Two Christmas Sermons

What Mattered to Mary
Luke 1:39-46
By Everett Wilson, Pastor

Unexpected babies are a familiar story in the Bible. Angels told Abraham’s wife Sarah that she was going to have a baby when she was ninety, and she did. Another angel told Samson's parents that he was going to be born, and what he was going to do, and it happened. So also was Samuel’s birth predicted and blessed by the high priest in the Tabernacle, and the angel Gabriel himself predicted the births of both John the Baptist and Jesus. All of the women involved, except Mary, were either barren or past childbearing age. Mary, virginal and having as yet no husband, was not, in the eyes of the world, supposed to be having a baby at all. In the case of the other women, all of them married, it was unusual for them to conceive and bear a child; in Mary's case, it was impossible.
No wonder she went to Elizabeth right away. The angel had told her about Elizabeth, so if anyone would understand, it would be Elizabeth. You can imagine how it would have been with Mary's mother. She would be embarrassed and disappointed at the thought that Mary and Joseph had anticipated their wedding, but those things happen. But she would be shocked and angry at hearing about an angelic visit and a pregnancy without a man involved. The angel would have had to tell Mom too, and in no uncertain terms, for her to believe such a tall tale. That left Elizabeth was the one person she could go too who might believe her, because Elizabeth also was in a similar, though not identical, situation.
It’s a long hike from Nazareth to the hill country of Judea. We don't know what was going through her mind. Whatever it was, she was mightily assured by Elizabeth's response to her.
When Elizabeth heard Mary’s greeting, the child leapt in her womb. And Elizabeth was filled with the Holy Spirit and exclaimed with a loud cry, ‘Blessed are you among women, and blessed is the fruit of your womb. And why has this happened to me, that the mother of my Lord comes to me? For as soon as I heard the sound of your greeting, the child in my womb leapt for joy. And blessed is she who believed that there would be a fulfilment of what was spoken to her by the Lord.’
What Elizabeth said would be enough for Mary’s explosion of joy. “Somebody else knows too! I am not dreaming it. I am not crazy. Elizabeth is not pretending, and neither am I. This is really happening!”
How could a teen-age girl speak the glorious words of praise that come from Mary's mouth? If you ask that question, you are thinking of a modern teen-ager, whose mind and emotions are continually stretched by outside stimuli—people around us, machines communicating with us; thousands upon thousands of images every waking hour, leaving our dreams to work some of them out the best they can. Mary was not a modern teenager, but neither was she an ignorant peasant. She was a descendant of Abraham. While she probably could not read or write, the stories of her ancient family—what we call the Old Testament—was not limited to the schoolroom of her brothers and male cousins (if she had them). The stories and songs of the Old Testament were their entertainment as well as their education. So what she says is not unusual for who she was, when she was. It governed how she thought and talked. It would be the most natural thing in the world for her to express her praise in Old Testament terms, for that is what she knew. In her outburst of joy, what we call The Magnificat, she doesn’t invent new doctrines or express new insights. Her song of praise is important not for what it says but because she said it.
Notice that in it she says nothing about the baby. That’s a little strange, seeing nothing matters more than the baby. But there isn’t any baby yet. When the baby comes, the angels will sing about that. What she has at this moment is the promise of God, which she either believes or not. She believes it, and rejoices in it. The baby will get his turn, but that is nine months or so away. When he arrives, he will be the most important person in the house.
After he is born, Mary’s life will be focused mainly on him, holding him, feeding him, changing him, burping him, singing to him. But it won’t be focused mainly on him. There is more to the will of God than one task. Mary has a husband too, and the story clearly implies that she will have more children, because Jesus is not her only son, but her firstborn son.
[Note: The doctrine that Mary remained a virgin comes from outside the Bible and seems to disagree with what the Bible clearly says.]
He is destined to become a big brother, and all you big brothers, and all of you who had big brothers, may suspect that his first encounter with temptation was not in the forty days after his baptism, but when a little brother or sister tried to get on his nerves.
Joseph and Mary had a real home in a real place, and Jesus lived in it with them. The Christmas story is the beginning of a human life, most of which was lived outside the pages of the New Testament. The family, including Jesus, drops out of sight for eighteen years, from the time Jesus was twelve until he was thirty. Mary appears a few times after Jesus is grown, and the brothers and sister, but not Joseph. A lot of people think he was dead. I think he was probably at his job! Somebody had to do the chores!
She will be a great mother and a great wife because she will take whatever God sends her. That will mean a helpless infant, a toddler, a little boy, a teenager. All of that is implied in her joyful acceptance of the task God has given her.
I think there is one thing you may be sure of—Jesus never pulled rank on Mary and Joseph. Later on, when he was twelve, Luke tells us that he submitted himself. He would not be a special case, promised Messiah or not. He will grow up as a carpenter’s son in order to become a carpenter himself. I can’t imagine him telling Joseph that he was too important to be a carpenter, that he had better things to do with his life. Like what? Die on a cross for the sins of the world? Jesus is the prime example that nobody is too good to do anything.
Mary is the second example. Her life was that of a wife and mother without servants, in a day when everything had to be done by hand. But that was the lot of all her friends too. The promise of God did not change any of that. In the midst of the burdens of daily life we take the tasks that are given us. If we are like Mary, we thank God for them.
But all of that is in the future. Until then, the promise will have to do.
Mary could see what the promise meant, not only for the world but for her personally: henceforth all nations will call me blessed. She didn’t look like the most important woman in the world, not then, and not ever. She looked like a carpenter’s very young wife, which is a way of saying that she looked like she could be anybody. She may have been pretty, but she didn’t need to be; she may have been smart, but not necessarily. What she needed to be was what she was, a person who wanted God’s will to be done above all things.
She knew who she was, and what it meant.
She knew who her son would be, and what it meant.
She knew who God was, and what he was like.
She knew before the birth of Jesus what we know afterward: God is holy, God is merciful, God is strong, God is generous, and God is on the side of the helpless. She not only knew these things; she was counting on them. They were what mattered most to Mary.
The prayer of Jabez, for prosperity in this life, was very helpful to many of us several years ago, that God desires a good life for here and now. But the prayer of Jabez is not always the prayer of the moment. The prayer Mary was anticipating, and that she lived, was the Lord’s Prayer: Thy will be done. She could shout her word of praise in the presence of Elizabeth because she had already said to Gabriel, ‘Here am I, the servant of the Lord; let it be with me according to your word.’ Amen.

