Receiving the Gift
Eternal Christmas
Wildwind Community Church
December 19, 2010
David Flowers
Luke 1:26-38 (MSG)
26 In the sixth month of Elizabeth’s pregnancy, God sent the angel Gabriel to the Galilean village of Nazareth
27 to a virgin engaged to be married to a man descended from David. His name was Joseph, and the virgin’s name, Mary.
28 Upon entering, Gabriel greeted her: Good morning! You’re beautiful with God’s beauty, Beautiful inside and out! God be with you.
29 She was thoroughly shaken, wondering what was behind a greeting like that.
30 But the angel assured her, "Mary, you have nothing to fear. God has a surprise for you:
31 You will become pregnant and give birth to a son and call his name Jesus.
32 He will be great, be called ’Son of the Highest.’ The Lord God will give him the throne of his father David;
33 He will rule Jacob’s house forever— no end, ever, to his kingdom."
34 Mary said to the angel, "But how? I’ve never slept with a man."
35 The angel answered, The Holy Spirit will come upon you, the power of the Highest hover over you; Therefore, the child you bring to birth will be called Holy, Son of God.
36 "And did you know that your cousin Elizabeth conceived a son, old as she is? Everyone called her barren, and here she is six months’ pregnant!
37 Nothing, you see, is impossible with God."
38 And Mary said, Yes, I see it all now: I’m the Lord’s maid, ready to serve. Let it be with me just as you say. Then the angel left her.
Two weeks ago we looked at the world into which Jesus came to bring his message – a broken world, a world of both light and darkness. Last week we looked at the actual message that Jesus came to bring – that message was the news that the kingdom of God is “at hand” – that is, within reach of every person who will choose to live in it, saying “Thy kingdom come” – and of course the necessary counterpart to Thy Kingdom Come is what? My Kingdom Go.
Today we’re going to look at Mary. Because if Jesus is the symbol of the gift itself, and how God gives that gift (which we’ll talk about on Christmas Eve in a few days), Mary is the symbol for how we are to receive and treasure that gift.
The first thing I want us to see in the passage I just read is the first thing the angel says to Mary. “Good morning. You’re beautiful with God’s beauty, beautiful inside and out. God be with you.” Ladies, how would you feel if someone greeted you that way first thing in the morning? Would you love it if your husband said that to you in the morning? I can imagine the effect that would have on my wife, if I said to her, “Good morning, Christy. You are beautiful with God’s beauty, beautiful inside and out. God be with you today.” Scripture says Mary was stunned, was thoroughly shaken, by this greeting. I know my wife’s mouth would drop open if I said something like that. It’s a beautiful, powerful, personal greeting, isn’t it? And it’s not just coming from some random person, or even a spouse or a parent – it’s coming from God.
Guys, just so you don’t feel left out, check out how the angel of God greets Gideon in the book of Judges:
Judges 6:12 (NIV)
12 When the angel of the LORD appeared to Gideon, he said, "The LORD is with you, mighty warrior."
Sound better, fellas? Mighty warrior? Can you imagine your wife waking you up one morning and saying, “I know you fight for our family every day – that you work hard, that you make sacrifices – I even know you would take a bullet for us without even thinking about it if you had to – so as you go through your day today, remember this – the Lord is with you, mighty warrior.” I know, guys – your mouth would drop open. You wouldn’t even know what to say. My guess is that some of you would say, “Am I being punked?”
But Mary was not being punked. Gideon was not being punked. What was happening was that each one of them was hearing from God exactly what they most deeply longed to hear, and most deeply needed to hear.
How far we have drifted from this understanding of God. A lot of us can’t even hear God saying anything good to us at all. We think only bad stuff is from God. If Mary had thought like us, she’d have heard God say, “Good morning pathetic loser. Good morning teenage, naive, insignificant, clueless, immature one .” If Gideon had thought like many of us, he’d have heard God say, “The Lord is with you, and good thing because you are a failure – weak-minded, weak-willed, insecure, undisciplined, you’ll never amount to much.” Some of us have our vision of God so messed up that we think God is in words like that – we hear our sick ideas about ourselves as the voice of God. But God says, “Good morning, beautiful.” “The Lord is with you, mighty warrior.”
And Mary’s response. Stunned, as we have said. Thoroughly shaken, wondering what was behind a greeting like that. Almost suspicious. What on earth is God going to ask of me? Am I being buttered up for something?
