When Elizabeth heard Mary’s greeting, the baby leaped in her womb, and Elizabeth was filled with the Holy Spirit. In a loud voice she exclaimed: ‘Blessed are you among women, and blessed is the child you will bear!’
Sermon for the Fourth Sunday of Advent
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Text: Luke 1:41-42 When Elizabeth heard Mary’s greeting, the baby leaped in her womb, and Elizabeth was filled with the Holy Spirit. In a loud voice she exclaimed: ‘Blessed are you among women, and blessed is the child you will bear!’ |
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God’s crazy Christmas plan.
The story
behind the first Christmas really is a strange story.
It’s a great story as far as stories go, a cute story, and I dare say, a
story that’s almost like a fairy tale.
I say it’s a strange story because logically it’s so far out there, that
it threatens what we consider to be common sense.
It’s a story that is unexpected and upside down.
It’s surprising and strange at the same time.
Why do I
say that the story of the first Christmas is not what is expected and so back to
front? There’s a number of reasons.
Firstly, the time and place for the first Christmas was all wrong.
Judea was not a peaceful place.
The Romans considered the Judeans persistent troublemakers.
King Herod ruled like a military dictator.
People were treated cruelly.
Murdering the innocent baby boys of Bethlehem is just one example.
The Judean people were poor, really poor, and heavily taxed.
Life expectancy was short. The
average life span was about 30 years.
Half of the children didn’t live past their 5th birthday.
Judea was
a mess. Of all the times and places in
the world, this is where God decided to enter humanity – amongst the oppressed,
the poor, the sick, the dirty, the downtrodden; amongst the wickedness, evil,
cruelty, danger, pain and dying.
Into this messed up world, the holy, all-glorious, all-powerful God chose to
come and live as a Judean. What was
God thinking? No one was expecting
God to come like this.
But there
is more. When it was time for God
to act, what does he do? He becomes
a fertilised egg, then a foetus in the womb of a poor unmarried village girl.
How risky is that? He
couldn’t have done anything more crazy – pregnant unmarried girls were stoned to
death as unclean and unworthy to live in society.
This is plainly absurd.
Why does
the all-powerful Creator of the universe, the King of kings, get down and dirty
right into the messiness of our world – not only in a stable with all its smells
and manure but also right in the middle of the sin, the corruption, the death,
the evil, the temptations of Satan, and every other bit of messiness in our
world?
This whole
story is so unlikely, so unimaginable, so impossible.
It seems just so …. well …
so ungodlike.
We can add
another layer of difficulty to this story.
God’s people were desperately waiting for a grand announcement that the
Messiah had arrived to bring freedom to God’s people but who were the first
people to share the Good News of the messiah’s arrival?
In Luke’s Gospel it’s two women on the edge of society – one a young,
poor, unwed girl, the other an old woman, well beyond child-bearing age.
We aren’t
told exactly why Mary visited her relative Elizabeth, maybe both women needed
support and encouragement dealing with the circumstances of their unusual
pregnancies. Maybe Mary needed to
escape the gossip of Nazareth. The
reason isn’t important. My guess is
they wanted to celebrate the joy of becoming mothers, share stories about their
pregnancies, talk about back ache, stretch marks, tired feet, what their babies
will be like and since they already knew they were having sons, what kind of men
they will be.
But before
they could begin any of this baby chatter, as they meet, Elizabeth’s baby jumped
inside her. Elizabeth was further
along in her pregnancy, and it seems her son, John, recognised Mary’s voice from
inside the womb and acknowledged the presence of his Saviour, still a very small
foetus inside Mary. John was
already doing what he was called to do – announce the arrival of the Messiah –
even from the womb.
Elizabeth
loudly and uncontrollably blesses Mary and the child she is carrying.
Even she is bewildered that “the mother of her Lord” should come
to her, a lowly, ordinary woman.
The two pregnant women rejoice that God is fulfilling his promise.
This story
is earthy, fleshy, ordinary, normal – two pregnant women announcing to everyone
across the centuries that God has become flesh and blood.
That God has become a child inside Mary’s womb.
This child is coming into the world like
any other child – but this child is different.
God is coming into the mess of this world, through the pain and messiness
of childbirth. This wasn’t expected.
This was too absurd. This
was so extra-ordinary.
God in
Mary’s womb is risky business.
God in Mary’s womb makes the dangerous trip from Nazareth to Bethlehem.
God in Mary’s womb can only find shelter in a cattle shed in the overcrowded
town of Bethlehem.
God in Mary’s womb is placed in the care of two people who have no child rearing
experience and no family in Bethlehem to help them.
Mary only has Joseph to help with the delivery of her child.
He may have helped deliver a goat or a
lamb but delivering babies – that was the job of women and midwives.
I wonder what was going through Joseph’s
mind as he took on the task of delivering the Son of the Most High God into the
world.
God in Mary’s womb being delivered into the hands of a carpenter – this is just
a crazy idea.
