A Sermon preached on Sunday, December 19, 2021 at St. Augustine’s
Micah 5:2-5a, Hebrews 10:5-10, Luke 1:39-45
My apologies to our Wednesday Bible Study group as they have already heard this illustration! What I said to them … and now to you, is that the Advent Sundays remind me a little of being in a plane coming into land. We began Advent still high up, with the general theme of the coming of God – the Day of the Lord - and all that it will entail, it seemed a long way away. The prophets – this year we heard from Jeremiah, Baruch, Zephaniah, John the Baptist, and Micah – act as beacons, pointing the way to the one promised by God variously called the righteous branch, the king, the shepherd, the one who will baptize with the Holy Spirit and fire, a new ruler “who will be great to the ends of the earth.” (Micah 5:5a)
But this Advent IV week – especially in the readings from Micah and Luke – we can see clearly where we are headed for, our runway - the stable and its temporary residents are already in view. Micah tells us where to look – to Bethlehem: “from you shall come forth for me (God) one who is to rule in Israel, whose origin is from of old, from ancient days,” (5:2) literally from ever. And Luke tells us who will be there to bring forth this ruler, Mary who is blessed among women as the “mother of the Lord.” We haven’t landed yet, we still have just under a week to go before we celebrate the birth of Jesus, but we now know exactly where we are headed.
We have also already heard how this will happen, how God is going to fulfil God’s promises. The power of God is not going to be expressed from on high, no army of angels is going to come down and set things right, we are not going to transcend or be transformed into some new heavenly, spiritual, sinless beings. No. God will act through God’s creation. God becomes human, God becomes flesh, God will be born of a woman, a special woman, a blessed woman, because she “believed that there would be a fulfilment of what was spoken to her by the Lord," (Luke 1:45) but a human being none the less. This is what we call the Incarnation – becoming flesh, “Fleischwerdung” in German.
The author of Hebrews uses a portion of Psalm 40 to emphasise the physicality of God’s action. Christ will come into the world into a body God had prepared for him, a body in which he will do God’s will and by his self-offering and obedience show us how we are supposed to live. Through him, “through the offering of the body of Jesus once for all” (Hebrews 10:10) on the cross we, and our loves, and this creation are sanctified and made holy. This is the meaning of the Incarnation, that this world is important, not just as some sort of staging post to heaven, or testing ground. Mary knows this too.
The Magnificat, her song of hope and joy that we read together this morning instead of a psalm, is Mary’s reaction to what Elizabeth has to say. This is what Mary believes will be “the fulfilment of what was spoken to her by the Lord.” Theologian Tom Wright calls it the “gospel before the gospel, a fierce bright shout of triumph thirty weeks before Bethlehem, thirty years before Calvary and Easter.”[1] Mary believes that God really cares about this world, and about how we live. She believes and sings about God’s promises of a new and just order, of a world based on self-giving, and on the sharing of abundance and love.
“His mercy is for those who fear him from generation to generation. He has brought down the powerful from their thrones and lifted up the lowly. He has filled the hungry with good things and sent the rich away empty.” (Luke 1:50-53)
Her son and her cousin’s Elizabeth’s son, John, will be agents of this revolution. First – as we heard last week - John warns the powerful to repent. Then in his parables Jesus tells the rich not to trust in their wealth, not to make it the centre of their lives and again and again he promises God’s kingdom to the poor. And this teaching is reflected in his actions, in the people he meets and eats with and in those he invites to follow him.
The Incarnation tells us that God's promise is not abstract and distant, but physical and tangible and that it comes to life in Jesus. Jesus’ life and teaching tell us how to live to make this promise come true. In following Jesus, we are called to make him alive and present in the world through our flesh and our daily lives. And Jesus’ death and resurrection tell us that we need not be afraid in working for the fulfilment of what was spoken to Mary by the Lord. No setback is final, no failure is definite, no sin is without redemption, no death is the end. We need that reassurance too, we need faith, trust and persistence in the face of disbelief, disappointment, and resistance – sometimes even our own. Most of us – and certainly the society we live in - would be counted with the powerful, more than with the lowly, and with he rich, more than with the hungry. The challenge of Mary’s song is not just to transform others, but also ourselves.
Jeremiah, Baruch, Zephaniah, John the Baptist, Micah and Mary are our beacons, pointing the way to the one promised by God and to a life lived in God. In the words of poet Malcolm Guite, both Mary and Elizabeth are “Prophets who bring the best in us to birth.”[2]
Advent, our time of preparation is almost over. Soon we will once again celebrate God with us, Immanuel. So get ready, fasten your seatbelts, we are coming into land.
Amen.
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