The angel knew Mary was afraid of what was going to come next, so said to her, as angels so often do in scripture: “Mary, you have nothing to fear.” My friends, this is the essence of what it means to meet God. To meet God is to have the experience of fear. Look through scripture at the times God appears to people – there is always a response of fear. How could there not be a sense of fear? When we meet God, we don’t know what God is going to ask of us, just like Mary didn’t know what God was going to ask of her. Just like Gideon wasn’t aware that the next thing out of God’s mouth was going to be,
Judges 6:14 (NIV)
14 ..."Go in the strength you have and save Israel out of Midian’s hand...
During our emotionally healthy series, we talked a lot about the false self and the true self. Mary’s true self was that she was the beautiful one, blessed of God to bear the child of God. Gideon’s true self was that he was the one who was going to do miraculous things as a military commander. Neither Mary nor Gideon saw themselves in this way at the moment God called them by their true names. And at this moment, you do not fully see your true self, and when God begins to show you your true self, you too will be filled with fear. You too will experience discomfort. You too will think God is talking to the wrong person. Fear is a natural part of the spiritual journey.
This is one of the main ways we can see that our traditional evangelical approach to knowing God is missing something critical. That traditional approach contains fear, for sure, but it’s usually fear of going to hell, fear of making a mistake, fear of believing something that isn’t perfectly correct, fear of doing something wrong – these are all fears that paralyze faith and make faith impossible – we’re afraid of making the wrong move. But the fear that comes from hearing God call you by your name – the fear you get when you start to encounter a living God who is calling you beyond the small and provincial faith you have had in the past, and into something too big for you to understand or even imagine – THAT’S godly fear, that’s true fear of God. This is the fear that makes faith possible, because it is not fear of doing something wrong but fear over the seeming impossibility of what we are called to do (which gives us a choice to exercise faith and move beyond our fear, where God waits).
Where is THIS kind of fear in our churches and in our teaching today? We’ll take fear of hell, fear of being wrong, fear of sin, fear of God’s wrath – fear of absolutely anything over true godly fear. True godly fear is fear we experience as God comes to us and gives us a bigger vision for ourselves. That’s the fear Mary experienced, the fear Gideon experienced – the fear of hearing God begin to call you by your true name – the fear of realizing that you are not who you think you are. By the way, it is only this kind of fear that can properly be called fear of God to begin with. Fear of God always leads you out of the flesh and the ego and the false self into God’s true desires for you. Every other fear is not fear of the light of God, but simple fear of the dark.
Picture now the disciples hunkered down in a boat, with the wind and waves pounding the sides, tossed all over the sea, and seeing Jesus out on the water. All 12 disciples are filled with fear, including Peter. Eleven of them cling to one another in the boat, afraid that one wrong move will get them tossed into the sea where they will surely die. One of them – Peter – in his fear – moves away from his huddled friends and steps over the edge of the boat, right into the worst of the storm, and walks, step by fearful step, toward Jesus. All 12 men experienced fear that day. Which of them experienced godly fear? And how do we know whether fear is godly fear or fear of the dark? Fear is godly fear when we respond in faith and move away from the false self and into our fear. It is simple fear of the dark when we hunker down and simply try to preserve what we already have.
Okay, we spent some time on that this morning, but it’s extremely important. Let’s move on. The angel says to Mary, “God has a surprise. You’re going to become pregnant, and the child you’re going to have is God.” What I want us to see here more than anything else is that this has absolutely nothing to do with any worthiness on Mary’s part. Mary is not chosen because she is beautiful, she is beautiful because she is chosen. Mary is not especially worthy, or holy, or spiritual – she’s just like everybody else. Yes, she’s a virgin, but many young girls at that time were virgins. In fact Mary was probably around 13 years old. Many 13 year old girls in our society today are still virgins, of course. God’s entire point in having Jesus be born of a woman was that Jesus was born of someone just like us, born in the same way we are all born, born into the same conditions we are all born into. If we miss the normalcy – the ordinariness – the non-specialness of Mary, we miss what we’re being told here. With the story of Mary, we are being asked to believe that God chose someone just like us to be the mother of God. We are being asked to understand that it was not Mary’s specialness that got her chosen, it was her chosenness that made her special.
This is true also of you. God comes to you when you, like Mary, do not know who you are. God comes when you, like Mary, think, “Oh, I’m just this, or I’m just that – I’m nobody, really.” And God comes and says, “I have a surprise for you. It is in you that I will be born. It is in you – in your mind, in your heart, in your body – that I will reveal my glory. It is in your ordinariness that I will show my splendor.” And of course we have to know that we are not chosen because we are special – we are special because we are chosen. But we are ALL chosen, and that is what makes us all special. The angel said it: “I bring you good tidings of great joy that will be for ALL the people.” We have all been chosen by God to be his dwelling place. That doesn’t mean, of course, that we will honor God’s choice, and allow God to be born and come alive in us. But it means the invitation has been extended. The image of God has been stamped upon every one of us – God has breathed into us all the breath of life – and God invites each one of us to make our hearts and lives a place fit for his dwelling. And of course we see from the story of the birth of Jesus that he is not looking for anything fancy. Just the shabby place that is your life. Which of course then becomes – just like the stable -- blessed and beautiful, because God has made his home there. But I’m getting ahead of myself.
