Harbinger!

Text: Luke 1:26-38
Theme: “Harbinger!”
4th Sunday of Advent
December 18, 2011
First Presbyterian Church
Denton, Texas
Rev. Paul R. Dunklau

IN THE NAME OF JESUS


26 In the sixth month of Elizabeth’s pregnancy, 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 conceive and give birth to a son, and you are to call him 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 Jacob’s descendants 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 on you, and the power of the Most High will overshadow you. So the holy one to be born will be called[b] 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 unable to conceive is in her sixth month. 37 For no word from God will ever fail.”
38 “I am the Lord’s servant,” Mary answered. “May your word to me be fulfilled.” Then the angel left her.

The words you just heard have become, down through the circling years, the traditional text for today, the Fourth Sunday of Advent. It brings to our ears, hearts, and minds the story of the angel Gabriel’s announcement to Mary, the mother of our Lord.

For many Christians, this selection pulls double duty as it serves as the chief reading for the minor festival called The Annunciation of the Lord. That feast or festival, celebrated in the more liturgical traditions, is observed on March 25th every year. Interestingly, that’s nine months before Christmas Day. Divide nine by three and you get three: a first, second, and third trimester. Today’s selection locates us toward the end of the second trimester of Elizabeth’s pregnancy. Elizabeth, a relative of Mary, was the mother of John the Baptist.

Many congregations use today, the Fourth Sunday of Advent, to have the annual service of Lessons and Carols. That particular service – and a beautiful one it is! -- has a history that springs from the English church. It begins with the lovely bidding prayer which we paraphrased at our “Christmas Traditions” choir concert here at FPC this past Wednesday. Luke 1:26-38 shows up in Lessons and Carols, but, while there is a bidding prayer, there’s no provision for a sermon in that liturgy. As a result, it does stand to reason that the Gabriel and Mary encounter, while read from the Scriptures, is not proclaimed all that much. Today, thankfully, we get to buck the trend and spend a bit more time with this incredible event.We are informed that “God sent” the “angel Gabriel.” So the initiative – the opening “oomph” in this story, if you will – begins with God. Already, this tale bucks the trend.

We like to begin the story with us, and our plans, and our schedules, and our traditions, and our menus, and our shopping lists, and our guest lists, and our errands. “Whoa! Wait a minute,” this text seems to say. Look what’s going on here. “God sent the angel Gabriel to Nazareth, a town in Galilee.” No, God didn’t this angel with a personal name (Gabriel) to Rome and the Palatine Hill where the great Caesar surveyed his vast domain. Neither did God send Gabriel to Jerusalem to the great temple built by King David’s son, Solomon, and recently restored by the Herodian dynasty. No, He didn’t send the angel for a meeting with the Jewish Sanhedrin at their next scheduled session. Instead, he chooses Nazareth – nothing short of a little backwoods town in Galilee. If the story took place in Texas in 2011, the town might have been Gainesville or some such place. The town’s on the map. The town has people in it. It even has a nice golf course; I might add. But it’s not where all the action is. That’s what Nazareth was like.

There was a young woman there, a virgin – probably no older than a teenager. We discover that she is engaged to be married. Her fiance’ is named Joseph, and we are informed that he is a direct descendant of King David. He’s got some royal blood in his veins. And there, in that patriarchal, male-dominated society, where women were relegated to the periphery of life or pushed to the margins, something else happened. The angel didn’t just send for Mary to come to where the angel was at. Instead, it says that the angel came to her. The angel, Gabriel, was a dutiful servant. He was just following orders. He cared little for what the mores’ of society were. That’s refreshing to hear about, I say!

This isn’t the first time Gabriel shows up in Holy Writ. Centuries before this get-together in Nazareth, we read of Gabriel explaining to Daniel some visions God had given him about what was yet to come. He must have been good at that, because this is precisely what he’s telling this young woman whose name was Mary. Before the trip to Nazareth, Gabriel was also in Jerusalem, at the great temple, telling the old priest Zechariah that he and his wife, Elizabeth, were going to have a baby. To the extent that Gabriel reports on future events, he is a “harbinger” of things to come (hence, the title to today’s sermon).

Gabriel. What an incredible name it is. It’s a compound word. It comes from the Hebrew gabar (which means to “prevail”) and the Hebrew el, short for elohim, which is the title of God. Literally, his name means “God prevails.” Later, when he told the young woman, Mary, that “nothing is impossible with God”, he was simply being true to his name. This kind of obedience to God’s commands joined to a robust confidence in God’s ability is really quite refreshing to read about in our day and age. Unlike Gabriel, we humanoids tend to pick and choose what, from God, we want to obey, or highlight, and look for confidence in our own abilities to steer our lives or church in the direction we believe it should go. Gabriel is a happy resource against this.

