Banner Logo

Sermon

Sermon Graphic


Fourth Sunday of Advent
St. Stephen's Anglican Church
The Rev. Jeffrey O. Cerar, December 21, 2014


Earthquake in Nazareth


Text: Luke 1:26-38

In these weeks of Advent, we have heard a lot about John the Baptist, who played such an important role in preparing the world for the coming of Christ. There is another towering figure of whom we first hear in this part of the Gospel, and that is Mary. John the Baptist we respect. Mary we love. We love Mary because she was so ordinary, so normal. And yet she was extraordinary in her obedience and her submission to the will of God. You can see the love that countless generations have had for Mary in the paintings and sculptures of posterity. She is portrayed with great tenderness, great strength, great wisdom, and great suffering for the cause of the God she loved and served.

One of the things about Mary that evokes our love is that she could be any one of us. She was a young girl from Nazareth, an obscure town in the Middle East. The Old Testament never mentions Nazareth. And Mary, who was probably fourteen years old or so, was nobody famous. She was engaged to a man named Joseph, who was nobody famous. She was probably planning her wedding, and projecting ahead to a simple life as a married woman living in her home town. She was undoubtedly brought up as a Jewish girl, who knew God and participated in the Jewish religious practices.

In all those ways, she could have been any one of us when we were fourteen—anonymous, going about normal daily life, imagining the future to be pretty straightforward, and having no idea what God might do in our lives. For Mary of Nazareth, a day came when an angel of the Lord stopped by to turn her life upside down. Let’s walk through that encounter with Mary and picture what she was feeling. For the ups and downs of her conversation with the Angel Gabriel show us a lot about our life as believers. And the reassurance she received is as vital to us as it was to her. And her response is a pattern for the faithful Christian life.

I like to imagine Mary was sitting in her family’s back yard, kind of day dreaming about the wedding, making plans and feeling good. Maybe she was making a basket or kneading dough as she stared off into the distance. And then, as Luke tells us, God sent the Angel Gabriel to her. That was the beginning of what for her was an earthquake. If you have ever seen a seismograph, which is the printout of the shock waves from an earthquake, you can picture a graph with lines that go up and down around the point of rest. That is how it was for Mary. Just the appearance of the angel standing next to her would have caused the needle on her seismograph to jump dramatically. Angels always have to tell the startled people to whom they appear, “Don’t be afraid.” So they must be awesome creatures who evoke a dramatic response. Her heart probably jumped into her throat.

Gabriel’s first words were, “Greetings, favored one, the Lord is with you!” Now it is somewhat reassuring to have someone tell you that God favors you. But Mary was smart enough to know that there was something else coming. The scripture tells us she was greatly troubled and tried to discern what sort of greeting this might be. The needle on her seismograph jumped again.

The angel was comforting. “Do not be afraid, Mary, for you have found favor with God.” But then he went on:

And behold, you will conceive in your womb and bear a son, and you shall call his name Jesus. He will be great and will be called the Son of the Most High. And the Lord God will give to him the throne of his father David, and he will reign over the house of Jacob forever, and of his kingdom there will be no end. [Luke 1:30-33]

I would guess the seismograph needle jumped to confusion and perplexity at this point. Every young girl at that time would have expected to have children. But this angel was telling her that her child would be somebody great. In fact, he was saying much more than that. He was describing the birth of the Son of the Most High. How would she process all of that? And in fact, she could tell something supernatural was afoot here. So she asked the angel, “How will this be, since I am a virgin?”

His answer had to have thrown her for more of a loop:

The Holy Spirit will come upon you and the power of the Most High will overshadow you; therefore the child to be born will be called holy—the Son of God. [Luke 1:35-36]

When I try to put myself in Mary’s position, I can imagine my heart beating like crazy. Forget the seismograph. I’m talking about the needle on the EKG. This is powerful stuff. This is outside the normal things of life. This is God breaking into my life, doing something totally unexpected and unfathomable.

The angel knew that. So he reassured her with a revelation of something in Mary’s life that she would understand as the hand of God at work. “And behold,” he said, “your relative Elizabeth in her old age has also conceived a son, and this is the sixth month with her who was called barren.” In other words, he was saying, Don’t forget, Mary, God does these things. There are several stories in scripture of barren women becoming pregnant, and in fact, it is happening right in your own family.

And then Gabriel said the unforgettable words—words we find other places in scripture—words that are engraved on our hearts—“For nothing will be impossible with God.” (Luke 1:37)

Unforgettable words, and yet we have to be reminded of this over and over. God can do anything. And time after time, He does amazing, impossible things. We can talk all we want about the laws of nature, and what can happen and what is impossible. But for God, there are no restrictions. The one who prescribed the laws of nature is not bound by them.

• When people die, they are dead. But not for God.

• When people are in hopeless situations with no way out, God can make a way.

• God can part the waters of the Red Sea to let His people pass through to freedom.

• God can move a million people through the Sinai desert where there is no food or water, and keep them alive for 40 years.

