The 4th Sunday of Advent
2 Samuel 7:1-5, 8b-12, 14a, 16 | Romans 16:25-27 | Luke 1:26-38

Pour forth, we beseech you, oh Lord, the grace into our hearts that we, to whom the incarnation of Christ, your Son, was made known by the message of an angel, may, by his passionate cross, be brought to the glory of his resurrection, who lives and reigns with you in the unity of the Holy Spirit, one God forever and ever, amen.

We celebrate this amazing moment in the work of God, awakening us, informing us, empowering us to understand a great mystery, the mystery of the incarnation. Nothing seems more important than we fix our attention on what this really means, God becoming one of us, God entering into a human being, having then been given humanity and the humanity and divinity become one, inseparable. You can’t figure out which is which other than by sifacs [phonetic 00:01:19], and then you have this act that he performed, this salvific act of hanging on a cross and transforming everything, changing everything and doing something that was never conceived to be possible, and that is that we be freed from sin, the power of sin. So if you understand that process that happened in Jesus, his coming into the world, dwelling in a human being and then saving us and taking away the one thing that the Old Testament consistently made clear is the thing that keeps us from the fullness of understanding and acceptance of all that God teaches, and that is sin. Sin is the block. Sin is the thing that gets in the way, and what is it ultimately? Ultimately it is a way of seeing life where it has nothing much to do with anything other than ourselves. It is something about the way in which we first come into this world. We are very much self-centered, and the idea that we are called to eventually grow into people that are transformed by an event in the history of the world that changes us so radically that we become life-givers and not life-takers ⎯ amazing.

So let’s look at this mysterious moment in salvation history. And I love that the reading from the Old Testament so clearly makes something very, very evident, certainly to David but also to us who read the story. King David has been successful. There’s no king that pleased God more than King David. I might say that he was the only king, almost, that pleased God, and he is benefitting from all that God was able to do through him for his people. He was famous. He was rich. He had a beautiful home, and he decides that he will do what he sees as a blessing from God to God. He said, “I will take care of God. Now that I am so powerful and so wealthy, I will build a beautiful temple for God.” It sounds like a beautiful idea, and then God’s response is so interesting. “What? You want to build a house for me? You want to do something for me? You do not understand that my whole reason for creating you was to establish a relationship with you where I would be the one giving to you. That’s my greatest joy. That’s what I love to do. I will empower you. Since you have free will, if you make a decision to work with me, then that is all I desire. That is my greatest joy. You don’t have to do something for me.” Amazing. Focus on that for a moment. God is not looking for anything from us to be given to him other than permission to be the God that he longs to be, to be the one who inspires us, teaches us, empowers us, sends us, gathers us. He wants so much to be the source of life for us that he wants his people to receive from him, and in a strange, mysterious way, he said, “I want to do it through you, with you. I want you to share with me the joy that I have when I see the love that I place in you entering into someone else and transforming them and making them into new creatures, new beings, filled with this amazing capacity for understanding and wisdom and healing power.” It’s amazing.

And so when you see the second reading in Romans, Paul is talking about this incredible God that he now sees so clearly. He didn’t see him before, but his eyes were opened, and he saw him. And he saw what he was doing for Paul, using Paul as an instrument of grace for people, and all he can do is give glory to God. “You have revealed to us, through prophetic writings, through all the mysteries that we have in the scriptures, you’ve made known to everyone that the core of this whole thing that we live in is some kind of obedience to faith. It’s what we believe is there for us to enable us to find the happiness that we want and we long for.” And all he can say is may there be all glory forever for this wise and beautiful and loving God who, through Jesus Christ, gave us this mysterious, incredible freedom from the one thing in the Old Testament that said would keep us from the fullness of understanding and seeing God, and that’s sin. When we pray to God through Jesus, we’re praying to God always. He’s the ultimate goal of all spiritual life, that we want to be in union with God the Father, but it would be impossible without this mysterious death and resurrection of Jesus that redeemed us and took away sin, which was the block. So now, without sin being the issue, we no longer have to focus on it ourselves. It’s not the obstacle that we had in the Old Testament that kept us from God. It is now something that God has already forgiven, already forgiven. That’s so hard for us to understand, because we carry from the Old Testament to the New Testament so much of the baggage that was there about fearing that we had to get rid of sin in order for God to pay attention to us, and that is no longer necessary. No longer necessary. I want to say it over and over again.

