December 24, 2000
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Loved-Filled Promise On previous Sundays in Advent, as we have heard Peter’s call to release the hope of Christ that is in us, we have shared with Zechariah his song of peace at the birth of his son John, and as we heard our own call as we listened to Paul call the Philippians to joy, we learned to rejoice. Today we are called to remember the words found in Galatians 4.4: "But when the fullness of time had come, God sent his Son, born of a woman, born under the law, in order to redeem those born under the law that we might receive adoption as children. That is where we are now. Today on this fourth Sunday in Advent, we overhear and join with Mary as she sings a mother’s song. She praises God for the promise that will be fulfilled in her. The long awaited Messiah is almost here. Mary of Nazareth will be the vehicle by which he comes into the world. The world had been waiting for a while for the promise of God to send a savior to the world to come to fruition. Isaiah writes of people who needed to remember that even when it seems that God is absent, God is not. Through sunshine and shadow, when it all works out and when it seems to fall apart, when it is all clear, and when it is utterly confusing, God is there. Isaiah knew the God who had been with them was not far away so he could say to Israel, join me because I will wait and I will hope. I know that God is paying attention. I know that you have been out there, groping and searching as if you were in a dark room. I understand your temptation to look for comfort in places that really were not all that good. You may have looked in an unhealthy relationship, or in bad eating habits, or in a perpetual search that led to nowhere. And all you found was what Fitzgerald called the dark night of the soul. But listen, the God of hope and liberation is here. There will be no more groping down life’s highway as if there were no signposts and no lights. God will give to us a liberator, one who will be light for our path. Why? God will do it because God has promised. What will this promised liberator look like? Will he be strong enough to defeat the Assyrians? Will the Messiah save Jerusalem for us for all time? What kind of man will this Messiah be? Well, it’s going to be like this. God will send to the world a child, a son who will have all the authority of God. He will speak for God, love as God loves, and save us for all eternity. So marvelous will he be that we will call him by some superlative names. He will be to us a wonder, mighty, everlasting, a prince, and the more he acts, the more authority he will have in our lives. How can this be? God’s own passion and promise for creation will make it so, even through a child. We can be sure that the love of God for the world is such that the promise of God that a Messiah will come will be fulfilled. God’s promises can be trusted, and we believe that this promise came to fulfillment in the birth of Jesus Christ, to a young woman named Mary. As I think of Mary, I am led to ask a question. What do you do when you receive word that God’s promise will be fulfilled in you? That was the question Mary faced. Surely she had grown up hearing the prophesy of Isaiah that a young girl would bear a special child. But I do not think she ever believed she would be the one. After all, we know that Mary was a young woman, some say probably a teenager, who was betrothed to Joseph. Understand that betrothal was more than an engagement to be married as we know it today. In his commentary on Luke, Fred Craddock reminds us, that "betrothals, legal and binding, were usually arranged between families when women were quite young, still only girls and that Joseph’s importance in the story is that he provides Jesus’ legal connection to the throne of David (Craddock, p. 27) But there she is, at home in Galilee, when the angel Gabriel comes to her with a message similar to the one given to Zechariah before the birth of John Baptist. He greets her and then brings her the news that God is with her, a promise she will need, since his next bit of news is that she need not be afraid. "Don’t be afraid of what, what are you going to tell me." "You have been chosen." "Chosen for what?" "Chosen to be the one who will bring the Messiah into the world." "What did you say?" "You will have a son, his name will be Jesus and he will be the savior of the world. He will be great, he will be the Son of the most high, he will have the throne of David, and there will be no end to his kingdom. That’s all." What might we do if were the recipient of such news from God? We might, we do run, decline God’s act of grace, get our friends to throw us a shower, move to a bigger house in an exclusive neighborhood, sell our story to People magazine of FOX TV for millions of dollars. We might do all of that and more upon hearing that we will be the Christ bearer. Mary’s response was to remember what another mother had done. She remembered when Hannah who had waited a long time for the birth of her son Samuel. Hannah kept her promise that if God would grant her a child, she would dedicate the boy back to God. Hannah spoke of the joy of her heart, and the goodness and justice of God. She praises God that people who kept the faith would know God’s love and protection. Mary adjusts the nuances of Hannah’s song and makes it her own. She begins by singing of the bigness of God, her spirit rejoices in the sheer size of a God who looks at her with such trust. Mary, after all was of no particular status. She was hardly noticed as she went about her life. Like her we have no standing, no fame. We could easily be passed by on the street. Mary was no different, except she was called to be the means by which the Anointed on of God, the Christ would come into the world. So are we. We are the ones who know the good news, and we are the ones who are therefore called to bear Christ in our lives and to share him with the world. People would call Mary blessed, let them see what we do and call us faithful. Can we be faithful enough to take Mary’s song as our own? I think we can. I think we can because like her we can sing of a love-filled promise, God will be with us through the tender mercies of Jesus Christ. We have learned to fear God, not in the sense of being afraid, but in terms of respect for God and worship to God, not just now but for generations to come. We are after all the ones who are in the company of saints who heard the story from a previous generation, and if is a story that will continue to be told, it is up to us to tell it. We can tell whoever will listen that 2000 years ago, the story swept through the middle ease, and then it was told and believed in Africa and Europe, it crossed the oceans till somebody here heard it, and eventually it got to us…love God, reverence God, trust God, respect God, and you will know the mercy