Heaven and Earth: Rejoicing at Peace | December 21, 2025

This final Sunday of Advent is all about proclaiming good news. Heaven is breaking into earth, and God is turning the world upside down. We eagerly await the fulfilment of God’s promised reign of peace. In worship, we’ll hear Mary respond in song to the miracles God is working. God is entering the world—let us rejoice and sing with joy! 

Today’s Scripture readings are Titus 2:11-14 and Luke 1:26-56. This is the fourth and final week of our Advent 2025 series, Heaven and Earth based on Will Willimon’s book Heaven and Earth: Advent and the Incarnation.

Here’s the sermon livestream video from Christ the King and the sermon podcast audio:

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Grace to you and peace from God our Father and our Savior, Jesus Christ. Amen

How many of you can reach your cell phone from your bed?

Just about every morning, before I get out of bed, I look at my phone. I check for messages, and I open a news app to see what’s happened in the world. I’m not saying that’s a good habit, but it’s what I do. I want to know what’s going on.

One of the dangers of preparing Sunday sermons ahead of time is that sometimes news stories break overnight. Last week, I woke up Sunday to see there’d been an attack on a Hanukkah celebration in Australia, and I wondered for a moment if it was still appropriate to give the message I’d written on joy, or if that seemed out of touch. It was easier at Living Hope, because we had the Christmas program and I wasn’t preaching.

But there’s always bad news, right? There’s always some disaster somewhere, somebody doing something horrible to someone else, some group of people suffering. I don’t think it’s possible to live in this world and not be aware of bad news.

And of course, Christians are supposed to love our neighbors, so we need to pay attention to the suffering in the world. Loving involves paying attention. We can’t just stick our heads in the sand, turn off the news, wait for improvement.

Even good news is rarely all good. The other day I woke up to the news that the Brown University shooter had been found dead. Good that he’s no longer a threat, yet there was a loss of life involved.

One group’s economic development success is another’s destruction of small town character. Feel good stories about donations of toys…donations needed because families live in poverty. The best we can hope for is a mixed bag, where maybe the good might outweigh the bad and we’ll be happier if we have a glass-half-full mindset.

This is the world we live in.

And into this weary world comes an angel by the name of Gabriel, sent by God to a small town in Galilee called Nazareth, to a virgin named Mary.

And the angel says, the world doesn’t have to be this way. God is doing something about the suffering, the brokenness of the world. God is showing up. Breaking in. And you here in your little small town get to be part of it.

There will be a child, the Son of the Most High, who will rule forever. This is good news. Mary says, “Here am I, the servant of the Lord; let it be with me according to your word.”

Mary welcomes God’s work, but the way God comes into the world does not make sense. This is not a logical story. She’s not married. Virgins don’t have babies.

Mary goes to see her cousin Elizabeth, who is pregnant with a child of her own to be named John. We’re mostly skipping over her story this week, but Elizabeth was far too old to bear a child. No hindrance to God.

Willimon writes:

“I hope that you hear this story of God coming first to these two otherwise unknown, lowly women on the margins—one who is young and the other who is old—as maybe your story. Let’s face it, most of us are unknown to the world. We are living in a place that’s nice enough, but our neighborhood is not that of the prestigious and prominent. To none of us has been given the power to run the world.

And Luke’s Gospel says, Rejoice! You are just the sort of person, young or old, to whom God might turn and enlist to play your part in God’s great revolutionary, reclamation, redemption project in the world.

Don’t believe Luke? You doubt that it’s possible for God to come to you like God turned to Mary and Elizabeth? Please listen to the angel: ‘Nothing is impossible for God.’” (Willimon, 110)

In a world of bad news, our hope is right there in the angel’s announcement: Nothing is impossible for God. We look around and see the cracks in the world, and the good news is it doesn’t have to be this way.

We can’t fix it, but God can. And God is. There’s the hope of Christmas, the promise of Advent, the message of the angel. Ready or not, here comes God.

Peace is possible, and not only possible, but on the way. Happening. “The grace of God has appeared, bringing salvation to all people.” Better days are coming. “We wait for the blessed hope and the glorious appearance of our great God and savior Jesus Christ.” (Titus 2:13)

We as Christians—we as the church—sometimes get caught up in the bad news. One strand of Christians spends all their energy condemning sin, demanding people repent and shape up and follow the rules, obey the commandments.

Believe the right way, have enough faith, and be saved. Good intentions, but it ends up being bad news. What is “enough”? We can’t earn forgiveness; we can only rely on grace.

Another group of Christians wants to focus less on the gloominess of sin and more on positive self-improvement: Just be more loving, less racist, work on your sexism and don’t judge and do your part to make the world better. Again, good intentions, but bad news because we can’t fix the world. We are sinful; we need a savior. There’s no way out of the cycle of sin and self-righteousness, nothing we can do that’s good enough. But nothing is impossible for God.

As people of God, we get to share the good news that really is good, the gospel: God does what we cannot do. God is acting. At Christmas, through these unlikely people, God is born into our world.

The news this day is all good. There is “no condemnation for those who are in Christ Jesus.” Romans 8. “For the law of the Spirit of life in Christ Jesus has set you free from the law of sin and of death.”

Good news not at the expense of ignoring the bad news, not pretending the world isn’t broken, but good news coming from outside of ourselves. Good news that comes to us from God. Not because we develop a positive mindset or try harder, but because God is shaking heaven and earth, tearing open the heavens.

As Willimon says, if you think the virginal conception of Jesus is a surprise, “Wait until you see what happens after Jesus’s death. Nothing is off the table. Nothing impossible.”

Filled with joy, filled with possibility, Mary turns to song. And she sings of revolution, of hope, of the world being overturned.

God has scattered the proud, brought down the powerful from their thrones and lifted up the lowly, filled the hungry with good things and sent the rich away empty. A different kind of news report: God undoing the headlines. Heaven disrupting earth.

And not only in some distant future; Mary sings in the past tense, because God is already acting, already making the impossible possible.

The great reversal has begun. In Christ, God is reconciling all creation to the creator, forgiving sin and creating life.

Willimon writes:

“No need to pray for God to show up and begin to act like God. From the beginning, God was for us, even though we had not the sense to see it…Who God is and what God wants is an accomplished fact. Read the Bible. Wake up. Face facts, open your eyes. Emmanuel is not just a name for God’s Son, it’s a description of what God was doing all throughout the ages. [God with us.]…

God didn’t start being our salvation with the advent of Jesus…Remember the Exodus…Recall Israel’s prophets.” (Willimon, 112)

Salvation is God’s character.

This is good news: The world is about to turn. Rejoice and sing!
Amen

Other sermon in this year’s Heaven and Earth Advent series:
Week 1: Meanwhile, We Hope and Wait
Week 2: Love’s Surprising Interruption
Week 3: Joyfully Pointing to Light