Luke 1:26-38

Sermon preached Dec. 13, 2015

Opening
A true story. A 5-year-old girl, Olivia, and her best friend, Claire, were participating in a
nativity play. Claire was playing Mary, and Olivia was an angel. Before the show, a
young boy was going around the dressing room repeating, I'm a sheep, what are you?
Each child responded politely, including Olivia, who proudly declared she was an angel.
The boy then turned to Claire, still struggling into her costume with her mother's help,
and repeated the question to her: I'm a sheep, what are you?
Claire simply said, I'm Mary.
Realizing he was face to face with a lead character, the boy felt he needed to justify his
own role. It's hard being a sheep, you know, he said with all the seriousness of a
5-year-old actor with a big part.
Claire's equally serious response was humorously profound. Yes, said Claire
innocently, but it's also hard being a virgin, you know.
The visitation
It was hard being the Virgin Mary. Because of what God asked of her.
Mary was an ordinary girl, a young teenager we think, probably with dark hair, dark eyes,
light brown skin.
She lives in an obscure village - Luke adds the detail Nazareth...in Galilee because
many of his readers would never have heard of this little place in the sticks.
So imagine the scene. Mary is inside the standard four-room house of the time - its dim
inside because there are only small openings for light and air - no glass windows,
remember. And she is alone - a rarity in that culture for a young woman - maybe her
father was out working on a farm or a job site, her mother had gone to market.
And maybe Mary is baking the days bread, her hair is tied back, she is kneading the
dough and there is a fire burning in the hearth, shes got a smudge of flour on her cheek
and while she works she hums a childhood song about Samson defeating the Philistines,
the rhythm of the song matching her kneading of the dough.
There is light streaming into the room from the doorway and suddenly the light is
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shadowed by a figure standing in the doorway. Mary is startled and looks up. Because of
the glare of the sun behind him she cant make out his face and she thinks it must be one
of her many male relatives in the village and shes about to greet him when the man
speaks to her in a voice she doesnt recognize, a voice that greets her by name and says,
Greetings, favored one! The Lord is with you!
What? Favored by whom? And who is this talking to me and what does he want?
As if he sensed her fear, the man says
Dont be afraid Mary...
How does he know my name, she wonders?
You have found favor with God.
What God asks of her
You have found favor with God.
There is a great bumper sticker that says, God loves you, but Im his favorite.
What could this mean, that Mary found favor with God? We think today, that means we
get some kind of special blessing - a surprise inheritance, a promotion, a new opportunity.
Something that will be good for us and bring us joy and excitement and security.
Thats not the plan for Mary.
Because the angel goes on:
Listen...and now you will become pregnant...and bear a son...and you will call
him by the name Jesus...and he (this son of yours, Mary) will be reign over
Israel forever and his kingdom will never end.
Well, what do you say to that? A moment of silence passes and Mary blurts out the first
question that naturally pops into her mind - I dont have a husband - how can this be?
Because she doesnt, Mary is engaged to Joseph and their wedding day was still a ways
off and they hadnt - you know - done it - but the angel says you will become pregnant
now, he tells 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 holy; he will be called Son
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of God.
This was a hard, hard thing God asked of Mary
Mary, of all the young women in Israel, is chosen by God to bring the Son of God into the
world. Its hard to imagine what that would be like, to have the Almighty look down and
zero in on you and choose you for maybe the most important thing every asked of a
human being.
It was a glorious thing God asked, it was a wonderful thing...Mary later sings in the
Magnificat that all generations will call me blessed - and so we have - Mary was known
by the early church by the Greek term Theotokos - God-bearer - but it was also a very,
very hard thing God asked of Mary.
Shes an unmarried teenager in what anthropologists call and honor/shame culture. It
was not acceptable to become pregnant outside of marriage. It brought shame on the
whole family. Youve maybe heard of honor killings that still happen today - that if a
young woman brings dishonor on her family by getting caught having premarital sex and a male member of the family is honor-bound to kill her for it.
And she lives in a small town - you know how small towns are - everybody knows and
nobody forgets - they never let you forget - in the small town where I served my first
church there was a retired elementary school teacher and some of her now-grown students
were in the church - people now in their forties and fifties - and the retired teacher would
confide in me that so and so wasnt very bright growing up, that so and so was quite the
show-off then and now - no, they never let you forget.
And then theres the whole situation with her fianc Joseph. With this pregnancy, the
right thing to do for him would be to repudiate her and the best Mary could hope for is
a cloistered life in her parents house - with a child outside of marriage she could not
hope ever to be married - and the whispers and glares would follow her the rest of her
life.
But as well hear next week when we have a first-person sermon from Joseph - he gets a
visitation too and marries Mary and thats not easy either because when shes almost
ready to birth that baby they have to make the 70-mile trip on foot to Bethlehem and then
after the child is born paranoid King Herod hears of it from the wise men and they flee for
their lives to protect baby Jesus and become refugees in Egypt.
And then after they finally return to Nazareth, everyone knew they had to get married people could count months back then - and maybe there were rumors too, rumors that
were still found in late first-century rabbinical writings, that Jesus was the son of a
Roman soldier who had sex with young Mary.
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The hard thing for Jesus

