I.N.I.

A sermon to be preached on the 4th Sunday in Advent (aka 18 December 2005) at Advent Lutheran Church, Forest Hills, MD, and based on the Gospel for the day, St. Luke 1:26-38, especially verse 38

Dear Friends in Christ,

I just got done reading a book that one of my children gave me for my birthday. It’s about a family of Bengali immigrants to America and begins with the young mother in this arranged marriage giving birth to her first child in a hospital in Boston where her husband is in graduate school. She’s pretty much alone. No family. No friends. Her first child being born without benefit of that surrounding culture in which his parents had grown up, a stranger in a strange land. It made me think a little about Mary.

Okay, so many of the parallels are not there. Mary and Joseph traveled away from their own home to an ancestral home several days’ walk away and, while they surely had some distant relatives there in Bethlehem (since they were ‘of the house and lineage of David’) it seems that at the time of the Savior’s birth either there weren’t any real close relatives or that the relatives could not take Mary and Joseph into their houses at the moment. Mary, it seems, brought forth her firstborn Son and laid Him in a manger pretty much on her own. Joseph likely wouldn’t have been much help. There weren’t birth classes in the first century to help first-time parents prepare for the birth experience. So I’m suggesting that, like the immigrants in the book I read, there were no family or friends to help her. Mary was pretty much on her own.

And, beyond that, I rather think that Mary was pretty much on her own from the moment of our text this 4th Sunday in Advent. The Gospel appointed for today is that of “the Annunciation.” That’s when the angel Gabriel announced to Mary that she was the one woman out of all humanity’s history chosen by God to give birth to his Son, the Savior of humanity. It was quite an announcement. It set Mary apart.

It set her apart in a number of ways. Immediately it set her apart from the other girls in Nazareth and Bethlehem who were engaged to be married and who were not pregnant. That would have stood out then more than it does in present-day America. Beyond that, of course, is that this announcement set the Blessed Virgin apart from the rest of humanity as she would be the mother of our Lord Jesus. It was a singular role, never to be repeated.

What the announcement by Gabriel didn’t do, though, was to set Mary apart from the rest of humanity in her essential role as another human being, just like you and me. She was still someone with intellect and emotion, someone with hopes and doubts and fears and dreams. Mary was still a woman who was tempted to sin, who needed to confess that sin and receive forgiveness. Mary was just like you and me.

In other words, this text from Luke’s Gospel doesn’t reveal Mary becoming something other than human when she hears that she is to become Jesus’s mother. In other words, this text is not about Mary at all. It’s not about Mary.

I wouldn’t be surprised if one of the first temptations that came to her after Gabriel left was that she started to think it was about her. She very well could have ‘stuck in her thumb and pulled out a plum and said what a good girl am I.’ Our whole world and our sinful hearts join forces to keep things turned in toward ourselves. We find ourselves at every turn being tempted to put ourselves in the center of the universe. It’s all about ego in the world’s eyes.

If you watch television at this time of year, or read popular magazines, or lift the Sunday newspaper off the ground at twice its normal weight, you’re very well aware that people want you to buy things now more than ever. Advertisements rush over us at this time of year like water flowing downstream from a broken dam. They’re all about how happy you will be if you buy this or that item. Sometimes the ads will be pitched so that you’ll want to ask someone to buy this item as a gift for yourself. Sometimes they are pitched to urge you to buy it for someone else — but so that YOU will feel good or be rewarded in some way for your thoughtfulness and generosity. The advertisements make it all about you.

And the advertisements are only drawing on our natural human tendency to focus on ourselves, to make ourselves and our own desires first and foremost. It’s been that way since the Garden of Eden. Even without wild consumerism urging us at every step to buy, to acquire, to store up, to keep and give more and more things, even without that, our natural tendency is in that direction. It’s especially natural; expected, easy and understood when people turn in that direction at this time of year. But it’s not what this text is about. Our text is not about Mary or anyone else making themselves so important that everything revolves around them.

This passage from Luke’s Gospel is about God. That’s where the focus is. It’s not about Gabriel. It’s not about Joseph. It’s not even about Mary. It’s about God.

