December 21, 2003
|
|
|
|
During
these four weeks of Advent, God has teased out a promise to us.
God has promised to give the world a Savior, One who will offer us
salvation and life for our spirits and souls. The
promise is about to be fulfilled in amazing and wonderful ways. Many of you may
have done like I did and spent six hours over the previous two Sunday evenings
watching the HBO movie special, “Angels in America”. Set in the
mid-1980’s, it tells the story of two men, the fictional Prior Walter and the
all too real Roy Cohn and the way they lived and dies with AIDS. At
one point Prior dreams that an angel crashes through the ceiling of his
apartment. During their conversation the angel says in effect that the San
Francisco earthquake of 1906 was the sign that God was so done with humanity
that God shook the world one last time and left the world forever. “Angels in
America” was wonderful, well-acted entertainment. I enjoyed watching it; I may
watch it again. But it does not tell the story of the promise that we are
waiting to be revealed. The
story of our lives, and of our promise as followers of Jesus Christ is this. Two
thousand years ago a quiet angel came to the priest Zechariah and told him that
he and his wife Elizabeth would be the parents of a son whose name would be
John. Some months later, that same angel also spoke quietly to a young woman
named Mary and told her that by means of the Holy Spirit she would be the bearer
of the promised messiah whose pledge to us is that we will never be left alone.
The good news promise revealed to us today is that through Jesus Christ, the
Promised One, the ever-present God will be with us forever. And
because God often does things we do not expect, the promise is revealed in ways
we do not always expect. The promise of the coming Christ is made plain to us in
Micah and Luke in a series of blessings God gives to the people. We
may expect to hear God’s promise of blessing when we are at our best. They
come when we deserve them, or when we have earned them, or when bad things
happen to us and God owes us something good. Micah declares a promise when the
city of Bethlehem was under siege. The Babylonians have captured King Zechariah
and forced him to watch while they murdered his sons. Then they blinded him and
took him away in shackles (II Kings 25.6-7). The king has been humiliated and
the people are walled in at Bethlehem. They have little reason to hope for
anything. Except,
it is when times are hopeless that God steps in and makes clear that despite
today’s difficulties, when we are down and there is no upside, the still
future belongs to God. Even in this little tormented town there is a promise of
a glorious future. The One who will rule Israel will come from David’s home
place. Even
in our sometimes tormented lives, God’s promise will be revealed to us. Do you
remember how a bit of good news lifted your mood and gave you hope you didn’t
know you still had? Nothing was going right, you felt the hope you had flee, the
peace that once was there has turned to chaos, the joy you once felt is a
memory, and the love that once had a big place in your heart has been washed in
a sea of despair. Then by some means that can only be described as the grace of
God, a little hope wedges in, a calm peace begins to descend, joy returns, love
comes roaring back. Bethlehem,
a little Judean town, receives a revelation that all is not lost. One is on the
way who will be a king and a ruler like no other and whose rule will not be
about politics, but salvation. The promise is that, “the new and coming king
will liberate the people of God from this bondage, the birth of the royal child
will serve as a signal that their servitude is at an end. When the mother has
borne her child, those who are lost will be restored to the household of
faith” (Texts for Preaching – Year C.
Louisville: Westminster/John Knox Press. 1994, p. 31). Micah
says that when he comes, he will feed his flock. His words echo the words from
Isaiah Rosalind sung a few minutes ago. “He
will feed his flocks like a shepherd; he will gather the lambs in his arms and
carry them in his bosom, and gently lead those who are with young.” When
the Messiah comes, there will be protection and peace. We can find blessing even
when we feel under siege, when we remember that we are held and led by God’s
Messiah. The promise revealed at Advent, and leading us to Christmas is that the
one promised to Bethlehem is also promised to us. Blessings
can come to us in ways that while they seem insignificant to the world, are
actually quite meaningful to God. Luke tells us that after her visit with
Gabriel, Mary decides to go visit her friend and kinswoman Elizabeth, who though
she is older, honors and blesses Mary. She even wonders out loud why Mary, whom
she calls “the mother of my Lord”, (v. 43) is
visiting her. One
writer describes the scene this way: “It is surprising that Elizabeth
expresses such a sense of honor at Mary’s visit. She was an elderly woman in a
culture that honored older people. Mary was young, probably a teenager, so she
would have been the one from whom deference would be expected. It was Elizabeth,
following in the tradition of the elderly Sarah, who appeared to deserve honor.
