Mary Mother of God
Holy Family:Christmas 22 • Sermon • Submitted
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Advent is the anticipation of God’s Promise becoming Provision
Advent is the anticipation of God’s Promise becoming Provision
What God says He does
Have you ever been startled awake? And when you do wake up you are faced with a new reality you weren’t prepared for? You are trying to figure out what to make of it. You might have been in such a deep sleep that you didn’t even know where you were when you woke up.
You spend a few moments orienting yourself to the reality that you can’t recognize.
This is the picture we get this morning with Mary. She is being woken up to a new reality, something entirely other than she has understood. She can’t even make sense of it and it takes Gabriel walking her through what is going on.
WH Auden wrote a long form poem in 1944 called For the Time Being, a Christmas Oratio. The poem begins with the darkness that covers the world and shows a humanity that can’t find it’s way out of it. In it’s attempts to define the world as dark it shows how hard the world can be, covered in darkness and shows a sense of our sleeping through it. He spends a number of pages defining what this world looks like. An example:
“And the houses smell of our fear
Death has opened the white eye
And the black hole calls the thief
As the evil and armed draw near.
Ravens alight on the wall,
Our plans have all gone awry,
The rains will arrive too late,
Our resourceful general
Fell down dead as he drank And his horses died of grief, Our navy sailed away and sank;
The evil and armed draw near.”
There is evil coming and those that have led us have not come through. We have run out of options.
While all our solutions have been tried and found wanting, Auden leads us to the annunciation, the place where Gabriel speaks to Mary.
And after this darkness and all this evil encroaching on a half sleeping people, Auden changes the tone of the poem entirely with one word.
It is from the Angel Gabriel to Mary. He says
“wake.”
Auden uses this word to show us that this is what is happening in the world. Gabriel’s announcement to Mary is the announcement for the world to wake up. For us to see that what God has promised is coming true. His promise is a provision.
Wake.
The same call is for us today.
We get lulled into a false sense of security. numbed to sleep by momentary peace.
Please note I am not anti Christmas fun tradition.
Our family has all sorts of fun things that we do over the Christmas season to celebrate over the month.
But The temptation of the Christmas season in our culture is to be lulled to sleep. Everything is tender and mild, everything is no crying He makes.
Whether Through coziness, through consumerism, the feeling of advent is to settle into a cold winter’s night. It sounds nice but true Advent is not sleeping through it but waking up to be dependent on God for true peace and not rest in lesser powers that numb us into a false peace.
We make the mistake in advent to use the season to cozy in and go to sleep. Mary shows us the opposite is needed
And he came to her and said, “Greetings, O favored one, the Lord is with you!” But she was greatly troubled at the saying, and tried to discern what sort of greeting this might be. And the angel said to her, “Do not be afraid, Mary, for you have found favor with God.
This is not only the provisional entrance of God’s promise in the world, it is also the introduction of Mary.
Mary, this 14 year old girl, becomes the center of all of human history.
Mary is brought into this heavenly plan, God’s eternal will in this moment.
She wakes up in this moment, brought into a heavenly reality.
Advent is the anticipation that God uses normal situations used in extraordinary ways
Advent is the anticipation that God uses normal situations used in extraordinary ways
Think about the way in which Jesus enters the world.
Jesus enters quietly, humbly, mysteriously
Mary is not at all a particular somebody
In the sixth month the angel Gabriel was sent from God to a city of Galilee named Nazareth, to a virgin betrothed to a man whose name was Joseph, of the house of David. And the virgin’s name was Mary.
- If you have ever planned an event before, a wedding or party or so on, you pay attention to the entrances. How the guests of honor enter the room.
And if you have ever planned a party, you would never have planned one like this.
The guest of honor comes in silently. Quietly.
He has no voice, Gabriel speaks on His behalf. He is completely dependent on Mary and Joseph
There is a reality in Jesus’ entry into the world where
None of the powers of the world care.
but All of heaven and creation can’t wait.
