Chris Taylor’s Sermon – 12/9/07

God Comes to Mary

2 Samuel 7:8-16

Luke 1:26-38

Twenty-three years ago, Bonnie and I arrived at a small church outside of Cleveland. She was nine months pregnant at the time. In fact, our first child (Christopher) was born the day after we moved into our new home.

The church had experienced a lot of conflict with its previous pastor, and had lost a significant number of its members. It was facing an uncertain future; wondering if it would even survive. The presbytery’s executive called us while we were still out in Connecticut and warned us that we weren’t going to be able to get by on what the church was offering. But we had seen the church’s financial statements. We knew they were doing the best they could. Most importantly, we felt a sense of call. And so we went.

Things were pretty tight those first few years. We had to watch every penny. There were no nights out for us; we couldn’t afford baby-sitters, or movie tickets or even a meal away. We drove a series of what could safely be called “junkers” – cars that were just a half-step from the scrap yard. We were kind of a mid-way point. We never knew when our car was going to break down, and we were never sure we would be able to afford the repairs.

It all reached a head one day when I had an appointment downtown. Not unusually, our car was broken down yet again. I borrowed a car from a friend. I was on Mayfield Ave., just above Little Italy, when lo and behold that car broke down, too. I couldn’t believe it.

Have you ever had one of those moments when you just want to shake your fist at God? “Why does it have to be so hard? Why couldn’t you make it just a little bit easier?” It is that point when you’ve finally had enough; that moment when the accumulated stress breaks loose – the day-in day-out effort to take care of the kids and make the marriage work and keep the house in some kind of order. Or maybe it is that point when the chemo, and the radiation, and all the uncertainty finally use up what’s left of your emotional reserves. “Where are you, God?”

Where are we supposed to turn in such moments? What are we supposed to do? Our text, this morning, offers us some clues.

First, there is the “when” of this encounter between Gabriel and Mary. You and I have the advantage of living on this side of the incarnation. We look at life through the lens of Jesus’ birth. Whatever else might happen, we’ve already seen the evidence of God’s presence. We know that God loves us, and that God is moving and working in our lives and in this world. That’s what the incarnation does for us.

But for hundreds of years people didn’t have that advantage. They lived on the other side of the incarnation; waiting, hoping, praying for that moment when God would fulfill his promises. It is a promise that actually went back some 1700 to 1800 years before Jesus was born.

It started with God’s promise to Abram. Genesis 12:2, 3 – “I will make of you a great nation, and I will bless you, and make your name great, so that you will be a blessing. I will bless those who bless you, and the one who curses you I will curse; and in [or “by”] you all the families of the earth shall be blessed.” God is promising that Abram is going to have a lot of descendents, so many they will actually be a nation. And God is promising that through those descendents all the nations of the earth will be blessed.

Now move forward seven hundred years to about 1000 B.C.E. David is King. The first part of the promise, that Abram’s children will become a nation, has been fulfilled. But now the promise takes further shape. God is speaking to David through the prophet Nathan (2 Sam. 7:12,13), “When your days are fulfilled and you lie down with your ancestors, I will raise up your offspring after you, who shall come forth from your body, and I will establish his kingdom. He shall build a house for my name, and I establish the throne of his kingdom forever.” The promise made to Abram has come down through David and is now being extended forward: God promises that he is going to raise up David’s offspring, and that he is going to establish the kingdom of this offspring forever. This kingdom will extend into all eternity.

Move forward another three hundred years – somewhere right around 700 BC. This time the promise is through the Prophet Isaiah (9:6, 7), “For a child has been born for us, a son given to us; authority rests upon his shoulder; and he is named Wonderful Counselor, Mighty God, Everlasting Father, Prince of Peace. His authority shall grow continually, and there shall be endless peace for the throne of David and his kingdom. He will establish and uphold it with justice and with righteousness from his time onward and forevermore.”

Are you seeing the connection here between these promises? A thousand years, an entire millennium, separates the promise God made to Abraham and the one made through Isaiah. And then it is another seven hundred years before that promise is finally fulfilled – seven hundred years before the angel appears to Mary and announces that it is time.

So where was God during all that time? Where was God when Abram’s descendents were slaves in Egypt? Where was God when they were wandering through the wilderness? Where was God when Jerusalem fell and God’s own people were carried off into captivity?

It would have been very easy to believe in such times that God must have abandoned them, or that God no longer cared. But here is the point: through all those seventeen hundred years between God’s great promise to Abraham and that moment when that promise was fulfilled in Jesus, God was right there. All the waiting wasn’t about God’s absence. The hardship wasn’t about God not caring. God was there, God was at work, but God had a very different plan. God’s ways, as the prophet tells us (Isa. 55:8,9), are simply not our own.

The “when” then of this encounter between Gabriel and Mary tells us something about God. It tells us that God doesn’t do things when we would do them, and God doesn’t do them the same way. The tough times aren’t about God not caring. God simply has God’s own way.