And those rumors followed Jesus during his ministry (and presumably while he was
growing up too). You see it later in the gospel of Mark where people say of Jesus, Isnt
this Jesus, the son of Mary? (Mark 6:3). In that culture, no one would refer to a man in
that way. A man would be referred to as the son of his father. Even though Joseph was
probably dead by the time Jesus began ministry, Jesus would still have been known as
Jesus the son of Joseph - Jesus bar Joseph.
But thats not what they call him. To call Jesus the son of Mary is something like in
English when we say someone is a son of a .... and then uses a crude, insulting word for
the mother. What this reflects is that all those years later, Josephs reputation, Jesus
reputation, had not recovered from the circumstances of Jesus birth.
It was not an easy way God chose to bring his son into the world. Not an easy way for
Mary, for Joseph, or for Jesus either.
The meaning of this
Why would God choose for his Son to come into our world this way - born of the Virgin
Mary, as we say in the Apostles Creed?
Most people when they think of the virgin birth, think it has something to do with purity.
That Jesus was conceived without the supposedly contaminating influence of sexual
intercourse. And Mary has been reverenced for being holier, special - according to one
church doctrine, Mary was born without original sin - so she could be holy enough to be
the Christ-bearer.
I think all that misses the point of Jesus being born the way he was to Mary. If God was
really after having his Son born to a virgin woman who was better, holier, than us - he
surely could have arranged it in such a way not to bring Mary, Joseph and Jesus into such
disrepute. It didnt have to be this hard, did it?
But it did. I think Mary was chosen to be the Christ-bearer, and Jesus was born into the
world the way he was, was all part of his mission - Christs mission to reach lost,
disreputable, broken people. And you see this - how Jesus had compassion for women
who were walking scandals is that he knew what it meant for his mother to bring him into
the world as she did - he knew the whispers and gossip she and Joseph endured. Jesus
loved and went towards disreputable people as one of them - when we say God came to
us in Jesus Christ, that he came in lowliness and humility - it meant that people thought
he was conceived out of wedlock and raised by a man who may not have even been his
father.