• When God wants to step through the time-space continuum and come to earth, He does so.

• And when He wants to manifest His divinity in a human being, He conceives a child in the womb of a virgin.

With God nothing is impossible. And when the Angel Gabriel said those words to Mary, her heart soared from confusion to elation. Her seismic needle jumped once more. And that is when she responded with the words we always remember as her manifesto: “Behold, I am the servant of the Lord; let it be to me according to your word.” In the most humble, beautiful, simple statement imaginable, Mary said, “I’m in.” Her life had been turned upside down, but she was in. And not only was she just okay with it. We find her going very soon to visit Elizabeth. And when she tells Elizabeth what happened to her, she says, “My soul proclaims the greatness of the Lord, my spirit rejoices in God my Savior.” (Luke 1:46-47)

I picked the image of the seismograph for two reasons. One, it works somewhat like an electrocardiogram, and Mary’s heart was very much engaged in this incident. And two, an earthquake leaves the landscape changed. Mary’s life was never going to be the same again. But after the shockwaves subsided, she moved on with her life in its new configuration. And she did so, praising God and submitting to His will.

There are dozens of stories like Mary’s in the Bible—stories about people to whom God appears and says, guess what I have in store for you. I went back and looked at many of these this week, and I found something that is worth noting. God didn’t ask a single one of them if they were willing to cooperate. He never posed His plan as a proposal for the human being to accept or reject. He never asked their permission. In every case, God said, “Here’s what is going to happen.” I raise that, because I think for most of us, we picture God coming to us on rare occasions. And when He does, He says something like, “Mary, I’ve got a mission for you which you may choose to accept or reject. If you choose to accept it, here’s how it will go.” Can you imagine Mary trying to respond to that? If the ball is in her court, she’s going to be responsible for the decision. And it’s too big a decision for her:

• Will my friends think I am crazy?

• Am I good enough?

• Can I handle the notoriety?

• How can I decide when I don’t know what will happen in his life?

• How will I explain all this to my fiancée?

• Will my family be okay with this?

• Are we going to have to move away from Nazareth?

• Where will we get the money to keep the Son of God in the style he deserves?

In some of the Bible stories, we see that kind of agonizing by people who think God is asking, not telling how it is going to be: Moses, Gideon, Jeremiah. In the case of Jonah, we see a man trying to run away from God’s plans for him.

In other cases, we see people simply stepping up and doing what God has said:

• Peter, receiving the keys to the Kingdom.

• Paul, stumbling around blind for a few days, and then settling in for the ride.

• Abraham, packing up his family without comment.

• Noah, of whom it simply says, “Noah did everything just as God commanded him.”

And then we see Mary, beautiful Mary whom we love, saying, “Behold, I am the servant of the Lord; let it be to me according to your word.”

What a long line of amazing stories we are a part of. For three thousand years, God has been entering into the lives of human beings and doing the impossible so that, when all is said and done, sin will be done away with and God’s perfect Kingdom will be restored. And on that day in Mary’s backyard in Nazareth, He entered into the life of one who was thrilled to be part of God’s plan—one whose soul magnified the Lord, and whose spirit rejoiced in God her savior.

Can you and I rejoice like that in God’s sovereign choice? Can we praise God for coming into our lives and saying, Here’s how it’s going to be? You know, that up and down seismograph of Mary’s encounter with Gabriel was just the beginning of an up and down life. Mary suffered for God’s glory.

• She watched as her beloved boy was ridiculed and rejected by the respected leaders of the faith.

• She worried about Him out on the road with nowhere to lay His head.

• She had to watch Him falsely accused and convicted of blasphemy for telling the truth about who He was.

• She stood at the foot of the cross and wept as He died there, a perfect sacrifice for the sins of the world.

And she also rejoiced as she watched Him at work, the Son of God bringing heaven down to earth:

• Blowing the rabbis away with His wisdom as a mere child

• Turning water to wine at a wedding feast

• Preaching the most beautiful words ever spoken at the sermon on the mount

• Healing the sick,

• restoring sight to the blind

• and raising the dead.

• And then she had the joy of seeing her own dear Son, raised from the dead.

That is the life to which God is inviting you and me. It is an up and down life, because the world takes offense at God.

• The world is riddled with sin, and responds to God’s holiness with contempt.

• The world is living under Satan’s lies, and doesn’t want to hear God’s truth.

• But at the same time, the world is hungering for something it can’t name, which only Jesus can give.

And you and I are the ones who can be the agents of those moments when Jesus does the giving.

• The world longs for things it doesn’t believe are possible.

And you and I are the ones who can be the vehicles for the Holy Spirit to make the impossible possible.

All it takes is for us to change the way we look at God’s call on our lives. Instead of seeing it as a negotiation with God, we can take our cue from Mary, the virgin girl of Nazareth: “Behold, I am the servant of the Lord. Let it be to me according to your word.”

© Jeffrey O. Cerar 2014

Return to top

Sermon Archives