When Elizabeth was six months pregnant, God sent the angel Gabriel to Nazareth, a city in Galilee, 27 to a virgin who was engaged to a man named Joseph, a descendant of David’s house. The virgin’s name was Mary. 28 When the angel came to her, he said, “Rejoice, favored one! The Lord is with you!” 29 She was confused by these words and wondered what kind of greeting this might be.
30 The angel said, “Don’t be afraid, Mary. God is honoring you. 31 Look! You will conceive and give birth to a son, and you will name him Jesus. 32 He will be great and he will be called the Son of the Most High. The Lord God will give him the throne of David his father. 33 He will rule over Jacob’s house forever, and there will be no end to his kingdom.”
34 Then Mary said to the angel, “How will this happen since I haven’t had sexual relations with a man?” 35 The angel replied, “The Holy Spirit will come over you and the power of the Most High will overshadow you. Therefore, the one who is to be born will be holy. He will be called God’s Son. 36 Look, even in her old age, your relative Elizabeth has conceived a son. This woman who was labeled ‘unable to conceive’ is now six months pregnant. 37 Nothing is impossible for God.” 38 Then Mary said, “I am the Lord’s servant. Let it be with me just as you have said.” Then the angel left her. (Common English Bible)
“The Nativity Scene:
Still Life Coming Alive in Advent,” Week One
It
was a marriage that was—and would be—controversial today for a great many
people. The bride had been previously
divorced, and the groom was marrying her purely so that she could avoid being
deported from England. In America, it
was what we would have called a green card marriage.
Except
that this was not simply any random pairing of people looking to flout the law
just because they could: the groom was C.S. Lewis, perhaps the most celebrated
Christian author of the 20th century, and his bride was a former
atheistic communist-turned-Christian Joy Davidman.
Shortly
after their civil ceremony, Davidman was diagnosed with terminal bone cancer,
and the couple—who had gone from being more than the best of friends to being
genuine spouses—sought to have a Christian ceremony; despite the rules
governing divorce in the Church of England during the late 1950s, a priest who
was a personal friend of the couple performed the ceremony in 1957.
Joy
Davidman died of her cancer only three years later, in 1960.
In
writing pseudonymously about his sheer, unadulterated grief over losing his
wife, C.S. Lewis wrote these words:
She was my daughter and
my mother, my pupil and my teacher, my subject and my sovereign, and always,
holding all these in solution, my trusty comrade, friend, shipmate, fellow
soldier. My mistress, but at the same
time all that any man friend (and I have good ones) has ever been to me.
Perhaps more.
When
we think about the most basic role an angel of God is expected to fulfill—that role
of revelation, of revealing a message from God to the human hearer—it is
altogether easy (in fact, seemingly too easy) to see those who in our lives
dramatically change shape and role from something common to something uncommon,
something everyday to something extraordinary, as someone who has become in our
eyes an angel.
And
we would not to be wrong for doing so, for such a person who inspires such a
change in our regard for them is someone capable of likewise changing our
regard for God, if we were to let them.
This
is a new sermon series for the church season of Advent, what we colloquially
think of as the “Christmas season,” but in fact the Christmas season in the
church traditionally refers to Christmas Day and the eleven days afterwards
between it and the Epiphany—the day the Magi arrive in Matthew 2 to worship the
newborn Jesus and present Him with the gifts of gold, frankincense, and
myrrh. Advent, rather, is much like the
pre-Easter season of Lent in that it is meant to be a season of preparation—of preparing
for the death and resurrection in the case of Lent, and preparing for the birth
(“preparing the way for the Lord, (to) make His paths straight,” as John the
Baptist puts it, by quoting the Old Testament prophets) in the case of Advent.
This
Advent season, we’ll be doing so by going through the characters one by one in
the nativity scenes that we all know and love—the setting of Jesus in the
manger surrounded by His earthly parents, Mary and Joseph, as well as the shepherds
and the angels who herald His birth—and this Sunday, we begin with the angels,
and not just any angels, but the archangel Gabriel and His message to Mary that
she is to bear a child who will one day bear the name Son of the Most High.
It
is a powerful and profound story, and likely not for reasons that we are truly
able to fully appreciate today, I think.
