On this last Sunday of Advent, we’re looking at the call and response of Mary to see how God is disrupting the world through Christmas. Here’s the online worship service for the 4th Sunday of Advent, December 20, 2020.
The sermon text for this week is Luke 1:26-38. I found helpful this commentary from Courtney Buggs at Working Preacher.
Before we get to the annunciation (that’s the church word for this familiar story of the angel Gabriel coming to Mary), before we get there, I want to jump back a few verses, to the very beginning of Luke’s Gospel. Listen to how Luke begins telling his story about Jesus. This is Luke 1:1-4, the cover page for Luke’s Gospel.
He writes, “Since many have undertaken to set down an orderly account of the events that have been fulfilled among us, just as they were handed on to us by those who from the beginning were eyewitnesses and servants of the word, I too decided, after investigating everything carefully from the very first, to write an orderly account for you, most excellent Theophilus, so that you may know the truth concerning the things about which you have been instructed.”
From there, he goes on to tell about an angel coming to a priest named Zechariah, married to Elizabeth, who will be the parents of John the baptist. Today’s reading begins “In the sixth month” —that is, when Elizabeth is six months pregnant with John. That’s when the angel comes to Mary.
But as we hear the story Luke tells, I think there’s irony in that introduction, because he says his goal is to set down an orderly account of what’s happened. Another translation says a “carefully ordered account.”
Luke is as close to a formal historian as you’ll find writing in the Bible, and he’s going to put it all out in good order, anchored in time and space, in the reign of Caesar Augustus, when Quirinius was governor of Syria, all those good historical details. He’s trying to tell an orderly, cohesive story.
The irony is that the orderly story Luke tells is all about the order of the world being turned upside down.
We’ve heard this story so many times that it seems normal, but think about it. This is the way the almighty Creator of the universe chooses to change the world? No one would come up with this story.
First, the whole premise is ridiculous. There’s nothing orderly or logical about God being born as a human baby. Other than the pandemic, the memorable thing about 2020 for me is that it’s the first year of having my son Micah, and I’ve learned in a new way how helpless and needy and messy a human baby is. This is not how you’d expect God to enter the world.
But ok, let’s accept the idea of God becoming human. But like this? There’s nothing orderly or expected about the who and the how and the where.
Look where the angel comes: A town in Galilee called Nazareth. Nazareth is a village in a backwater colony of the Roman empire. I don’t know for sure, but I have a strong suspicion Emperor Augustus had never heard of Nazareth, or Galilee, or Bethlehem, where Jesus was actually born.
To enable Jesus’ entrance into the world, God chooses a young, unmarried girl named Mary. She’s an ordinary, Jewish peasant girl. The only reason Mary is special is that she’s willing to say yes to God. That’s it. She’s not wealthy, she’s not royal, she’s not well-educated, she has no special talents that we know of. But God chooses her. The angel tells her God favors her. God is with her. And she says yes.
The angel announces to her that the child within her will be great, but nothing about her appears great. All she has is faith, and the willingness to say yes to God, the willingness to trust that God will do what the angel says. She has questions for the angel, because she knows the order of the universe, she knows the steps involved in a baby coming, but nevertheless, she accepts the angel’s response. She accepts her call.
Her fiancé, Joseph, sounds special. I mean, he is of the house of David, a descendant of Israel’s royal line…but so are many people. Later, when they get to the family home of Bethlehem, there are so many descendants of David that this particular family can barely be fit in. Joseph is a laborer, a carpenter, not a chief priest, or government official, or any kind of dignitary. When God chooses how to enter the world, it’s through ordinary circumstances, not privilege.
But perhaps the most ironic thing about Luke’s orderly account is in Mary’s song, the reading Erin read, the Magnificat. It’s a prophetic speech, and Mary is an unlikely prophet. She’s too young. She’s from the wrong place. Oh, and she’s a woman. In fact, this is the longest speech the Bible records from any woman.
And look what she says. Through the faith of this lowly servant and the unplanned, unexpected, difficult-to-explain child she is carrying, God is turning the world upside down. God has brought the mighty down from their thrones, and lifted up the lowly.
The hungry are filled with good things, and the rich sent away empty (that’s a tough prophecy for those of us in America with money in the bank). The proud are scattered. The impossible promises made to God’s people hundreds and thousands of years earlier will be fulfilled.
I know for me, I have certain expectations of what Christmas looks like. My family traditions have been disrupted by living hours away from all my relatives and, you know, working every Christmas Eve, but still, there are certain foods to eat at Christmas, a certain way we open presents, particular memories our family have in common. And of course, we go to church and sing the familiar Christmas carols. It’s an orderly thing, and that’s beautiful.
This year is different. I am excited for our Christmas worship on Thursday. It’s going to be shaped around videos the Sunday School kids are doing with the “ABC’s of Christmas.” (watch the service here) I think it’s going to be a meaningful, memorable worship service.
But it’s going to be different. It’s not going to feel like a normal Christmas Eve worship service. Like so much else this year, the orderliness of Christmas is broken.
And so I suggest to you today that perhaps that’s appropriate. Perhaps in this year of disruption, we can see in a new way that at Christmas, God is at work disrupting the world. Through Christmas, and the life of the baby whose birth we celebrate, God calls us out of our orderly patterns into a new way of life, a way of giving beyond ourselves, a pattern of seeing through God’s eyes rather than our own, a life of meaning and purpose beyond what this broken world has to offer.
May you find hope in this season in the promise that at Christmas, God shakes things up, breaks the patterns of sin, destroys the most orderly, predictable fact in the universe, the finality of death for all of us, for as Mary hears and believes, nothing is impossible with God.
Amen