WE ARE GOING TO HAVE A BABY
A Sermon by the Rev. Dr. Jack E. Skiles

December 21, 2008

Luke 1:26-38

We are on the proverbial edge of Christmas!  Nearly all the advent candles have been lit.  Only one remains for Wednesday night, Christmas Eve, when we next gather here.  The candles over the entire sanctuary will be re-lit.  Last Sunday evening was beautiful at Candlelight Communion.  But Wednesday night is when Christmas begins for me.  The busy preparations are all done.  When we go to drive home Wednesday night, few if any stores will be left open and our Christian world will be getting as absolutely quiet as it ever gets.

But, we are at the edge today, not quite to Christmas.  We are still in advent.  We are still called upon to listen to the stories of those who have been called by God to help God make God's realm a very real possibility.  Preaching advent is not nearly as immediately rewarding as preaching Christmas.

The last four weeks we have spent listening to the call and to the words of Prophets.  Our Scripture lessons for two weeks were from the Prophets Isaiah I, II and III, who warned the Israelites that they better be good for goodness' sake.  You'd better watch out, you'd better not cry, King Nebuchadnezzar is coming to town.   By and large, Prophets don't ever sound forth with very much Christmas joy.  They do not show up on the stage with guitars filled with a lot of kumbaya spirit and hugs and toasts to the New Year.  Then we heard from John the Baptist.  Even at his most cheery moments he was a downer.  Repent for the Realm of God is at hand.  He never, so the story is told, ever let wine touch his lips and his appetizers were made out of desert bugs soaked in wild honey.  Ho, Ho, Ho!

But, we have faithfully listened, have we not?  We have listened to how Israel 's prophets in the midst of horrible national and personal realities have sought to encourage God's people to have hope, to have joy, to be at peace.  Nobody really enjoys a prophet or hearing what they claim they must say.  All prophets claim that if we will but listen and respond to their message from God there will be hope.  Few preachers really enjoy or get rewarded for preaching the message of the prophets or for being prophetic.  And now this morning we come face to face with the very last prophet before Jesus and her name is Mary.

Mary gives witness in word and with her life that God is coming anew.  We often don't allow ourselves to ponder Mary as a prophet because of the way that traditional Christmas stories and songs portray her.    As in other biblical stories that call men and women to be prophets, first for Mary there is the word of God, followed by her startled response and a divine “fear not.” She asks a question, receives an answer and finally relents and adopts God's vision as her own.  The basic pattern is as old as God's call to Abraham and Moses.  Mary is the latest in a long line of God's chosen witnesses to God's truth, all of whom have done their part to prepare the way of God in this world.  She is not the first woman to be enlisted in divine, prophetic service, Sarah, Hannah and Elizabeth preceded her.  There probably have been others but as men who write and tell the stories were apt to do, they have probably purposefully forgotten many of the faithful female prophets of history.  We are privileged to have the few we have.  

Even today many attempt to make of Mary nothing more than an empty vessel that God used, as so many men have sought to use women.  But, we will not participate in that sort of misogyny.  We will remember Mary as the brave person she was who was sought out by God, talked to God and fully received God into herself and gifted us with Jesus, the one we have come to know as our Christ, the anointed one of God.  Mary joins with God's prophets of old and accepts a unique and difficult task and her life is totally disrupted.  God is demanding some strange and difficult things of her and she responds with a faith response that you and I would do well to replicate: she says, “I am God's servant.  May it be to me as you have said.”

From time to time we preachers present Jesus as the solution to all our problems, the one who stills life's storms and brings stability and peace to disordered lives.  All that can be true.  But this Sunday, the 4 th Sunday of Advent, with the intrusion of the angel Gabriel and his shocking message to Mary, let us remind ourselves that as safe and serene and nostalgically warm as we prefer Christmas to be, let us remind ourselves that the nativity is far from being a stable and serene affair.  The child who is born in the stable is born to reign, to rule, to establish a new kingdom that shall destabilize the world as it prefers to organize itself when left to the rich and the powerful.  Mary, the Prophet of God, tell us that God's new birth into our world, this new King will disrupt and disorder in order to heal, in order for the world to have true joy, true peace and true hope.  God's new child will teach us, show us how to truly love, the fourth emphasis of God's advent into our lives.

As we approach these last four days until Christmas I would like to suggest that we hold two realities in our hearts, in minds, in our souls at the same time.  We can do that.  One reality is the warm, sentimental, fun reality that is traditional Christmas celebration.  The second is the recognition that there was little that was sweet, nostalgic or sentimental about that first Christmas.  I have gone hunting for the birth of the savior many times over through my many years of Christmases past.  I have had many hundreds of quiet moments and earnest prayers and meditations as I have sought to know God most intimately through my Christmas spiritual practices.

What I keep finding myself coming back to remember is that this Sunday's gospel lesson is about a disrupted, shocking innovation coming into a young woman's life in the form of an unexpected visitor and an unplanned pregnancy.  An angel shows up in a little town in Galilee called Nazareth and the angel goes to a young girl, 12, 13, 14 years old whose name was Mary. 

I don't know how many pictures of the annunciation you have seen, but there a plethora of them out there.  The traditional famous ones come from the Middle Ages or the Renaissance.  They show a demure young lady, usually blond with a blue dress sitting humbly on a stool with her head sort of tilted to one side, one hand up like this while a very gentle-looking angel kneels at her feet and offers her a flower, usually a lily, a symbol of purity.  It is all very meek and mild, very calm and quiet, very serene.  The pictures are designed to underline Mary's willing acceptance of God's will, a rather passive acceptance.