Gabriel starts the conversation with an angelic greeting: “Hail, you who are highly favored. The Lord is with you.” Artists have had fun capturing on canvass what they imagine this scene must have been like. Did Gabriel have human characteristics, or did he appear – as he did in one famous painting – as a flash of bright light. We are not told. Apparently, what he said was far more important than the experience. This, too, is quite refreshing to consider in our day and age. We like to think that a good life, even a godly life or spiritual life, is the sum total of the “experiences” we have had. Marketers and advertisers have a field day in the “holiday season.” They aren’t stupid; they play right into our hand. Everything is geared toward making our Christmas “experience” a warm and special time. Think about that when you’re waiting in the check-out line at Dilliards, or Macy’s, or Best Buy this week! Are you having a “warm and special” experience?

Meanwhile, back in Nazareth, this young woman named Mary freaks out. But it’s not her fear over the presence of the angel. Rather, it’s what the angel said that momentarily stunned her in fear before she could engage her “fight or flight” response. Gabriel, obviously anticipating this, nips the fear in the bud.
Gabriel declares: “Do not be afraid, Mary; you have found favor with God. You will conceive and give birth to a son, and you are to call him Jesus. 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, and he will reign over Jacob’s descendants forever; his kingdom will never end. “ Someone queue the “Hallelujah Chorus”: “And He shall reign forever and ever.” It’s all going to take root and take wing with this young, peasant girl sitting alone, in her little world, in ordinary, run-of-the-mill Nazareth in Galilee.

Being the sensitive souls that we are or at least claim to be, we would be shocked if we were Mary. We would need time to “process”, as psychologists and therapists like to say, this announcement. We might write it off as due to drinking too much Bacardi 151 in our eggnog the night before. We might scoff and deny and say: “What a bunch of flim-flam and hooey this is.” Or we might burst into mental overdrive: “Oh, my goodness, gracious! I’m going to have a baby!” I like that commercial for Nissan cars. A woman looks at her husband with amazement in her eyes and says: “We’re gonna have a baby!” The husband upon hearing this is momentarily stunned. Then he runs outside, looks at his Nissan 350Z 2-door coupe, and ponders his options. Then he grabs the back bumper and starts to pull, and, thanks to the wonders of modern technology, his pull causes the little car to magically turn into a 4-door Nissan Maxima sedan. Pleased with his work, he says: “We’re gonna have a baby!”

Meanwhile, again back in Nazareth, the virgin Mary simply said what she said. Without over-reacting or under-reacting, and seemingly without any drama, she says: “How will this be since I am a virgin?”

With a precious, wonderful, total lack of drama, she asks the obvious question. Gabriel chimes in with the reply: “The Holy Spirit will come on 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. Even Elizabeth your relative is going to have a child in her old age, and she who was said to be unable to conceive is in her sixth month. For no word from God will ever fail.”

Mary’s reply to Gabriel, the harbinger of things to come, is, if I may say, one of the most precious and powerful statements in the entire Bible. We think of precious as being very dear and valuable and fragile. Something dear and valuable and fragile can easily be dispensed with by power which we think is oppressive and aggressive. But here, in Mary’s words, the precious and the powerful combine as one and give us the way to live as children of God and brother’s and sister’s of Mary’s baby boy, the Son of the most high.

Mary says (and I provide a literal translation from the original Greek): “Behold, the servant of the Lord. Let it be to me according to what you have said.” It is not “Let it be to me according to my plans”, not “Let it be to me according to my best hopes”, not “Let it be to me according to my vision of the future, not “Let it be to me according to what my family says, or my politics say, or my government decrees, or my bank account reports, or my physical health dictates.” No, it’s far deeper –and simpler – than any of that. It’s “Let it be to me according to what you have said.”

Mary references nothing – except the Word of God delivered by the angel Gabriel. This, of course, is faith which rests on the Words and promises of God.
How shall it be with us this week, this Christmas? Will it be just another holiday experience like any other? Will we come out of it with more gifts and more debt and more weight? May I suggest an alternative? Hear again the story, so old and ever new, that “Unto you is born a Savior.” And then say: “Behold, the Lord’s servant. Let it be to me according to Your Word.”

Amen.