If you look at and listen to the verses here you see and hear that God is the one doing what gets done. The angel Gabriel was sent by God. Gabriel’s message to Mary begins “The Lord is with you.” It is in God’s sight that Mary has found favor. Her Son will be called ‘the Son of the Most High” (that is, of God). The Lord God will give Mary’s Son the throne of David. The Holy Spirit will come on Mary. The power of the Most High will overshadow her. With God nothing is impossible.

All Mary can say in the face of this message is: Let it be done to me. All she can do is passively accept what God is already doing, what he is doing on her behalf and on the behalf of all creation. There’s nothing of Mary in it.

Here in Advent — or, really, at any time of the year — when we face that continuing temptation to push ourselves into the center of the universe and claim responsibility and power over everything that happens in our lives, here and now we have tools to fight that temptation. One of the tools is the example of Mary. The other tool is that which entered Mary’s story: letting the Holy Spirit come over her.

Mary herself can, at best, a model be for us of how we can remain out of the spotlight. Two things made Mary different from Moses and Paul and so many others whose stories we have in Scripture. Mary is neither a leader nor a man. She’s also a very interesting case to examine, for she’s one of the people whose interaction with God came through a means other than direct conversation with the Lord. She didn’t speak to God in a burning bush or in a bright cloud. She heard His message to her through another means, the angel. In other words, her experience from the beginning is more like most of us than like most of the other biblical stories of interaction with God are.

Thinking of Mary as ‘just like one of us’ might be a little hard at first because we so often hear about people holding her up as something quite different from the rest of humanity. But there’s nothing in Scripture that distinguishes her as anything above and beyond the norm. There are no miracles which she did. There is no teaching or sermon or prayer (other than the spontaneous ‘Magnificat’ she sings later on in Luke 1). We basically know nothing at all about her life from Scripture. She’s at Christmas, at Cana, and at the cross. And then she disappears. The book of Acts doesn’t tell of her life in the early Church. There’s no solid historical record of anything beyond what we’ve got here in the Bible. And that’s quite like just about all of us.

Our own places in the history of the world are going to be very small. There isn’t any grand historical memory being created about us. The only real difference between us and Mary is that a few bits of her life and conversation were recorded in the Bible and are preserved down to this day. But her life itself was a humble reception of what God was doing. Mary acted by being passive and letting God act in her. You and I can do the same. The only place we’re eternally important is in the presence of God. The Lord is with us, as He was with Mary. We, too, have found favor with God because of Jesus. The Holy Spirit has come over each believer. Nothing is impossible with God in each of our lives.

The Spirit overshadowed us and then we, too, accepted by faith what God is doing in our lives. Chances are there won’t be anything quite so dramatic happening to us as happened to Mary. Unless you consider the complete forgiveness of all our sins to be dramatic. Unless you consider the creation of saving faith in our hearts to be dramatic. Unless you consider God drawing us to eternal life by His side to be dramatic.

We should not forget, either, the second tool God affords us in the present battle against the temptation to claim first place in our lives for ourselves. That is the tool of God coming to us through other means.

We don’t generally have angels speaking God’s word directly to us the way Gabriel spoke to Mary. God comes to us in Scripture and in the Sacraments. We don’t draw him near to us. We don’t do anything to make him appear or make him speak (this isn’t some pagan religion, you know, where we could force God to show up and reveal himself in response to some incantation or sacrifice). God comes where and when he wills.

These days he wills to come to us in his Word, in Baptism, and in the Holy Communion. During Advent we re-enact the waiting god’s people did before the birth of our Savior in Bethlehem. During Advent, too, we enact for ourselves the waiting we all do now for our Lord’s second coming. While we wait, we are sustained by the faith implanted in our hearts by the Holy Spirit. While we wait we are strengthened by the

Word and Sacraments.

God comes to us through those means. He gives meaning and importance to our lives. He forgives us those things we constantly do that separate us from his way, from his love. By making the story about God, particularly God in Christ Jesus, rather than about Mary or about ourselves, we can rest assured that there is peace and forgiveness for each of us. In our loneliness, in our isolation, in our sorrow, in our pain, in our sin and in our forgiveness, in all our conditions and situations, God comes to us in Jesus with the love and peace we so crave. All we can do is to echo Mary’s words and say “Here am I the servant of the Lord, let it be to me according to your Word.”

So, may the peace of God that passes all understanding keep your hearts and minds in Christ Jesus, our Lord. Amen.

S.D.G.