of God. Mary sang of the mercy of God, and then she sang of the strength of God. We can surely join in this verse. So many of us have been sustained by God when all around us our support was crumbling. We know it because so many of us have been humbled by God. We know that God is strong enough to banish from us our human arrogance, our sense of entitlement, our attitude that the rules do not apply to us. Mary sings to those who would say you know, my money, my education, my position, is all that I need. She says, keep that thought and remember it when your day of accountability comes. If you think you all that is, if you are the center of your own universe, then enjoy your own company because you will likely spend your days alone, unless there is a conversion in your life. Think of Zaccheus until Jesus called him down from his tree. Remember Ebenezer Scrooge, it is the plot of countless movies, books, and shows. Many of us are prone to the sense that we are all that matters. Beware of self-importance that cannot tell the difference between pride, which we rightly feel when we do something well, but rather with hubris, which occurs when we have an overly generous opinion of ourselves. But the day is coming when God will again turn it all upside down. The powerful will be pulled down, the rich will be sent away, the hungry will be filled, and the lowly lifted up. Our God through time has been about doing the unusual and unexpected to help us to keep things in perspective and to remember who God really is. We have seen God do it before. It happened in Genesis when God created humanity from the dust of the earth, we believe it because God promised to Abraham and Sarah, a childless couple that they would be the ancestors of a great nation, and they were. God called a stammering Moses and a stubborn Paul to lead the people to faith and trust and action, and God entrusted the Savior of the world, Jesus to a young woman from a small town in Israel. God certainly could have entrusted Jesus to a wealthy woman in Rome, the seat of the world’s only superpower. But that was not what God wanted to do. In order to fulfill the promise in love first made to Abraham, and believed by generations following, God chose Mary who God loved enough to have her bear the Christ. Through God’s trust in mortal human beings, and by the grace of Jesus Christ, there is a church that has lasted 2000 years, about to begin its third millennium of transforming lives. God has chosen us to continue to proclaim that the promises of God are true and that they find their fulfillment in Jesus Christ. So what does it mean for us to be bearers of Christ? First we can hear the promises of God. We elect politicians on the basis of promises we know they can’t keep. People make promises, all the time that are not always kept. Parents tell their children they will never leave. Children tell parents that they will never put them in a nursing home. All of those promises are made with good intentions, there is no thought of not fulfilling the promise, otherwise those promises are simply lies. After Mary’s conversation with the angel Gabriel, she went to see her relative Elizabeth. She talked things over with someone she knew and trusted and who as the soon to be mother of John the Baptist, knew something about miraculous births. Elizabeth confirmed for the young woman the words of Gabriel. In fact her own unborn child leapt by the Holy Spirit at the presence of Mary. She was indeed about to do something spectacular. Hear the promise of God. We will do spectacular things in the name of the one who is coming. Then after we hear the promises, we can believe the promise of God. I know to people who are not in the church and even to some who are, every thing about this promise to Mary makes it hard to believe. Angels bringing messages, betrothed but not yet consummated women having children, God’s own Messiah coming into the world in the form of an infant. It must be true – it is too fantastic not to be. Mary believed the promise made to Isaiah would be made real in her, especially after he says, "for with God, nothing will be impossible (1. 37)." It is still true and if we can believe that, then we can believe that God can be trusted absolutely to do whatever God says will be done. Jesus will come and proclaim the fulfillment of the promises of God who loved the world so much that he gave us his son. Believe the promises of God and look to accomplish the impossible. If we believe the promises of God, then we can embrace the promises of God. Mary accepted that she would be the Christ bearer and says, "let be to me according to your word." When we embrace the promises given to us, we hold on to them, we enfold them in our hearts, and draw our strength and life from their presence in our lives. Finally we can live the promises of God. The reality is that we are all among the lowly. None of us has it all together. Few of us live faultless lives. All of us will find ourselves at one point or another among ones who need a word of support, or a hand up. The love-filled promise of God is that God will lift each one of us up, and set us in the directions we need to go, and we can remember that all of the promises of God through Jesus Christ, from "I have come that you will have life, and have it abundance to I am with you even to the end of the world are true. The love of God is about to come into the world in an amazing way. I received a Christmas card last week from the new President of the Claremont School of Theology and his wife. (When I was there, we called the School of Theology at Claremont) The card talks about the high expectation we have for the promised child. It says: "In this season we wait for that cosmic whimper, the sound of a baby cooing, stirring, crying. At the outskirts of our awareness is this wee one, our brother, made of the same stuff as the children all around us. In that distinct whimpering is our hope. Can you hear it? Shh – Listen. Shh – Eternity waits our hearing." The promise given to Isaiah is being fulfilled through a young woman and a baby who will teach and heal, preach and pray, love and live, die and live again. We can thank God for the love that brought to life a promise made so long ago. We can indeed hear, believe, embrace, and live the promises of God, that the Messiah has come and will come again. The glory of the Lord is about to be revealed. And when it is, we can run with the shepherds, go tell it on the mountain, sound the trumpet, and sing with Mary, and we can come bearing the gift of our lives for that sweet little Jesus boy who is God’s great gift of love to us. It will happen. God has promised, and the promises of God can be trusted, absolutely. Come Lord Jesus, come. Amen.
Dr.
LaTaunya M. Bynum |
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Broad
Street Christian Church
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