Troubled by Good News

3rd Sunday Pentecost December 15, 2024

Texts for this sermon are Philippians 4:4-7 and Luke 1:26-38

Mary’s people, the Israelites, children of the ancient Hebrews, had not heard from God in 400 years. Prior to that time they had routinely been summoned, rallied, sent forth, rescued, disciplined and forgiven, rewarded, reminded. Abraham and Sarah, Moses, Aaron and Miriam, Judges, Kings and prophets had conveyed God’s words executed God’s directions and negotiated the Hebrews through a dramatic God-directed epic. Then nothing. Nothing, nothing, nothing. nothing but an unending Silence.  

But God had made a promise in that distant past: God would come one day, God would come as a child, walk the earth and rise up and redeem them along with all of humanity and God’s creation. So in the silence the Israelites waited.

They fell into a routine. They farmed, herded sheep, negotiated contracts and invested in the stock market. They married, watched the children play T-ball and lost sleep over the medical bills. They mourned the loss of their parents, laughed at the next door neighbor’s yard decorations, and hung curtains. Their pastors and teachers launched into complex debate about moral issues and their commissioners and mayors negotiated the tricky politics of the global Roman empire. Life was okay. Not great, but tolerable.

Then, one morning, in a remote town, an angel walked into a small house and spoke to a teenager.

I don’t think Gabriel was dressed in iridescent Gates-of-Heaven garb for this visit. I think he was dressed in a t-shirt and dockers with Birkenstocks on his feet. I say this because while angels did present in dazzling appearance at other times they appeared as a regular human being. Such was the case when God visited Abraham in the company of two others and the three looked like normal men; the same when an angel appeared to Hagar in the desert and Elijah in the wilderness. 

But isn’t that how God works most of the time? There are those rare epiphanies, those almost vision-like visits: Peter, John and James witnessed one like that, but most of the time God elects subtler forms of communication. Sometimes God prompts us with an inner voice, sometimes audible, but most times with a thought, an idea that ignites a restlessness, an unease, an unsettledness, yet it persists. It’s like God creates a hunger do not want to name. 

For Mary that morning, and she wasn’t more than 15 or so, it was a mild though unusual greeting.

Hello, Mary, You are favored and God is with you.

I don’t know about you, but I like to think I’m favored, that someone likes me better than ‘them’. I loved it once when an aunt of mine said “you are my favorite.” And it makes me feel especially good when one of my nieces or nephews whispers, You’re my favorite.”  Those are nice favors or blessings. They make us feel warm and good all over. But they do, in part, because they don’t require anything of us. They’re there by virtue of who we are already and nothing further is demanded. The most they ask is that we keep being as we are to them.

So, why do we next read that

Mary was greatly troubled by this statement.

The word troubled here means agitated, alarmed.

I have two thoughts about this. One is conjecture on my part but the other is fleshed out in our passage. My conjecture on why Mary was trouble comes, again from experience. There’s a kind of favor that comes from merit. We’re favored because of how we’ve behaved or conducted ourselves or accomplished something worthy of merit. Then there’s the kind of favor that commissions. It singles out for a special assignment; it confers a mantel. 

Call to mind a time when you experienced something like this: a persistent idea or prompting that felt like a call to do something.

If you recall what you think might have been an experience of a call from God, what was your first response or thought?  

When we’re singled out for this kind of favor most of us feel cold ice in our veins instead of a warm glow. We don’t want to be the one to lead a cause, blow the whistle on corruption or confront an alcoholic friend or become a friend to someone we do not like. And who ever asked for the job of prophet? 

And as young Mary stood there sizing up her unexpected visitor she just knew there was something of the latter in his greeting and she began to ponder what was yet to be said.

Mary was greatly troubled.

Gabriel senses Mary’s distress and so he reassures her before he goes on with his message.

Do not be afraid, Mary. God favors you.