None of the powers of the world care because no one noticed. But yet the situation that no one noticed is the situation that God used to enter into His creation.
This is the good news of Advent. God is still in the world using normal things in extraordinary ways.
God doesn’t need the biggest, shiniest, most powerful thing in the world to accomplish His work
He does His work and uses ordinary means, ordinary people.
This is a helper reminder in Advent, God uses the normal to accomplish His incredible will.
It is not that we have to become normal or supernatural, it is that we are brought into God’s work in our normal selves.
Mary reminds us that God doesn’t wait until everything is fixed and ready for His arrival, He fixes everything in His arrival.
Mary reminds us that God doesn’t wait until everything is fixed and ready for His arrival, He fixes everything in His arrival.
Is there a situation you have kept from God because you have been hoping to fix it before He interacts with you?
God is calling us to interact with Him in the places we are. Not because they are fixed and ready but precisely because they are not.
God can do supernatural things with your ordinary means.
But we need to invite Him into those spaces and stop pretending that we can fix everything,.
When I was a kid I worked for my grandpa and during the winter he had a massive Christmas tree lot. So my job was to help customers and clean up the trees to get them ready to sell. Because it was WI in the winter there was a lot of snow, I had to brush and clean all the snow off the trees to get ready for the day. There was one tree that was waiting to be picked up, a massive 25 foot tree going in some lobby in a store. So I went to pick it up and not thinking I picked it up by the top of the tree and the top 4 feet snapped off. What do you do with a tree without the top four feet? I panicked and instead of telling my grandpa I just put the top of the tree back where it was like it was still connected to the tree.
He very quickly figured out what happened. And it was not a pretty scene.
But that is sometimes what we do, we rearrange the broken things in our lives that no one will see and tell people that everything is ok.
But please know God does normal and broken situations in extraordinary ways. We will see at the end Advent’s invitation is to live with faith in God who still works that way.
Advent is the anticipation that God still does the impossible.
Advent is the anticipation that God still does the impossible.
And Mary said to the angel, “How will this be, since I am a virgin?”
Let’s be honest, this is a great question.
Gabriel declares that Mary will be the Savior’s mother.
Mary doesn’t doubt, she doesn’t say it can’t happen. She just wants some of the details.
But this annunciation from Gabriel is the annunciation that God is doing the impossible. God is doing more than we can fathom.
In Gabriel’s announcement we see that he forms his news to Mary around who Christ is and what He is like. Look at the initial declaration
He will be great and will be called the Son of the Most High. And the Lord God will give to him the throne of his father David, and he will reign over the house of Jacob forever, and of his kingdom there will be no end.”
and then after mary asks her question
And the angel answered her, “The Holy Spirit will come upon you, and the power of the Most High will overshadow you; therefore the child to be born will be called holy—the Son of God.
Gabriel shares the reality of Jesus to the woman who will give birth to Jesus. But this is the first she’s hearing about it.
It’s such new news that when Joseph hears it he thinks that she had an affair and he plans on divorcing her quietly.
When you are the Creator, doing the impossible is not a problem.
When you make the plans, creating and financing impossible things is not a barrier.
The barrier is not God’s will or work in this situation, it is the response from the world.
The issue is not what is in the world the issue is what is God going to do.
The issue is whether we recognize God’s work in the world or not.
God can do the work restoring relationships and healing and saving. He has already done the work of raising Christ from the dead and forgiving sins. The rest is not a problem for Him.
But we often allow the stuff in the world to dictate what God does, not the God in the world. God moves in amazing ways, not because the world is rightly set up but simply because God is incredibly powerful
In Flannery O Connors short Story, A Good Man is Hard to find, we find a family driving on vacation. A husband and wife, two kids and grandma. THey hear about an escaped fugitive on the loose but ignore it. On the drive they get stuck on a country road in a ditch. A car drives by. It turns out it is the escaped fugititive the misfit with his gang.