It might
well be asked, “What was God thinking sending his Son, the King of Heaven, into
the world in this way. It’s just an
absurd idea that God should shrink the Prince of Heaven into a tiny helpless
child and place him in the arms of a teenage girl.
It was all so unexpected, so crazy, so strange!
Mary’s
song gives voice to God’s strange way of doing things.
This young unwed, pregnant woman, a person normally too ordinary to be
noticed, sings of how God does the absurd.
She is amazed how God has chosen a plain girl like her to be the mother
of her Lord. It’s almost comical to
think this but she realises that future generations will call her blessed.
This very ordinary, very small girl, in a very small out of the way
place, and her pregnancy, will have an impact on generations to come.
And the
rest of her song announces the larger implications of what will happen in the
upside-down world – how the powerful and proud will be brought down and the
lowly lifted up, and the hungry will be filled and the rich sent away with
nothing (Luke 1:51b-53).
God’s plan
was an upside-down plan, unlike anything anyone would expect God to do –
shedding his power and authority and becoming a child, a servant to help all
people – this is a plan that grew out of his tremendous love for all people.
For centuries God’s heart had ached for his people who got into all kinds
of difficulties because of their disobedience.
God’s
heart ached because he knew that even in 2024 his people would need help to get
through the troubles of this world and require strength and comfort to face the
evil of these times.
Because of
his love, nothing was going to be too hard, too difficult, too lowly, too
painful to bring about the rescue of his people from their own destruction.
So, he became human just like us.
He came into the world just as we do.
He lived in a family with brothers and sisters and, of course,
grandparents, cousins, uncles and aunts just as we do.
He grew and learnt new things and did and felt everything that we do.
That God would humble himself and become like us – so unexpected, so
crazy yet so effective.
We know
how the story continues. This baby,
God in the flesh, became a man and taught about the Kingdom of God with
authority and then to top off this seemingly absurd story, he is rejected by
those whom he loves, tortured, nailed to a cross and there the King of kings,
the servant of all humanity, dies.
Some
people have questioned whether this ordinary kid born in Bethlehem, is truly
almighty God, all holy and above all things, the Saviour of all humanity.
And I can understand that because I don’t think I fully grasp the
magnitude of what happened that first Christmas.
What happens is something way beyond anything we can imagine.
It’s a bit
like a rich and powerful king who loves mice.
He sees that there are lots of mice in the world who are in trouble, and
he is deeply concerned. There are
mousetraps in kitchens and shed everywhere and the mice are walking into these
deadly devices one after the other.
The smelly cheese is just too tempting and as much as the king tries to shoo
them away, and shout to warn them, they don’t take any notice.
His beloved mice keep on dying.
What can he do to save them?
He leaves
his comfortable castle, the prestige and honour of being the king; he leaves his
royal authority and power and by some extraordinary means becomes a mouse so
that he can talk mouse-talk and warn them about all the dangers and keep them
safe.
In a
similar way and in a more radical way the all-powerful and eternal God chose to
plunge himself into the messiness of our world and take on the weakness of our
humanity.
In a
simple way, the apostle Paul says,
Christ was truly God.
… he gave up everything
… he became like one of us.
Christ was humble. He obeyed God to
the point of dying on a cross.
(Philippians 2:6-8).
Humanity
was in a mess. We are in a mess
living in a messy world; living messy lives smeared through and through with
what sin does to us, other people and our relationship with God.
There was only one thing that God could do.
Get down and get dirty. Come
down into the mess with us and deal personally with the mess we are in and root
out the cause of the ongoing mess that continues to threaten us, namely Satan
and every trick he has to manipulate us – selfishness, greed, pride, arrogance,
smugness, you know them all.
God does
unexpected things.
Throughout the Bible he does unexpected things not just to be novel or difficult
or hard to get on with.
He works in our lives in unexpected ways, sometimes in ways that are completely
opposite to what we expect.
His patience with us when we are constantly falling away from his ways,
his never-ending love for us even though we lack appreciation for his love,
his persistent care for us even in our darkest moments.
His grace is so unexpected, so undeserved.
By human standards God has everything upside down.
Make no
mistake, Jesus came into the world to make a difference in your life and no
doubt some of those changes will be unexpected.
Trust in the one who loves you unconditionally and he will challenge you with
new directions that are totally unexpected;
he will give you peace and hope and calm in what seems to be a time of
never-ending trouble;
he will tear down old barriers, get rid of an old bad habit, restore a
relationship;
he will enable you to reach out to others in need with compassion;
he will soften your hardened and unforgiving heart,
and it might happen that in the end you will say,
“That was absurd. No way!
I didn’t expect that to happen!
God’s love does do amazing things in our messy lives”.
Elizabeth
proclaimed how blessed Mary was to be the mother of the Saviour.
How blessed are we that God’s crazy plan gave us the best gift of all –
Jesus Christ our rescuer and saviour.
© Pastor Vince
Gerhardy
22nd December, 2024
E-mail: sermonsonthenet@outlook.com