Which brings us to the second part of this text, to the “who”. What do we actually know about Mary? Not a whole lot as it turns out. What we know is pretty much limited to what Luke tells us in verses 26 and 27. We know she was from Nazareth, that she was a virgin pledged to be married, and that her name was Mary. And that’s it.

Compare that scanty description with what Luke tells us about Zechariah and Elizabeth some twenty verses before. We are told something about their families; Zechariah was part of the priestly family of Abijah, Elizabeth was a descendent of Aaron. And we are told something about their character: the two of them were “righteous before God, living blamelessly according to all the commandments and regulations of the Lord.”

There is none of that with Mary. We don’t know anything about her family. There is no mention of her character or of any special righteousness on her part. The absence of any of that, coming as it does right after this account of Zechariah and Elizabeth, stands out.

Luke was very careful about what he wrote. It is hard to believe that this was simply an oversight. Far more likely, this omission was Luke’s way of telling us that there was nothing particularly special about Mary. She was human. She was ordinary. She was real. She might have been out in the garden when that angel appeared; her clothes dirty and filled with sweat. Or maybe she was preparing a meal, or cleaning the dishes, or bringing some water back from the well. There is no halo here.

Gabriel’s greeting underlines the point: “Greetings, favored one…” He doesn’t say, “Greetings, righteous one” or “worthy one” or “blameless one.” The word “favored” isn’t so much about her as it is about God’s choice. She is favored because God has chosen her for this unique and wonderful task. She is favored because she has been invited to experience firsthand the miracle of Jesus’ birth. In other words, unlike Zechariah and Elizabeth who really seemed to deserve the miracle that came their way, Mary was different. Mary was much more like us. In some ways, she was a kind of precursor to that grace that would come to us through her son: it isn’t about our merit, or our being “good enough.” It is, instead, about God and God’s unconditional love for us.

When things go south there is a part of us that may not be all that surprised. What else could we expect? There is a part of us, no matter how successful we’ve been, that is well aware of our own brokenness. It might be rooted in some trauma in our past. It might be the product of some choices we would rather forget. But it is there; there where the shame hangs out, where the fears or anger or lusts lurk on the edges of our awareness.

Aware of our own dark side, we assume that miracles must be for other people – for the other guy, and not for us. But what does Mary’s story tell us? Isn’t part of the message here that it isn’t about being special?

Was Abraham special? Keep in mind that this is the same guy who went around telling people that his wife was actually his sister – “go ahead and take her as your own wife!” – because he was afraid of what they might do to him. Was Jacob, the father of Israel, special – this guy whose very name means “deceiver”? Or Moses, a murderer whose first reaction to God’s call was to try to find some way out of it?

The miracle of God’s involvement isn’t just for the other guy. It is people like us that God chooses. People who aren’t perfect. People who have made mistakes and who keep on making them even after they turn to God.

Seven or eight years ago a woman named Pat Hornberger woke up to a dream in which she had seen an automobile accident. The dream was so vivid and so powerful that Hornberger spent the rest of that night in prayer. She prayed for sixteen members of her congregation who were on a mission trip. That same night two other members of that same church woke up and were also moved to pray.

Thousands of miles away in Ethiopia, four vans carrying sixteen members of the Solana Beach Presbyterian Church were winding their way through a nine-thousand foot descent from Ethiopia’s capital to a small desert town below. One of them was forced to swerve by an approaching bus. The van flipped over twice, and then landed upside down. Its roof collapsed. Those behind were sure that no one could possibly have survived the accident. But then, miraculously, a window was kicked out, and one by one the four occupants emerged.

What was it that woke up those members? What was it that led them to pray? Some might look at that accident and say, “Hah, I told you there was no God.” Others might ask, “How could God have let that happen? Where was God when those people needed him?”

Those members awakened in the middle of the night and led to pray, however, tell a very different story. Their prayers speak of a God who was at work all along.

It is tempting for us to look at our lives, at times, and to feel crushed by our limitations: our inability to change; to break free of some life-long habit; to alter our circumstances or make the kind of radical shift for which we long. God might be able to work miracles, we say to ourselves, but surely God isn’t going to work any miracles in a life like mine. Miracles are for the saints. Miracles are for the special people, for people whose lives are so much better than my own.

But here, in Mary’s story, we encounter a very different message. We see that God whose power can bring life and hope to even the most unpromising of circumstances.

God didn’t abandon Bonnie and me twenty three years ago. By God’s grace that church did make an amazing turn in the years that followed. And by God’s grace, some of the members of that church – the hands of feet of God – got together and bought us a car upon which we could depend.

Where is God calling you to be faithful? Where is God saying “Hang on”? In the face of Mary’s questions, the angel replied “Nothing is impossible with God.” Mary chose to believe it and her life (and all of history) was forever changed. This is grace: that the miracle of God’s involvement is for people like Mary, and for people like you and me if only we will believe.