They interact with the family but you slowly realize that because they family has seen the escaped convict, they are now witnesses to where he is. The misfit stands around and talks to the grandma, telling her about his life and what he’s experienced while the gang slowly kills the family.
At one point toward the end, the misfit, a real bad guy, tells the grandma this,
“Jesus was the only One that ever raised the dead." The Misfit continued, "and He shouldn't have done it. He thrown everything off balance. If He did what He said, then it's nothing for you to do but throw away everything and follow Him, and if He didn't, then it's nothing for you to do but enjoy the few minutes you got left the best way you can by killing somebody or burning down his house or doing some other meanness to him. No pleasure but meanness," he said and his voice had become almost a snarl.”
The Misfit understands the call of Christ, he is just never able to follow Him. But His understanding is clear.
Mary shows us that in the middle of a world gone mad there is a God who is throwing everything off balance. Christ who has raised the dead who came into the earth silently is throwing everything off balance. Which in the case of the misfit means that Christ throwing everything off balance means He is actually putting the world back in order.
We have a God who is doing impossible things in our possible world. Advent is the confession that this is a reality.
But we often ignore the call so to speak because we don’t always recognize who it is.
Here is the Advent encouragement.
Don’t allow your ability or the worlds ability to define what is possible get in the way of what God is doing.
God does not wait for the world, we wait for God, and He has entered in and is still doing miraculous things.
Advent is the invitation to see that faith waits in the ordinary for God to do the extraordinary.
Advent is the invitation to see that faith waits in the ordinary for God to do the extraordinary.
For nothing will be impossible with God.” And Mary said, “Behold, I am the servant of the Lord; let it be to me according to your word.” And the angel departed from her.
These are places of absurdity that call us to faith.
I am using the word absurd on purpose. I think it is one of the best descriptions of faith.
The word absurd assumes there is nothing we can do about it. That is absurd. It is beyond our ability and imagination.
Absurd forces us to run up to our limits. To try and figure out things that we can’t even figure out.
Advent begins at the absurd.
We wait at the place where we see the need for God to do something. And we wait with faith. We trust that we are in the right place.
There is a restaurant in Mil WI called Safe House. It is a spy themed restaurant that has been around for 30 or so years. The fun part about the restaurant is that it has no signage on the front of the restaurant. There is only a door (show picture). You walk into the door and there is a small room with a book case and some other items in it. Like a personal library. It fits about 8 or 10 people. The first time you go in, you say, “are we in the right place?” There is no restaurant or anything.
During the day the room is open but unoccupied and you have to follow clues to get in. You pull down on a candlestick and the bookcase swings open and leads through a tunnel into the bar area. Once you are in there is a massive themed restaurant. Everything is spy related.
There isn’t even a normal exit. You have to find where the exit is and it turns out you have to go to a pay phone and dial the right number to leave.
Here’s the point. When you walk in you immediately question, “are we in the right place?” Nothing looks like it should. Nothing is what you think it should be. And even though nothing looks like it should be you are in exactly the right place. To enter into the restaurant there is not a better place to be than in the place that doens’t look like a restaurant.
- The whole advent story is strangely ordinary.
The place
The characters
The action
But God entering into the scene makes it extraordinary.
We look around in the waiting and think, “are we in the right place?” Nothing looks like it should. But faith in Christ’s Advent shows us that we are in exactly the right place. That it is not dependent on what the room looks like, or what the situation looks like, but it looks like what God is doing in that place.
Fleming Rutledge writes about Advent that, “hope, however, persists in spite of the clearly recognized facts because it is anchored in something beyond. This time of the church year is about hope. We need to face up to the horrors of the twentieth century and the apparent chaos and randomness of life and then see if we can still say “Jesus is Lord.”
The apparent chaos and randomness of life begs the question, “are we in the right place?”
But Advent reminds us that there is more, that the room doesn’t have to be arranged right to be in the right place.
Advent is the absurd reminder that God is working in world. And it is the invitation to wait in faith for God to do impossible things in our possible world.