Mary has done nothing to deserve honor, except that she had ‘believed
that there would be a fulfillment of what was spoken to her by the Lord’
(v.45). But that was enough. It was Mary’s belief that served as the grounds
for her honor” (www.lectionary.org/luke
4th Sunday in Advent, p. 2). Mary
has been chosen by God, she has been blessed by Elizabeth. She is no doubt
wondering why me. We can hear her saying, I am not rich, I am not from a
prominent family, there is nothing particularly significant about me. Why has
this promise been revealed to me? It
is because God wants to break open our limited worldview. There is a theme that
runs through the gospels, it is called the great reversal and it refers to those
times when Jesus tells his disciples to pay careful, close, loving attention to
the ones others ignore. Care for the widows, the orphans, little children, the
poor, and the sick. Don’t ignore married couples with children, or adults, or
the rich, or those who are physically, emotionally, or spiritually well. Just
remember that in the time to come, when God acts to redeem the first will be
last and the last will be first position, income, and little else of the stuff
we have will save us. In God’s eyes, no matter who we are, what matters most
is faithfulness, and compassion, accountability and openness to what God is
doing in our lives. There
are blessings to be received from what Jesus calls the least of these. Ever feel
like one of the least? Feeling out of place? Through the coming one, a place
will be made for you. Feeling out of sorts? The promised one can help you get it
together. Feeling neglected? The coming one will pay attention to you and care
for you. Mary
teaches us how to respond to the promise revealed to her. She remembers another
mother who gave birth to a special son. She remembered that Hannah sang when she
committed her long awaited son Samuel to a life time of service in the temple.
Hannah sang (I Samuel 2.1-10) and Mary does too. What
does she sing? She sings a song about the bigness of God and about the joy that
resides in her spirit. She sings of thanksgiving for her blessings and for her
place in history – she knows the church will call her blessed. Mary sings with
thanksgiving about what God has done for her and for what God will do in the
future. She praises God’s great name. This
last Sunday in Advent, our waiting is almost over. We hear the promise revealed
and know its fulfillment is near. It is not yet, so we wait just a few more
days. While we wait, we can sing along with Mary. Our
souls can magnify God. We can make God as big as God can be in our lives. That
bigness is the source of our strength, our hope, our ability to hang on when
life gets tough. We
can rejoice in the salvation God has given us in Jesus Christ, who gave up his
life so that we could have ours forever. We can thank God daily that God
remembers us and that God keeps on doing great things for us. We
can bless God because God continually blesses us. The promise of God is revealed
to us when we see that God has in Mary and in the Son she will deliver redefined
who can be blessed. There is a whole theology that declares that blessing equals
wealth, and prosperity and success. If you are not wealthy and successful, if
your house is not big enough, if your clothes are not costly enough, if your
vehicle is not flashy enough, you just don’t love God enough. Their theology
is wrong. It is not wrong because wealth, prosperity, and success are wrong,
they are not. They are good things. It must be wonderful to be financially
secure and to have met and exceeded your goals. The blessing is not in the
achievement, the blessing is in how we honor God with all that God has given us
the grace to achieve. We
can bless God because God is merciful. God’s mercy is not for the fearless but
for the ones who fear God. In the biblical understanding fear is not about
terror or anxiety, but about respect and obedience. The proud, those with an
overwhelming sense of themselves will be scattered in their own hearts. Their
hubris, their sense that the sun, moon, and stars revolve around them will be
content in their fantasy. Hubris is not about the good feeling that comes from
doing well. It is about being arrogant and entitled when God calls us to
blessing and grace. But
the day will come when the powerful will be brought low. Watch the news on any
given day and see how true her prophesy is. Things will balance out when God’s
promise is fulfilled. The lowly, the ordinary, the everyday people will be
lifted us for their faithfulness. The hungry will be filled with good, those who
believe they have all they have and are sufficient all by themselves will be
sent away. We
are invited to sing what Mary sings and to know what Mary knows; each one of us
is called to carry Christ deep within us, and to give life to him in our own
lives. We are invited to be bearers of Christ and believers of the promise of
God; even while we wait just like Mary waited. “She
is not yet the mother of the child who will be great and who will be called the
Son of the most High" (1.32), but God has promised it and she
believes the promise. The author of Hebrews defines faith as ‘the
assurance of things hoped for, the conviction of things not seen’
(Hebrews 11.1). Mary was a person who possessed that kind of faith, and it is to
that kind of faith that God calls us now. The richest blessings go to those who
believe before God delivers on his promise” (lectionary.org,
p. 5). But God will deliver; and when the
Promised One comes, he will gather us and love us without ceasing and he will
show us how to love the world. So
it was in Bethlehem in the time of Micah and Jesus. So it is with us as we give
ourselves to the one worthy of all our adoration. “Those who allow themselves
to know God are already in touch with God’s mercy. It is newly experienced
every day. It is available to the least of us and to the greatest. All whose
spirits hunger for God discover how richly they have been fed. God has been
doing great things for us. Let us commit the [lives] God has given us to doing
God’s will. May our spirits rejoice as we magnify our God together” (Gathered
by Love. Lavon Bayler. Cleveland: United Church Press. 1994, p.11). Thanks be to God. Amen. Dr.
LaTaunya M. Bynum |
|
Broad
Street Christian Church
|
