Sermon 12/21/08 Lk. 1:26-55

 

Mary was an ordinary woman. Taken aback, but only for a while, by Gabriel’s announcement, Mary found her voice. While women had private voice, they could not often speak publicly. She found a voice that spoke for social life. She goes beyond the charity of Scrooge in a Christmas Carol. She sees the selection of her as a sign of big things to come, a new game in town, when the old ways would not cut it any more. The ways things are cannot be the way things should be, could be, or would be.

Jesus would be with us in ordinary life God did not put the divine hopes on angels, or power, but in the hands of a young, possibly quite young, woman. How can this be? After all of this time, God would pick an ordinary family to raise the one to be called Jesus. She knows of the promises of God all the way back to Abraham and David. Messianic reading of promise to David She starts to see that she will be the vehicle for promises that were thousands of years old coming into being in a way as new as the child within her womb. That dream was half forgotten, said as much as out of the realm of possibility, but now it was alive in her.

It was appropriate for Gabriel to deliver the message. First, we have a little joke. The name means a mighty one for God, as in the army of the heavenly host, but here the general is a mere delivery service for the prince of peace. Second, Gabriel was associated with ripening fruit, and he announces that the fruit of Mary will be Jesus of Nazareth. (By the way, I have to throw this in. The followers of George Rapp in New Harmony believed that Gabriel spoke with him, and one can see the footprint of the angel there.) Finally, Gabriel was a figure of the end times. Gabriel announces the beginning of the end of the old order and the start of the new way of God with the announcement of the impending birth of Jesus.

The announcement was only the beginning, of course. Mary waited nine full months to have her baby. I wonder if nine months seemed long enough to start to grasp what the future could hold for her and Joseph. Luke has her doing a lot o travel in her expectant months, to Elizabeth and then a hard journey to Bethlehem. Even now, many of us wait a while to even announce a pregnancy, as we hope everything will be all right. With ultrasound we get to hear the fast beat of the heart, a holy moment as we hear the sound of a new life. Advent is only four weeks. It is time for us to learn to listen for the heartbeat of Jesus in the ordinary. Can we spot a Gabriel making a birth announcement of a new turn in life? Every day, we give birth to the new future, or maybe the hand of God helps bring us to new birth in the future.

Christmas is almost here. In these few remaining days, I pray that all of us set aside some time.to seek the spirit of the new life of Christmas. It may be in listening to old songs, or findings some new Christmas stories, to watch a Christmas movie, to read once again, the biblical story of the Nativity. Mary would never have another firstborn. We will never have another Christmas 2008. It would be a shame to enter into another Christmas dispirited, never giving the story of the Incarnation some time to take hold and grow within us. As the hymn says (O Little Child), “where meek souls will receive Him still/ the dear Christ enters in/ be born in us today/we hear the Christmas angels/the great glad tidings tell/o come to us, abide with us/ O Lord Emmanuel.