For as long as I could remember, my sister, Yvonne, had wanted to be a nurse. When she was little she played hospital… and I was the patient! As she got older she talked about it and planned for it. She had never wanted to do anything else. While I went through all kinds of phases – sailor, pilot, joining the air force, all kinds of ideas – Yvonne only ever wanted to be a nurse. So, when she turned 16 she left high school and went to study at nursing college, which is the way you did things in those days.
That Christmas she got pregnant. She came home for Easter and never returned to college. She and Tommy were married in June. The baby was due in September. People whispered behind her back that she shouldn’t be wearing white.
As if that wasn’t enough, the baby was stillborn and my sister went into a post natal depression that lasted a couple of years. We were talking a few years ago and as we went back over those days Yvonne realised that she had lost two years of her life, two years that just had disappeared from her memory. Yvonne and Tommy had moved into her bedroom when they got married, but when my Dad came home on leave in the fall he kicked them out of the house. They spent the next couple of years wandering from one place to another, at one point spending the winter living in an unheated trailer on a friend’s farm, until they found an apartment.
Yvonne’s dream of becoming a nurse was dead.
It’s never easy to be a pregnant teenage
girl. It wasn’t easy 30 years ago in
For my sister, a teenage pregnancy meant the death of her dreams. For Mary, it could mean her own death.
26 In
the sixth month, 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…
You bet she was troubled! This was bad news! Mary had a bright future ahead of her. She was pledged to be married to a man named Joseph. He wasn’t rich but he was an honest tradesman from a good family. She was looking forward to being the respected wife of a respectable man. And then this!
You bet she was troubled! The law said that
if it was found that a woman who was pledged to be married was not a virgin, 21 she shall be
brought to the door of her father’s house and there the men of her town shall
stone her to death. She has done a disgraceful thing in
You bet she was troubled! Even if the messenger that gave her this news was an angel. It still wasn’t good news. It may have been a message of grace, but it was very inconvenient grace.
Compare Mary’s situation with Zechariah’s story from last week.
Last week, in the “talkback” session, I was accused (in the nicest possible way) of beating up on Zechariah. At that time I said that I hadn’t intended to beat up on him and I was sorry if it came out that way. On reflection, I’m not so sure anymore. As I reread the passage and reflected on it this week I came to the conclusion that Luke wants us to compare Zechariah and Mary. I think he tells us Zechariah’s story first to set it up so we see Mary’s story as a contrast to his.
Take the news that Gabriel delivers. Gabriel basically delivers the same message to both Zechariah and Mary. He tells both of them, “You’re going to have a son.”
To Zechariah, this was the best news he could ever hear. Gabriel actually says to Zechariah, “your prayer has been heard.” He’d been praying for this very thing for years.
To Mary, this same message was deeply troubling news. This news put her whole future, if not her whole life, in jeopardy. What could it mean?
The angel could see she was upset, so he fills out the message with some details. “Do not be afraid, Mary, you have found favor with God. 31 You will be with child and give birth to a son, and you are to give him the name 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 the house of Jacob forever; his kingdom will never end.”
That’s all very well for him to say. It’s all very well for him to get all excited about who this child is going to grow up to be. He’s not the one that’ll have to walk around a small town pregnant and unmarried. He’s not the one that’ll have people whispering about him behind his back. More to the point right now, he’s not the one that has to go and tell Joseph that she’s going to get pregnant before they get married.
Zechariah’s good news was Mary’s bad news.
Then there’s their responses.
Remember Zechariah’s response last week? “How
can I be sure of this?” Maybe Zechariah was an
American from
At first sight Mary’s response sounds similar. 34 “How will this be,” Mary asked the angel, “since I am a virgin?” But there is a significant difference. Zechariah asked for proof, so he could be sure the angel was telling the truth. Mary asked for information, so she could understand what was going to happen to her.
How do we know that Mary’s answer was different from Zechariah’s? Because the angel’s response is different. When Zechariah asked for proof Gabriel told him off and struck him dumb. When Mary asked for clarification on what would happen to her… she got it.
35 The
angel answered, “The Holy Spirit will come upon 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. 36
He almost sounds like a doctor explaining a procedure. I had an MRI yesterday. The operator explained in clear, simple English that the table would slide into the machine, that it would take about half an hour and that I had to lie still for the whole time. Gabriel’s explanation to Mary sounds very similar.
“Now Mary, it’s a very simple procedure. You won’t feel a thing. The Holy Spirit will come upon 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.
No rebuke, no punishment, just a simple walk through the process that would take place. She even gets an added bonus to help her understand. Ironically it’s the example of what’s happening to her cousin Elizabeth, Zechariah’s wife.
Even Elizabeth your relative
is going to have a child in her old age, and she who was said to be barren is
in her sixth month. 37 For nothing is impossible with God.”
That’s enough for Mary. 38 “I am the Lord’s servant,” Mary answered. “May it be to me as you have said.” Then the angel left her.
We could have called last week’s message, “Things not to do when God sends you a message.” This week could be the opposite, “How to respond to God’s voice.” Where Zechariah wanted proof, Mary asked for clarification and submitted herself to God’s will. There’s nothing wrong with asking God to explain what it is he’s asking you to do, so long as your basic attitude is one that submits your will to his.