Oh, What a Treasure

13And suddenly there was with the angel a multitude of the heavenly host, praising God and saying,

14‘Glory to God in the highest heaven, on earth peace among those whom he favours!’ Luke 2:13-14.
By Everett Wilson, Pastor

We have just sung the hymn, written by Minnesota Covenant pastor Nils Frykman over a hundred years ago, and now I will preach the message.

A Reason to Party

The two oldest Christian celebrations are Christmas and Easter. They were feasts, or festivals, as contrasted with the fasts of Advent and Lent. Christians said, “Let’s party” and chose the dead of winter for Christmas for two reasons. It didn’t have a specific date for it, like Easter does; we have only the approximate year for the birth of Jesus. Since the dead of winter was when the world partied—it cheered up the most depressing time of the year—the Christians joined them for their own reason; since they were partying in honor of Jesus Christ, they did it without drunken bashes and depraved orgies.

But then as always Christians who were Christians in name only, not in heart and mind, gradually got their way. They got so good at partying that they forgot what they were celebrating. After about a thousand years of this behavior, The Puritan Christians got so disgusted with it that when they settled Massachusetts and took political control of England in the 1600’s, they made the celebration of Christmas illegal!

But Christmas as a party was too powerful to be ignored, so even Puritans rejoined the party after awhile.

After all, what was going on in heaven in the early morning of the first Christmas, but an angelic party, praising God? Christmas is a time to pray, but so is every day; it is also a time to party.

