Third Sunday of Advent December 12, 2010 "A Servant's Heart" Reverend Michael D. Powell Luke 1:26-38

I’ve been using Adam Hamilton’s series, “It Was Not a Silent Night,” as a resource for these last three Advent sermons, in which he brings the story alive by seeing it through the eyes of Mary. We started with Mary as a woman of 64, which tradition tells us is the age of her death. Then last week, as we celebrated the Sacrament of Holy Communion, we joined Mary at the foot of the cross when, as a woman of approximately 48, she saw her son executed, and pondered the meaning of his life and death. So we’ve been working backwards in time, and this morning Mary’s just a kid, probably about 14 when she conceives, 15 when she gives birth to the baby Jesus.

She was just a kid herself, a baby having a baby! And yet that’s the way it was, the way it had to be in those days. The average life expectancy for a woman in the First Century was between 30 and 40 years. Only 1 in 4 woman made it past their 40^th birthday. So, when a girl was able to conceive children she was typically engaged in a formal, legally binding contract. She continued to live with her family for about a year while wedding preparations were made, and it was during this period of time, during her engagement to Joseph, that the events described in our scripture this morning take place. It’s called The Annunciation: “In the sixth month the angel Gabriel was sent by God to a town in Galilee called Nazareth, to a virgin engaged to a man whose name was Joseph . . .”

We sing beautiful carols about Christmas, and we send beautiful cards with angels and shepherds depicted on them, but I think we all realize that Christmas wasn’t like that. Nobody really knows what the angel Gabriel looked like, but he probably didn’t have big wings that stick out, like in the movie Michael, where John Travolta hides his angel wings under a raincoat. If he’d have shown up with wings Mary would have been totally freaked out by his appearance, but the Gospel doesn’t tell us that. It doesn’t say she was terrified by his appearance; she’s just perplexed by his words. The word angel means messenger, and maybe Gabriel was just some stranger who knocked on the door. The bible doesn’t say. All that the bible reports are his words: “Greetings, favored one! The Lord is with you.” If you were raised Roman Catholic you learned those words a little differently, and you may have grown up praying them, repeating them in the words of the Rosary: “Hail Mary, full of grace, the Lord be with thee.” The scripture says that Mary was “much perplexed by his words and pondered what sort of greeting this might be.”

Mary was a virtual nobody. Not only was she a teenage kid, an unwed baby having a baby, she was also from the lowest rung of Jewish society, of peasant stock, probably even illiterate, as girls of her class were not commonly taught to read and write. And, to make it worse, she was from Nazareth, which was an unsophisticated backwater town in an obscure, backwater part of the Roman Empire.

You have to ask yourself, why in the world would God have chosen this peasant girl to bear the one who, 2000 years later, 1/3 of the earth’s population would honor as the king of all creation! It’s astounding, really. She’s about the most unlikely person you can imagine.

You may remember how, when Mary was in the first three months of her pregnancy, she went to stay with her older cousin, Elizabeth, who was also pregnant. As Mary was approaching, Luke writes that the babe in Elizabeth’s womb began kicking. That kicking baby was none other than John the Baptist, whom God had chosen to be a great prophet, the voice of one crying in the wilderness, prepare the way of the Lord. That’s when Elizabeth cries out the words that have also become a part of the Roman Catholic Rosary. She says, “Blessed are you among women, and blessed be the fruit of your womb.” So the Rosary prayer combines the words of Gabriel with the words of Elizabeth: Hail Mary, full of grace, the Lord be with you. Blessed are you among women, and blessed be the fruit of your womb, Jesus.”

Then Mary responds with the powerful words that our Christian tradition has enshrined as the Magnificat, a canticle that has been sung or spoken for centuries in the liturgy of the church. It’s a poem that is directly inspired by the Song of Hannah, as recorded in the Hebrew text of First Samuel 2:1-10. And, in these ancient words, dating back to perhaps nine hundred years before Christ’s birth, we have a powerful clue about why God chose Mary to be the mother of Jesus. She sings, “My soul magnifies the Lord, for God has looked with favor on the lowliness of his servant . . . God has scattered the proud in the thoughts of their hearts . . . God has lifted up the lowly; has filled the hungry with good things, and sent the rich away empty.” [Lk. 1:46-55] What do we learn about Mary, and about the nature of God from this ancient song?

Mary was lowly. She was humble. She was probably the least likely person in the world you’d have expected to be the mother of a king, and that’s exactly why God was able to use her. God knew Mary had a servant’s heart. God knew that when the angel Gabriel announced that she was to be the mother of Jesus, Mary would respond by saying “Here I am, the servant of the Lord; let it be with me according to our word.” [Lk. 1:38]

Hamilton points out a pattern. God exalts the lowly and humbles the proud. When God chose Moses to be the great lawgiver and liberator of his people, God chose a man who stuttered! [Exodus 4:10] When God chose David to be the king of Israel, [1Sam. 16:12] he was one of 7 sons of Jesse, the youngest, one who was out tending sheep. When the prophet Samuel said, “He’s the one,” even David’s father, Jesse, said, “You’ve got to be kidding, him?” When Jesus chose his disciples he didn’t choose seminary graduates with degrees in theology, he chose fishermen and tax collectors, the most unlikely disciples imaginable.

The point Hamilton is making is that perhaps God finds it easier to use people who are humble, who have no presumptions about themselves. God could just as easily choose someone rich and powerful and educated, and sometimes God does work that way, but it’s tricky, because the more successful we are, the more we might tend to think it’s about us, and not God. Mary was humble. She had a servant’s heart. “Let it be with me according to your word,” she said. And God knew that’s what she’d say.

So, what does this mean for us? Some of us are pretty successful in our own right. What does it mean when scripture says that God favors the lowly and opposes the proud? What it means is that we ought to be very careful to humble ourselves before God.

If you’ve had enough life experience one thing you begin to realize is that you will be humbled! One way or another, we’re all brought to our knees. If we get too full of ourselves, we discover that God opposes the proud, and we find ourselves being humbled in a way that’s humiliating. We may find our names in the paper and our neighbors talking about what we’ve been busted for. We’ve all seen it happen - to CEOs, Wall Street executives, politicians, preachers, and lay people. The other alternative is to humble ourselves before God. We do that by simply asking God, “Please don’t let me think it’s all about me. Help me to remember who I am and that everything good in my life is a gift from you. Help me to treat other people the same way I want to be treated.

In the Philippians Canticle, [Philippians 2:6-11] another text that has been used liturgically for two thousand years, we read: “Do nothing from selfish ambition or conceit, but in humility regard others as better than yourselves. Let each of you look not to your own interests, but to the interests of others. Let the same mind be in you that was in Christ Jesus, who . . . emptied himself, taking the form of a servant.”

That’s what Christmas is about. That’s what the birth of Christ is about. It’s about each of us taking on the mind of Christ, letting that same mind be in us that was in Jesus.

It’s the third Sunday of Advent. We’re preparing for the birth of Jesus. The manger of the Christ exists in every human heart and mind and soul. We are meant to bring Christ to life in our lives, but it can only happen if we, like Mary, are open and receptive, humble and willing to be channels of God’s grace.

We can even pray like Mary prayed: “Give me a servant‘s heart, O God. May it be with me according to your word.” May you experience a new birth of Christ’s love this year. And may Christ be your shalom. Amen.