Mary asked the angel for some insight into how God was going to bring this thing about. When we have a sense that God is calling us to do something in particular we have all kinds of avenues to get clarity on what the next step is.
We can pray and ask the Lord to speak to us
directly, to just give us a clear sense of what it is we should do. Once, when
I was part of a reflection group in seminary, we were talking about how we
discerned God’s will in our lives. Because I had a reputation for being
something of an academic (or as my nephew in
We can read scripture and seek wisdom from
what is recorded there in terms of principles and models of behaviour. Exodus
18 has wonderful teaching on how to set up a ministry, or any programme, so
that the leader doesn’t burn him or her self out but instead delegates
responsibility to other leaders. (That’s where Moses’ father-in-law reams him
out and tells that he’ll kill himself unless he smartens up.) In Nehemiah 11,
Nehemiah recruits one family in ten from the surrounding towns to come and
repopulate
We can talk with others and get their Godly wisdom on what we should do. That’s one of the major reasons why the Bible teaches that the church should have multiple leaders rather than just one guy calling the shots. We can also read about what others have done and apply their learning to our own lives.
There are all kinds of ways of getting more information about the “how” of God’s call on our lives. But what’s most important is that we start out with the same attitude as Mary, “I am the Lord’s servant.”
When I started thinking about this sermon I
had originally thought I would be kind of neat to split it in two, talk about
Mary and then talk about Joseph. That was before I actually sat down and
studied the text and realised that Luke says hardly anything about Joseph. When
Joseph does appear, it’s only ever in a supporting role. He only appears in
today’s text in order to locate Mary in a particular flow of history, 26
In the sixth month, 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… Then it’s all about Mary.
Most of
the other times that Joseph appears it’s only because they’re going somewhere
and women and children can’t travel alone. In chapter 2 verse 4 they go to
The only time Joseph appears and they’re not going somewhere is in 2:16 when the shepherds come to visit the baby Jesus and in that case it says that they found “Mary and Joseph, and the baby who was lying in a manger.” It was very unusual to put the name of the wife before the husband in that society. There’s something important going on here.
You can see what I mean if you look at Matthew’s birth stories. Luke and Matthew are the only gospel writers who include birth stories. But that’s where the similarity ends. Matthew’s birth story isn’t really about Mary. It’s about Joseph and the dilemma he has as a righteous man when he discovers his “bride to be” is pregnant, and not by him. In Luke, Mary gets one visit from an angel. In Matthew, Joseph gets three separate dreams in which an angel visits him and tells him what to do next. Mary is hardly even mentioned, except as the source of his dilemma. For much of Matthew’s story Jesus and Mary are referred to simply as “the child and his mother.” Matthew’s story is about Joseph.
Luke, on the other hand, is all about the women. The message he focuses on is the one to Mary, not Joseph. It’s Elizabeth who responds with praise to the news that she will have a baby. Her husband, Zechariah, takes some time to catch up.
This is because one of Luke’s major themes in his gospel is that God reaches out to those that his readers wouldn’t expect; the poor, the sick, women, foreigners. Luke also wrote the book of Acts and in his gospel he’s already preparing the way for the theme of God’s love for non-Jews by including every story he could lay his hands on about Jesus ministering to foreigners.
When it comes to the poor, it’s Luke that tells us Jesus was born in a stable and laid in a manger. It’s Luke that tells us in 2:24 that Joseph and Mary could only afford to offer the most inexpensive sacrifice for the birth of Jesus. They weren’t well off. Matthew records the visit of the kings to give gifts to Jesus. Luke, on the other hand, tells us about the shepherds; despised, smelly labourers who lived on the hillsides.
It’s really important to Luke that we see
that, as Ecclesiastes says, “The race is not to the swift
or the battle to the strong, nor does food come to the wise or wealth to the
brilliant or favor to the learned.” (9:11) The writer of Ecclesiastes goes on to say it’s all
chance, but Luke would say, “No, it’s not.” Like Paul, Luke believed that, 27 …God chose the
foolish things of the world to shame the wise; God chose the weak things of the
world to shame the strong. 28 He chose the lowly things of this
world and the despised things—and the things that are not—to nullify the things
that are, 29 so that no one may boast before him.”(1 Cor 1:27-29)
And so he introduces us first to Zechariah, the
educated religious professional who spent his time studying God’s word and
serving in religious service. He was like me, a professional minister. And when
the call from God came, he got it wrong.
Then, in contrast, Luke introduces us to Mary,
an illiterate 15 year old girl who, when the call from God came, got it right. Not
because of anything that she could point to or boast about, but simply because
she had a heart that was willing to trust God and take him at his word.
God hasn’t changed. He still comes to us and asks us, “Do you trust me?”
“Even if you don’t understand, do you trust me?” “Even if you can’t see the
next step, do you trust me?”
He doesn’t ask, “Are you smart?” or “Are you rich?” or “Are you powerful?”
or “Do you have the right family?” He only asks, “Do you trust me?”