Unwed mothers have it tough in so many ways in 21st-century America:
the judgmental stares in the supermarket checkout line, the juggling of schedules
without the help of a significant other, and, well, I don’t need to tell you—many
of you were or are single moms yourselves.
It’s hard, and I should not, cannot, pretend to know what it is like,
because I don’t.
But
nor do we really know what it was like, how harrowing it truly was, to be a
single mom in first-century Israel. It
meant that she was completely unmarriageable, completely without the intrinsic
worth of the only thing that defined her worth back then: her virginity. Back before the days of paternity testing and
Maury Povich, the only way families could determine that their heirs were in
fact their own was through virginity, and for obvious reasons, a pregnant woman
was assumed to not be a virgin no matter how truthful her claims were of the
Holy Spirit overcoming her and the power of the Most High overshadowing her.
She
could have—and likely would have—been ostracized, demonized, and functionally
exiled, putting her in an infinitely more dangerous place and probably dying
even earlier than she otherwise would have due to the lower security of her
livelihood.
But
I’m getting ahead of myself. We’ll talk
more about Mary as a person when her sermon arrives.
Yet,
you can understand why some of Gabriel’s very first words to Mary are “Be not
afraid” Be not afraid, Mary, of what I am about to tell you, of this fate that
would mean almost certain isolation to any other woman. Be not afraid, Mary, of who I am about to tell
you your son really is. Be not afraid,
Mary, of me, of who I am, of a being sent to earth solely to reveal God’s
goodness unto you!
Be
not afraid, Mary!
It’s
ironic, then, that these are the words that Gabriel perhaps least needed to
speak. Mary was not afraid, or if she
was, Luke certainly does not know it or convey that to us. No, what Gabriel is instead delivering is
indeed what he says is a cause for rejoicing: rejoice, Mary, for you have found
favor with God. Rejoice, Mary, for you
shall give birth to He who will save us all.
Rejoice, Mary, because God’s ultimate expression of love for humanity is
going to arrive through you!
Rejoice,
Mary!
Could
we rejoice were we in Mary’s place? Dare
we rejoice were in the place of a teenaged girl visited by an angel to deliver
her news that may be welcome to the world but potentially terrifying to her
personally?
If
God were made known to us by someone whom we did not know, who had to introduce
themselves to us by saying “Be not afraid,” would we be able to live out the
promise that God’s angel makes to us in that moment? Would we be able to even see God’s Word in
something so unexpected, told to us by someone so unexpected?
My
prayer is that we would.
For
weeks now, since the Paris terrorist attacks by the Islamic State, it seems we
desperately need to be told to be not afraid—be not afraid of our Muslim
neighbors, be not afraid of the refugees from Syria, be not afraid of those who
simply do not look like us. And in
truth, the shootout that took place this past weekend over in Colorado Springs,
at the Planned Parenthood affiliate there, ought to teach us that lesson with
bitter tears: the terrorist who killed a law enforcement officer, wounded four
more, killed two civilians, and wounded nine more, was not a Muslim, or a
Syrian, he was a corn-fed, red-blooded American just like you or I. Just like the terrorists who shot up
Charleston, South Carolina, Aurora, Colorado, Newtown, Connecticut, and so many
other sites of such tragedy.
Be
not afraid, says Gabriel. Perhaps it is
impossible for us to be truly unafraid in this world we now live. But certainly we must still try, and
certainly we must learn to not be afraid of people whom we need not fear. Gabriel is telling Mary she will soon become
a mother with a child upon her back, like so many of the Syrian refugees—need
we fear Mary?
Of
course not. For as an angel of the Lord
says to her, the Holy Spirit will overcome her.
May we too find those in our lives for whom the Holy Spirit can show us
a new reality, a new life, a new way of living.
Joy Davidman did that for C.S. Lewis, perhaps the most popular Christian
thinker of the past 100 years. Think of
what you could do just for one another, never mind someone famous or of renown,
but simply for the person sitting across the sanctuary or across the world from
you.
Can we serve in that selfsame role of angels for one another, even if we do not think we can? Because were we to do so, then it shall truly be as the writer of the letter to the Hebrews famously said: that by welcoming in strangers, we have indeed unknowingly entertained angels.
May
it be so. Amen.
Rev.
Eric Atcheson
Longview,
Washington
November
29, 2015
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