You have been made whole by the death and resurrection of Jesus, freed from sin, and yet before Jesus came, there was a human being who, through some miraculous power of God, came into the world before the redemption and the resurrection of Jesus. Her name was Mary. In order for her to be an instrument of what God asked her to do, asked her to be, she had to be free of sin, and so we are taught that, that Mary came into the world sinless. And out of that goodness that was her, she was asked to do something that must have been absolutely incredulous. How could you believe how this could happen? She’s told by an angel, and it’s a manifestation, it seems, of Gabriel. It’s Gabriel, but he ⎯ it’s a gentle, gentle kind of appearance, not with fire and thunder but a loving presence of an angel that says, “I have a message for you that is essential for you to understand, that you have been chosen from all of humanity to be the one who will celebrate for the first time the goal of the Old Testament, the longing of every human being soul, the indwelling presence of God,” a completely unimaginable thing in the Old Testament, because if God got close to a human being, the only way they could imagine the result being was that the human being would be simply destroyed, burned up, obliterated. God was so much more powerful than humans. There was no way a human could contain divinity, yet we find now, with this story unfolding, that Mary is the model of you and me, all that we’re to become, and knowing first and foremost that we have been first gifted with this thing called redemption. Our sins are forgiven. Our sins are no longer a block.

It doesn’t mean that we don’t still have power to make mistakes, but mistakes are very different than being, in a way, controlled by the darker version of human nature. We know that human beings are capable of enormous evil, and God has allowed people that freedom to choose that. It’s a great mystery, but what he’s also given people the power to do is to reject all of that and to receive this gift with a desire that it gives us the enthusiasm, the being filled with God to know that we have this capacity to be used by God in a way that brings life to people around us, healing to people around us. It’s such an incredible gift.

So I don't know if I’ve ever said this before, but I want you to imagine with me that Mary, being the model of who we are to become, she then becomes a very, very powerful figure for us in our spiritual journey. We too, not in the same way, have been freed from sin, not from birth but by something that was done for us. And then there’s Elizabeth in this story. I’ve never thought about this before, but Elizabeth is, to me, an image of the Old Testament. Never was the Old Testament able to bring the new life and the fullness of the message of God to people, and so Elizabeth is this woman who has longed for a child for so long, longed to give new birth to people or to be a symbol of the new birth that the Old Testament might be able to create for people. But it didn’t happen in the Old Testament. So she’s now able to have, in her womb, the greatest of the Old Testament prophets, and his only message, it’s not for him to describe what is going on or what is happening. It’s to point to Jesus. “Listen to what he says. He knows what’s going on. Pay attention to him.” And what is he saying? What is Jesus saying with his life? That a promise made long ago to a king named David, that there would come one day someone who would fulfill the obligations of all the things that the Old Testament required by his very being. He would free us from all the rules, regulations and rituals that had to happen before we could ever get close to God. He announces something wonderful.

So the chance that you have now, as I have, is to understand this mystery perhaps in a new way that you haven’t seen before. The incarnation is at the heart of the message of the Old and New Testament. The fact that God chooses to dwell within our hearts and from there to transform us slowly, daily in our struggle with all the things that God has placed in our life so that they will be the very things we need to change and to grow through the experiences we’ve had, both in our ancestry and also in our family of origin, we have this wisdom given that can bring us out of anything that would have kept us in darkness and be a light, a star, a light in the darkness. What a beautiful promise, and I pray, on this Christmas Day, you will feel the power of this message. We’re engaged in an amazing miracle, and we are all able to participate in it as we accept it and understand it and try to seek to live it, not through our own strength but because of what’s been given to us. It’s a great celebration, and such a wonderful gift has been given to us. Amen.

Father, open our hearts to the mystery of what happened in Mary’s life.  This miraculous promise is not something we should simply think about as happening to one person but that it happens to all of us in some mysterious way.  So bless us with that kind of faith and that kind of expectation of being one who can become a vehicle to bring Christ into the world, manifesting himself through us, and we ask this in Jesus’ name, amen.