Chris Taylor’s Sermon –12/21/08
God’s Steadfast Love
Psalm 89:1-4
Luke 1:26-38
I love to greet people following the service, but as some of you may have noticed I sometimes struggle to understand what people are saying. It may just be all those hard reflective services in the atrium, but whatever the cause there are moments when I feel like one of the three old guys who were out for a walk one day. The first says, “Windy, isn’t it?” The second, “No, it’s Thursday!” The third, “So am I. Let’s go get a beer.”
Then there was the guy telling his neighbor about his new hearing aid, “It cost me four thousand dollars, but this thing is state of the art. It is absolutely perfect.” “Really,” says the neighbor, “what kind is it?”
“Twelve thirty.”
There are times when I feel like that’s my world! All these disconnects! Maybe you’ve been there, or maybe you are struggling with something else in your life right now – eyesight or health, your investments or your job, or maybe it is something your kid is struggling with. Whatever might be going on, our text comes to us as welcome news this morning. Its message is clear: God is with us, and God is very much at work.
That’s the first thing we see: God reaching out. He sends his messenger, the angel Gabriel, to tell Mary that he is going to do something incredible, and that she has a crucial part to play.
Now it is worth considering the significance of God’s choice of Mary. Keep in mind that this was a society absolutely dominated by the men. It was the men who sat out by the gates and made all the decisions, the men who served as witnesses to any legal matter. No women were allowed. They literally had no legal rights. They couldn’t own property. They couldn’t sue for divorce. They were considered the property of their fathers or their husbands. They had to stay behind a screen at the back of the synagogue. They weren’t allowed to speak or read. In the great Temple of Jerusalem, their courtyard lay only just beyond that of the Gentiles – that’s as close as they were allowed to get to the Holy of Holies.
Yet here is God choosing a woman to play this crucial part – a part that is going to change the world. But even more, Mary wasn’t living in a palace or in the center of some great metropolis. She was nowhere near the trappings of wealth or power. She was out in the country; living in an obscure village that no one outside of Palestine would know. She was young and poor and unmarried.
God, in other words, not only chose a woman but a woman who had none of those things that we might consider essential for someone who was going to have an impact. Again and again, that’s the way God moves in this world. He doesn’t look for the powerful or the prestigious. He chooses the ordinary. He chooses people like you and me who are willing to place our trust not in ourselves or in our own resources, but willing to place our trust in God.
Consider God’s choice of Israel. God could have chosen Egypt, or Persia or Rome. God could have chosen one of the great empires of history. But instead he chose these people who had no power – a people who really weren’t much more than nomads.
When it came time to deliver them from captivity, who did God call? Moses was a murderer; forced to flee his home for fear of prosecution. He was a refugee, living out in the wilderness. When God called he wasn’t even tending his own flock. He was tending the flock of his father-in-law. By his own admission, he wasn’t eloquent or quick witted. Who was he to demand that God’s people be released? Yet he is the one that God chose.
We see the same pattern in God’s choice of David; Israel’s greatest king. When God called him, he was the youngest and least impressive of all of Jesse’s sons – so much so that Jesse, his own dad, hadn’t even bothered to summon him. Yet as God said to Samuel, “the Lord does not see as mortals see; they look on the outward appearance, but the Lord looks on the heart” (1 Sam. 16:7).
It is not about us and our greatness. It is about God, and God’s greatness, and whether we are willing to be used by God to accomplish great things.
So here is God choosing Mary, and choosing her in this obscure corner of the world where no one would ever have dreamed of looking. No one else in Israel had any idea of what God was doing. If you had asked them, they might have talked about God’s absence. If you had asked, they might have wondered why God left so many prayers unanswered. Yet all the while, God is right there and very much at work.
After announcing God’s favor, Gabriel goes on to tell Mary that she is going to bear a son who one day will sit on the throne of his ancestor David. Mary, of course, wonders how this can possibly be since she happens to be a virgin.
I know that some of you struggle with the idea of the virgin birth. Some of you have told me that you even skip over that part of the Apostles’ Creed that speaks of Jesus being born of the Virgin Mary. There is some basis for that skepticism in Scripture itself. It is striking, for example, that of the four gospels, Luke and Matthew are the only ones who mention it. Why wouldn’t John mention it when he was the closest to Mary of all of Jesus’ disciples? In Acts, when we are offered a summary of the message the Apostles proclaimed, there’s no reference to the virgin birth. And in all of his epistles, Paul himself never discusses it.
What does all this mean? At the very least it suggests that there were a lot of Christians in that first generation Church who never heard that Jesus was born of a virgin. It suggests that the virgin birth is not one of the essentials of our faith: that it is possible to be a Christian without knowing or acknowledging the virgin birth.
Having said that, however, let me add that I do believe that Jesus was born of the Virgin Mary. To my mind it is no great stretch to believe that the same God who spoke this universe into existence out of nothing could speak this child into existence in a virgin’s womb. And I like the aesthetics of it; for me there is a compelling beauty in this idea that speaks to me of God – the way in which Jesus’ birth captures the truth of his two natures: at once fully human and fully divine. At the same time, it offers a wonderful witness to what Gabriel himself proclaimed: that there is nothing impossible to God.
It wouldn’t shake my faith if I some day I found out I had this wrong. My faith isn’t in the virgin birth, it is in Jesus and Jesus alone. But I don’t think I’ve got it wrong. I don’t think it is any more incredible than the idea of the incarnation itself – that on that Christmas Day so long ago, God himself took on the form of human flesh. I just don’t see any reason to doubt what Matthew and Luke share about the miracle of Jesus’ birth.
Note, however, what Gabriel goes on to say about Jesus’ kingdom – that his kingdom would endure forever. Jesus, like John the Baptist before him, came proclaiming that the Kingdom of God was now at hand – that the Kingdom was breaking into this world and making its presence felt and known. His miracles were a sign of its presence. His teaching was about its implications.
When Gabriel tells Mary that Jesus’ kingdom will have no end, he is saying that we can’t relegate this kingdom or God’s activity just to the past or just to the future. It is happening right now. The Kingdom that has no end is ongoing and real and happening all around us. We catch glimpses of it in those moments when everything comes together and feels so right and good and beautiful. We catch a glimpse in those times when we can sense God’s nearness, or feel the prodding of God’s Holy Spirit.
The same God who reached out to Mary some two thousand years ago is present and at work right now. God may feel very distant, but that doesn’t mean he isn’t here. We may not see or understand what he is up to, but that doesn’t mean he isn’t at work according to his own perfect purposes.
The great invitation of this passage is to place our trust in God no matter what we might be facing; to trust God the same way that Mary did; “Here am I, the servant of the Lord; let it be with according to your word.”
There is nothing easy about letting go our need to know, or our need to be in control. There is nothing easy about placing our trust in him. Yet it is precisely there, in that kind of faith, that we open ourselves to becoming God’s instruments in this world. Precisely there, that we open our lives to that peace which passes all understanding – that peace which is God’s alone to give.
God is at work. The Kingdom is here. And in the end, there’s nothing else that really matters.