For those of us who feel disreputable, or disrespected or broken - well, we have a Savior
who went through the same thing. This is part of the miracle of Christmas - not only that
the Son of God became a real human being - but that he was born a human being of poor,
obscure and of dubious parentage. So we could have a Savior who comes right alongside
us and knows our pain and our struggles, knows what its like to be put down and
despised.
He came down, to raise us up
Jesus came all the way down to the lowest of us, to come alongside us, and take us by the
hand and raise us up.
The disciple John wrote a gospel and at the beginning of it he writes this:
To all who received (Jesus), who believed in his name, he gave power to become
children of God, who were born, not of blood or the will of the flesh or of the will
of man, but of God (John 1:12).
Please here this - Jesus came to save and heal broken, hurting people and make us Gods
children - not give us a long list of rules so we can work ever so hard at being good and
moral and upright boys and girls and somehow earn Gods approval like that of an
emotionally distant parent we could never please.
We too are Christ-bearers
But theres something more. In the hymn were going to sing after the sermon, O Little
Town of Bethlehem, theres a line that goes
Cast out our sin and enter in, be born in us today
Thats talking about God being born in us, too. We have a calling like Mary - to have the
presence of the living Christ grow within us, too.
Or in other words, if you are a follower of the Lord - youre kind of pregnant, too. With
the presence of Christ growing inside you.
Now...I bet you didnt expect to hear that today. Ive never really thought much about
what it would be like to be pregnant - a child growing inside - I mean, guys have no idea and growing a beer gut doesnt count.
Ive read that if men could get pregnant:
- Maternity leave would last two years - with full pay
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- Theyd stay in bed the entire pregnancy

- Natural childbirth would be completely forgotten
- All methods of birth control would be 100% effective.
But anyway - weve talked a lot this year about how the living Lord Jesus Christ,
becomes incarnate over and over again in ordinary people like us - that Christ lives inside
us - for our good and healing and blessing - but also so that he can reach and touch and
heal and save other people through us.
And how do you know if thats happening? Well, you will have some of the same kinds
of experience that Mary had.
Like, having Jesus inside you will inconvenience you, disrupt your life.
Like, having Jesus inside will push you towards disreputable people.
An example. On Wednesday night Major Doug from the Salvation Army
came to speak for our Revive! Wednesday program. He told us about the
history of the Salvation Army - really interesting - they got started as a
movement within the Methodist church to reach the poor and despised and
outcast of England. Started out to help people come to faith in Christ and
to provide practical needs - like food and clothing and education.
And they had great success, lots of people came to faith. And the people
in the Salvation Army directed these new believers to go to existing
churches. And they did. And came back and reported that they werent
welcome - they didnt have nice clothes, they didnt always smell good,
they were the wrong class of people.
So the Salvation Army started their own worship services for people
rejected by other alleged Christians and their churches. And today theyre
a denomination with regular Sunday services because they helped the poor
and outcast and nobody else wanted them in their worship services.
Im going to tell you right now, that if the presence of Christ is growing inside you - it
will inconvenience you - you will be called to serve and help people in ways that disrupt
your settled, planned-out life. It may even make you disreputable - other people may
think youre taking this religion thing too far, youve got too much passion and
commitment.
But thats the price you pay for bearing the presence of Christ within you. Just like Mary
did.

But...but..when it happens, well, its beautiful.

Closing
Let me give you an example. Late Spring of this year, I told you about a man who
collapsed on the front steps of his church, having a really bad reaction to synthetic
marijuana. We did what we could for him while waiting for the police and EMTs to
come and when the police came they recognized the man and one said to him, You keep
doing this, youre going to be dead.
A homeless drug addict, sprawled on the church steps, hallucinating and crying and out of
his mind from drugs.
A young man who grew up in this church learned about Shawn. And made it his mission
to be the presence of Christ to him. He befriended Shawn and took him to live in his
parents home. He prayed with and for him, taught him about Jesus, helped him get
clean. And didnt do it from a distance, above him, as if to say here I am being
benevolent to you poor messed-up soul - he went down to his level - shared life with him.
And I just saw a video this week of Shawn and this young man doing a Christian rap song
together at a local church in Chambersburg.
God is at work to birth something within you. Like a real pregnancy, it may be painful,
inconvenient; may demand a whole lot of you. But you can be sure of this - if you
consent to the work of God within you, you will give birth to something beautiful. Amen.