Luke 1:30-34 (MSG)
30 But the angel assured her, "Mary, you have nothing to fear. God has a surprise for you:
31 You will become pregnant and give birth to a son and call his name Jesus.
32 He will be great, be called ’Son of the Highest.’ The Lord God will give him the throne of his father David;
33 He will rule Jacob’s house forever— no end, ever, to his kingdom."
34 Mary said to the angel, "But how? I’ve never slept with a man."
Mary is just like you. Just like me. She doesn’t understand. She is probably still fearful, perhaps more now than she was before. She’s a child. She’s a virgin. And she’s being told that she’s going to become pregnant and have a son. That’s a scary thing. And Mary says, “But how?” The angel tells her how this is going to happen, and ends with:
Luke 1:37-38 (MSG)
37 Nothing, you see, is impossible with God."
38 And Mary said, Yes, I see it all now: I’m the Lord’s maid, ready to serve. Let it be with me just as you say. Then the angel left her.
This is the breakthrough moment for Mary. This is the moment where she realizes that this is not about her. She now knows that she has been gripped by something greater than her, something beyond her, and her choice is simply to accept the role she has to play.
That is how Mary receives the gift that is given to her. She has her fears. She has her questions. But she realizes “I am the Lord’s maid, ready to serve.” This is the model. We each have to reach that place where we realize we are gripped by something greater than ourselves, something way beyond us, and then make the choice to simply accept the role we have to play. My friends, in this story, this happens for Mary in an instant, but I think many of us will be stuck on this for decades. For many of us, we will spend years saying yes to God with our lips, but then trying to engineer our own journey, trying to make this happen.
What did the angel tell Mary was going to happen?
Luke 1:35 (MSG)
35 The angel answered, The Holy Spirit will come upon you, the power of the Highest hover over you; Therefore, the child you bring to birth will be called Holy, Son of God.
This was not about Mary and what Mary was going to do and the efforts Mary was going to make, and mission statements, and personal growth statements (which I’m not disparaging here), and going to synagogue and being Jewish, and being sure to hate the Samaritans and the lepers, and making sure to have the right morals and the right judgments about other people and knowing who Mary was above and better than. It had nothing to do whatsoever with any of that. It was about God and what God was going to do in Mary and again, not because she was worthy, but simply because God had chosen her.
“The Holy Spirit will come upon you, the power of the Highest hover over you.” That’s mystery. It’s not all explained for Mary, or for us. But Mary realizes that it is in her body that this mystery will occur, and that the thing that happens, though mysterious, will result in a real child – will have real consequences in daily life. So it is with you.
1 Corinthians 6:19-20 (NIV)
19 Do you not know that your body is a temple of the Holy Spirit, who is in you, whom you have received from God? You are not your own;
20 you were bought at a price. Therefore honor God with your body.
Like Mary, your body is the dwelling place of God. Like Mary, your calling is to honor that, to be part of it, to allow it, to let God be there and grow there and produce the fruit in your life that the Holy Spirit produces:
Galatians 5:22-23 (NIV)
22 But the fruit of the Spirit is love, joy, peace, patience, kindness, goodness, faithfulness,
23 gentleness and self-control...
Like Mary, your job is not to strive. It is not to tie the fruit on the vine. It is not to tell God how to do God’s job, and it is not for you to know all the details. Like Mary, you can be content to know the following things:
a.You are not chosen because you are special, you are special because you are chosen (and everybody is chosen!)
b.The mechanism, the way God will produce his fruit in you, is none of your concern
c.Your job is simply to say yes – to allow God to do his work in you and make his home in you
Let us close this part of the service using words from a prayer Mary prayed shortly after the passage we have looked at today. This prayer has come to be called the Magnificat (which means “my soul magnifies”), and is a model for all of us in responding to God. Pray Mary’s words, but consider that this prayer should also be yours.
Luke 1:46-49 (NIV)
46 Mary said: "My soul glorifies the Lord
47 and my spirit rejoices in God my Savior,
48 for he has been mindful of the humble state of his servant. From now on all generations will call me blessed,
49 for the Mighty One has done great things for me-- holy is his name.