If I read our own church’s history right, the founders of of the Covenant in the 1800’s were pretty straight-laced-laced about worldly entertainment on the whole, but they also enjoyed celebrations. Many of you know this, but many don’t, and it’s worth remembering. When Amy Nelson—Lee and Asta’s daughter—was ten years old and still Amy Solie, she represented the children of the Covenant at the opening of the Centennial celebration of the Covenant at the old City Auditorium in Minneapolis,1985. I didn’t know her then, and wouldn’t for fifteen years, but I always remembered what she said, because she said it for all of us: I love the Covenant because we know how to make a party. And most of the places I have been, that’s been true. We haven’t had a choir of angels, but we knew how to make a party.

A Gift to the World
The occasion for the angelic party was a birth, the reason why so many Sunday School programs have had the theme “A Birthday Party for Jesus.” But the birth of Jesus, along with all the other births that happened that year, would have been forgotten if it had not been recognized and received as a gift to the world. The savior was born to save us, and to make peace among all whom God favors. As Frykman summarized it with a rhyme:
Oh, what a treasure, God in his pleasure
Lovingly gives today;
Grace to the lowly, peace pure and holy,
Angels to men convey.
The party celebrates the gift; it is not itself the gift. The gift is grace and peace, not fun and games or even worldly happiness. The gift neither denies or guarantees these things. The gift is a reason to party, but that doesn’t mean that partying is the way we use the gift. When Jesus was grown-up and a teacher, Much of our treasure, Jesus said when he became a teacher, is to be laid up in heaven.
Earthly parties tend to end, and worldly happiness does not last forever. Marriages fail, accidents happen, promises are broken, you get cheated or you cheat somebody else; when these things happen—and they seem to happen to some people more than others, having nothing whatever to do with whether they are Christian or not, even good people or not. It’s not surprising at all when people believe that God let them down. Our heads may agree that God didn’t let them down, but our hearts sometimes have trouble going along. The hard realism of life
I could sing you a tune
and promise you the moon
But if that's what it takes to hold you
I'd just as soon let you go.
Even though God never guaranteed them earthly happiness here are those who say that God has let them down. but, as Cornelius sings in Hello, Dolly, “It only takes a moment to be loved your whole life long.”

In times of war, natural disaster, and personal tragedy these feelings take hold of many people The poet Henry Wadsworth Longfellow was in that state of mind during the Civil War.

The month after the war began Longfellow’s wife died in a household fire, leaving him badly scarred in his attempts to save her. (The reason he is always pictured with a beard is that it was impossible for him to shave after the fire.)

Two years later his son, an officer in the Army of the Potomac, suffered a severe and disabling wound. Apart from his family grief there was the horrible grief of the war itself, Americans against Americans.
Then, on the fourth Christmas of the War Longfellow wrote a poem that has lived on in the carol, I Heard the Bells on Christmas Day. We are going to sing it to conclude this Christmas service, but I want to read for you now the two verses we do not sing, but which are just as significant as the ones we do. Longfellow is not lingering at the manger, but he grasps Christmas in the midst of national and personal tragedy.

Then from each black accursed mouth

The cannon thundered in the South,

And with the sound, The carols drowned

Of peace on earth, good-will to men!

It was as if an earthquake rent

The hearth-stones of a continent,

And made forlorn The households born

Of peace on earth, good-will to men!

In despair he bows his head, but his despair is not the last word, as we will sing it. Beyond the bad stuff, out of reach of the bad stuff in fact, is the treasure God offers: grace to the lowly, peace pure and holy.

Without grace for the lowly there is no peace pure and holy; there may be justice of a sort, but not “justice and peace.” Too often the theme song of justice and peace is actually “One tin soldier,” in which justice is bloody and the peace that issues from it is the peace of a cemetery, not of a heavenly kingdom; “On the bloody morning after, one tin soldier rides away.”

The fullness of grace is peace. Jesus may sleep in heavenly peace as he lies in the manger, but he makes peace by the blood of the cross, by which all people everywhere may be saved. Amen.