My current favorite one is nothing like those from the Middle Ages.  Try this one on for size, a poor waif of a very young adolescent girl, nothing womanly really about her yet.  She is dressed in rags; she is desperately poor and doing the dishes for her family of origin, caring for many of her younger siblings who are all at the same time demanding her attention.  Suddenly this family scene where the oldest siblings are de facto parents to the youngest siblings, the scene is interrupted by this huge handsome hunk of an angel and in this picture Mary looks scared witless and so does the cat!  In the picture it has all its fur on end and it tail out straight and its eyes are as big as saucers. 

The annunciation, the announcement that God's fullness and completeness would be born through an acne scarred, barely a woman teenager whose life was already at wit's end because of her family responsibilities, did not come in a religious setting on a holy night when all were gathered to hear the Scriptures read and pontificated upon.  Me and that cat would have a lot of similarities if an angel appeared to me some night as I was filling the dishwasher, listening to the evening news and my daughter telling me how exciting her life will be once she moves away from home and the dogs asking to go outside for the fifth time in the last hour just so they can get a treat.

The text says that she was greatly troubled, perplexed by what was happening.  I love how real Scripture can be.  You can bet your last shares in today's stock market that she was very troubled.  The angel had not even gotten to the hard part of the message yet, and she was already perplexed.  Wouldn't you be?  “Greetings, you are highly favored in the eyes of God.  God is with you.”  I beg your pardon?  Favored?  Who are you and what are you doing in this house?

If an angel can come and say this to Mary, what stops an angel from coming to you or to me when we least expect it, when we are busy and boxed in by all that is going on in our lives?  The answer is nothing at all.  God is every bit as active and loving and confronting in our lives as God was with Mary.  We are so used to thinking of Mary as unique and special, as set apart from all the rest of us, that we forget to see how utterly normal she is…, until she does what few of us do, see the reality of God's presence right in front of us and our dirty dishes, our ungraded exams, our stock and earnings report, the unfolded laundry, the evening news, the video game, the book that we have been reading.

Mary's uniqueness revolves around her willingness to see God and to be afraid.  Obviously this happens because she is scared!  And then comes the message and there is a lot to absorb.  She will bear a child and be given a specific name.  He will be the Messiah, the holy one awaited by all Jews.  Wow!

Have you ever been in a situation where there was too much information?  I was sitting in my office the day that Lynn called to tell me she was pregnant with Kali.  She said I'm calling from the Women's Clinic, the place she said, “You know where the abortion clinic is.”  Lynn was a Planned Parenthood educator for many years, a good one, not one that skirted the reality of the issues of a given situation like we are reading about in the local papers today here in Bloomington. Lynn knew that the Women's Clinic gave free pregnancy tests so she went there.  She didn't think she could ever be pregnant and when they told her that she was, she sat down and started crying tears of joy.  Most people who don't know us can't tell if tears are joyous or sad.  She had to explain to the women who were accustomed to women mainly not being happy that they were pregnant that she was overjoyed.  I'm listening to all of this and I am in a daze.  She says to me, “We are going to have a child” and I am taking little of it in.  I was in a daze.  She says, we are blessed or we are favored.  I just remember sitting there thinking, “Huh, how could this be?”

I can't help but think that this young, wet behind the ears Mary wasn't pretty blown away and confused.  In fact, she asks, “How could this be?  I'm a virgin?  Of all the things that the angel talked about…..finding favor with God, giving birth to the Messiah, you will call him Jesus…she latches on to the pragmatic question….. “Hey, I sort of know how babies happen, how can this be?”

This is part of the beauty of this story.  Isn't it just natural when we are told something too big for us to comprehend, we latch on to some detail to help us focus ourselves?  Some of us never escape the details.

As it was to Mary, it is to us.  We know that God desires the best for each of us.  We know that God has a vocation for each of us, something, some things that God would have us be about, but it's the details that bog us down.  How will I feed the kids if I follow my dream?  How will I make it through retirement if I invest in making my dreams come true?  What will people think if I live my faith radically and see the face of God in the poor?  What will my partner do if I decide I must change the direction of my life?  It is the details of God's plan for us that bogs us down sometimes.  Our fears.  We can talk ourselves out of doing nearly anything because of the details, rather than boldly walking forward toward doing what God is aiming for us to become.

But our role model, the Prophet Mary makes a quick recovery.  After the angel explains the game plan she is able to say, “I am God's servant.  May it be to me as you have said.”  She receives and accepts.  She steps over her fear of the details.  She sets aside her doubts and she trusts that God will fulfill what has been promised.  She moves from terror, to incomprehension, to faith.  That's what it is in the end, isn't it?  Faith? 

“I am the Lord's servant.  May it be to me as you have said.”  That's faith.  That is where all of us are being invited to be, too, with Mary.  Saying “yes” to God's aims, to God's dreams, God's wants for our lives.  There is a little of Mary, pregnant with God, in all of us.  A little Mary that hears what God desires for the world through our lives and which says, “YES, may it be to me as you have said.”

We are a people of Christmas faith that knows that God will not be found wrapped in a gift under the tree, but most likely will be found in the midst of lives, living normally, if we have but eyes to see, ears to hear and the courage to respond to the angel that is next to us, saying, “You have found favor with God…..let God be born through you.” 

Amen.