You know, it’s one thing when people favor us—when they attempt to commission us or persuade us to take on some assignment. It’s quite another when God favors us. When God presses God’s finger on our heart, leans over and speaks in our ear, saying “There is something I want you to do.” Because we immediately feel it will be something we don’t feel fit for.

I have often been asked how one can discern if it’s God’s prompting or something we’re just imagining.  What’s been your experience in discerning whether or not what has
come to you is from God’s Spirit?  

You are going to have a Baby, Mary, Gabriel says.

Astonished, she says “

How can this be? I am not married!

But Gabriel continues. The child to whom you will give birth will be the Promised One, Mary. God wants you to conceive, bear, birth and parent the Begotten of God. 

I don’t think it is too far afield to imagine Mary asking herself “How can I do this?” I’m not only not married, I am not anyone special, I’m not this…I’m not that…I’m not. Oh surely he’s got the wrong address. This belongs to someone else. 

God does what God does so mysteriously, gloriously well: calls forth the singularly unique, the singularly impossible from the most ordinary, good but not inordinately remarkable soul.

Now here comes the good part. Gabriel explains almost step by step how this is all going to mature.

The Holy spirit will come upon you and the power of the Most High will 

overshadow you.

Now we have to stop here and consider what this statement meant to Mary. When we read it, we do so from the Advent side of things. When we hear power of the Most High, we think of God creating the world and raising Jesus from the dead. 

When Marty heard Holy Spirit and power of the Most High she would have thought of the God Jehovah who turned the waters of the Nile into blood; who set sunless darkness over Egypt and divided the Red Sea. She would have envisioned the Spirit who spoke like thunder and blazed like fire on Siani shuddering the mountain peak to valley; the Spirit who smote Uzza for touching the Ark of the Covenant and of the priests fleeing Solomon’s Temple when the Holy Spirit descended to take up residence in the Holy of Holies.

When Mary hears of that Spirit, the Spirit of the Most High she hears The Holy, Fierce, Pure and Piercing Almighty.  Whom not even Moses could see and live.

Yet Mary says

Be it done to me according to your word.

When God asked Moses to face Pharoh he pleaded excuses; when God asked Gideon to face the Philistines he asked for double assurances; when Jonah was asked to preach to Ninevah he fled; when an angel visited Jacob the angel was met with wrestling match. This is not a comment about men, rather, it is a pattern of response that arises in most of us when confronted by God’s Call. But Mary doesn’t hesitate. She doesn’t beg off, she doesn’t procrastinate an answer, she does not flee, she doesn’t fight. Mary says a simple and unconditional “yes” to the consuming terrifying impossible.

And even before she gives birth she sings a song of exuberant joy.

My soul exults the Lord,
and my spirit has rejoiced in God my Savior.
And my spirit has rejoiced in God my Savior.

The literal translations reads

Magnifies the soul of me the Lord, 
and exulted the spirit of me in God the savior of me.

Her “Yes” moved her from being troubled by God’s Call to being filled, full and running over, with joy.

Now, do not dismiss Mary as exceptional or uniquely gifted. No. She was a peasant woman, a betrothed 14 or 15 year old. We elevate the icons of scripture, thinking them especially endowed or saintly. They were all, all of them, people like you and me. The only One exceptional in scripture is God. Gabriel says For nothing is impossible with God. It is God who makes it possible for Mary to bear God’s presence and live, to conceive, bear and birth. It is God who makes the way. It is God who endows; who enables; who lays straight the path for obedience. It is God. But God needs one thing: people with the courage to say “Yes.”

And our Yeses do birth a deep unalloyed joy. And yes, there is often a sacrifice in the unfolding of that Yes but God walks into it with us strengthening us. 

Is there a “Yes” you have failed to say? A regret for having said a “No?”  I have. If this is so for you, let us claim the good news that God forgives us, but let us also understand, our “Nos are costly:

they’re costly to us, to the purpose God had in mind for us and yes, to God as well.  

May we turn and repent of our insensitivities and hesitancies to God’s call. And prepare to welcome that deep unalloyed joy that arises from our obedience.