(Video clip from A Christmas Story where Bart wins a major award)
I love the mother’s reaction to Bart’s major award. It is so classic with how wives have to put up with their husbands so many times. Have you ever been put in a position where you love somebody so much that you will go along with their cocka-mammied ideas, even when they seems so irrational?
Our text this morning also gives an example of someone having to hear some unbelievable notion and then given the opportunity to see how she will respond. We find this in Luke 1:26-38.
Luke 1
26 In the sixth month, God sent the angel Gabriel to Nazareth, a town in Galilee, 27 to a virgin pledged to be married to a man named Joseph, a descendant of David. The virgin's name was Mary. 28 The angel went to her and said, "Greetings, you who are highly favored! The Lord is with you." 29 Mary was greatly troubled at his words and wondered what kind of greeting this might be. 30 But the angel said to her, "Do not be afraid, Mary, you have found favor with God. 31 You will be with child and give birth to a son, and you are to give him the name Jesus. 32 He will be great and will be called the Son of the Most High. The Lord God will give him the throne of his father David, 33 and he will reign over the house of Jacob forever; his kingdom will never end." 34 "How will this be," Mary asked the angel, "since I am a virgin?" 35 The angel answered, "The Holy Spirit will come upon you, and the power of the Most High will overshadow you. So the holy one to be born will be called the Son of God. 36 Even Elizabeth your relative is going to have a child in her old age, and she who was said to be barren is in her sixth month. 37 For nothing is impossible with God." 38 "I am the Lord's servant," Mary answered. "May it be to me as you have said." Then the angel left her.
The other day, I was driving through town and I heard Judy Garland’s haunting voice singing, “Have Yourself a Merry Little Christmas.” And I started thinking back on a message I preached a couple of years ago that was a take-off on something like that. Instead of saying,
“Have a Merry Christmas,” I would say, “Have a ‘Mary’ Christmas.” I purposed that Mary had a very different concept of being blessed than we do today. Let’s think about that for a bit.
As we reflect on today’s scripture lesson I think that we can see three things that God did here and continues to do today.
1. God chooses the unlikely
- theme found throughout the bible
- Abraham and Sarah, an elderly couple too old to have children
- Moses - a shepherd of goats, fugitive of the law, and stutters
- Ruth – a Moabite
- David – the runt
Mary – most unlikely candidate
- How we choose our mates – looks, sex appeal, right pedigree, intelligence, wealth
- What was God looking for when he chose Mary?
- As we look to the scriptures, we can assume that she was ordinary – probably never voted Home-coming queen at Nazareth High School, uneducated, came from wrong side of the tracks (not Sepphoris, but from tiny Podunk town of Nazareth), young (~13 y/o)
- What was God looking for?
o a heart that was willing, that captures certain qualities and characteristics that God looks for and who can be used. God chooses not based on SAT scores or outward appearances, but by looking at the heart and asking, “Am I able to use you?”
- You may be saying, “I don’t have any special skills or special abilities. What do I have to offer?” If you are in that place where you are wondering that, you are in the perfect place to be used by God. God says, “If you have a willing heart, you have all I need and I’ll supply everything else.”
2. God accomplishes the inexplicable
- I tend to be rational. I expect everything to have rhyme and reason to it. God has set up some natural laws and I expect everything to happen in compliance to those laws.
- God normally operates within those boundaries that God created
- But God will not be put in a box.
- Sometimes God doesn’t operate in my preconceived notions.
- God sometimes says, “I can do things that you can’t even begin to imagine.”
- I find this to be true with Mary as well, that she had a bit of a hard time believing what she was hearing.
- When the angel Gabriel, he brings the message, “Mary, you’ve found favor with God. You’re going to have a boy, and he’ll be the Son of God, the Messiah.”
- Mary was a bit shocked. She wasn’t concerned that she was going to have the Son of God, she was hung up on the notion that she was going to have a baby. She missed the whole point that he was going to be the Promised One, the Messiah.
- She questioned the basic premise. She was smart enough to know the mechanics about having a baby and she knew that in her case, it just wasn’t possible.
- She was the first to question the virgin birth.
- If you are stuck in believing that God can’t do anything out of the ordinary, then you can’t believe this story.
- Somewhere we have to allow that God can do things outside of the ordinary.
- Sometimes God does just things that simply messes with our heads and ways of thinking. Abraham and Sarah have son, Moses and the parting of the sea, David (slaying Goliath).
3. God’s favor is sometimes hard to bear
- Mary isn’t filled with joy at first.
- Magnificat (Song of Joy) comes later, maybe months later.
- God’s favor came with a task.
- She was a young woman who was going to have to explain to other people what had happened.
- Remember that a woman caught pregnant outside of marriage could be stoned to death and the woman’s parents could call for the child to be stoned.
- Interesting thing that we find in the bible is that when God favors you or blesses you, the blessing is coupled with a calling. You’ll find that God isn’t blessing you for a life filled with bliss and happiness – instead he favors you by a calling that will be difficult and challenging
- Abraham is called to leave his home, where he lived his whole life to wander as a stranger in a foreign land in his old age.
- Moses is called to face Pharaoh and risk life and limb
- David is going to be chased by Saul who want to kill him before he ever becomes king
- God’s call and God’s favor is going to require challenge.
- One of the challenges that we face is to recognize that God’s blessing is never about our happiness. Happiness is a by-product of being obedient to God and doing what he wants us to do
- Mary didn’t understand. She didn’t understand how or why, but she summed it up with these words, "I am the Lord's servant. May it be to me as you have said."
- In pursuing that, we ultimately find happiness.
Would you like to “Have Yourself a Merry Little Christmas?” If so, maybe we need to be a bit more like Mary, the mother of Jesus.
We need to have a heart that is open to the inexplicable ways of God. You, by the grace of Jesus, are favored (blessed) by God. What are we going to do with it? Are we going to seek how God is going to make us happy? Or are we going to understand that with God’s blessing comes the calling to be obedient, even when it sounds ridiculous.
So friends, I say, Have yourself a ‘Mary’ little Christmas by being like Mary and using her sentiments as ours: "I am the Lord's servant. May it be to me as you have said."
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