Peace in the Journey

          A sermon by Dr. Jim Somerville
         Pastor, Richmond’s First Baptist Church
        Richmond, Virginia
             The Second Sunday of Advent, December 7, 2008
            Second in the series, “Journey to the Manger”

Luke 1:26-38

Today we continue a “Journey to the Manger,” guided by Luke’s story of Christmas and accompanied by the traditional Advent themes of Hope, Peace, Joy, and Love.  Last week we stocked up on hope for the journey through the story of Zechariah and Elizabeth, an elderly couple who wanted something they couldn’t get.  They wanted a baby but they had almost given up hope because Elizabeth was barren and both of them were getting on in years.  Until that day in the temple when the angel Gabriel came to Zechariah and told him that his prayer had been heard, that his wife would conceive and bear a son, and he would name him John.  It was news too good to be true, and because Zechariah couldn’t believe it he was struck dumb, unable to speak until the promise was fulfilled.  At the end of last week’s sermon, however, there was Elizabeth, five months pregnant, combing out her long, gray locks and saying, “This is what the Lord has done for me when he looked favorably on me, and took away the disgrace I have endured among my people.”

And so we come to this week’s section of the journey and the news that “in the sixth month of Elizabeth’s pregnancy the angel Gabriel was sent by God to a town in Galilee called Nazareth, and to a virgin engaged to a man whose name was Joseph, of the house of David.  The virgin’s name was Mary.” 

There she was, going about her everyday duties, drawing water from the well or grinding meal behind the house when Gabriel came to her.  The first words out of his mouth are “Hail, favored one.  The Lord is with you!”  It sounds like good news, doesn’t it?  It sounds like the kind of thing Ed McMahon might say if he showed up at your house with one of those enormous checks from the Publisher’s Clearing House Sweepstakes.  Still, Mary was perplexed by his words and pondered what sort of greeting this might be.  Here we are talking about peace, but these words and this startling visit from an angel have unsettled Mary; the calm, flat sea of her thoughts has been churned up into anxious waves.  She sits there with a troubled look on her face, wondering what kind of greeting this could be, when Gabriel says, “Don’t be afraid, Mary, you have found favor with God, and now you will conceive in your womb and bear a son and you will name him Jesus.  He will be great, and he will be called the Son of the Most High, and the Lord God will give to him the throne of his ancestor David.  He will reign over the house of Jacob forever, and of his kingdom there will be no end.” 

It all sounds good: she’s going to be the mother of a boy named Jesus, who will be the son of the Most High, a descendant of King David, “and he shall reign forever and ever.  Hallelujah!  Hallelujah!”  But Mary raises a good question: “How can this be, since I am a virgin?” 

I remember telling this story once at the trailer park in Wingate, North Carolina, where our church had a mission.  Some of us would go out there every Saturday to spend time with the children who lived there.  We would play games and have snacks, sing songs and tell stories about Jesus.  It was about this time of year that I was out there telling this story about the annunciation to Mary.  All of the children were gathered in the living room of the double-wide trailer we rented, most of them sitting in tiny, wobbly wooden chairs that we had inherited from the preschool ministry of our church, a few of them standing against the back wall, but right there on the front row were two boys about fifteen years old who were much too tall for those chairs.  They sat there with their knees under their chins, looking up at me as I told this story.  I talked about Gabriel coming with these wonderful promises for Mary, that her baby was going to be great, and he was going to be son of the most high, that he would sit on the throne of his ancestor David, and rule over the house of Jacob forever. 

But I hadn’t really thought about this part, where Mary asks, “How can this be, since I am a virgin?” I wasn’t sure the word virgin would communicate to these children, and so I tried to think of another way to say it.  I thought about having Mary ask, “How can this be, since I am not married?” but even the youngest children in that room knew that you didn’t have to be married to have a baby.  So there I was, struggling to find the right word, and stammering… “How can this be, since I am not...since I don’t have…since I have never…”  And that’s when one of those fifteen-year-old boys on the front row said, “Done ‘it’?”  “Right!” I said, relieved.  “How can this be, since I have never done it?”  You probably won’t find that translation in even the most modern versions of the Bible, but at the trailer park, that day, it communicated.

And on that day in Nazareth, long ago, Gabriel gave Mary this answer: “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 holy; he will be called Son of God.”  In other words, “It is God himself who cause one of your eggs to become fertile, to start multiplying and dividing, becoming a baby within your womb.  It’s not a big miracle for the one who brought the universe into being; it’s a small miracle—no bigger than a pinhead—but it is a miracle all the same.”  And the look on Mary’s face—that look of absolute and utter disbelief—must have prompted Gabriel to say what he said next: “And now your relative Elizabeth in her old age has also conceived a son; and this is the sixth month for her who was said to be barren.  For nothing will be impossible with God.”

We all know what Mary says next: she says, “Here am I, the servant of the Lord; let it be with me according to your word.”  But I want you to stop and consider what Mary had to stop and consider before she said it.  Although she was not yet married she was “betrothed,” and as Alan Culpepper explains in his commentary on this passage “the marriage would have been arranged by her father.  She would live at home for a year after her betrothal.  Then the groom would come to take her to his home, and the wedding celebration would last for an entire week.  Legally, the marriage was sealed after the engagement.  Thus if Joseph had died before the wedding, Mary would have been considered a widow.”[i]  So, here was Mary, wondering what it would mean to say yes to this angel.  She lived in a small town, and any of you who have lived in a small town know that it doesn’t take much to start tongues wagging and this, the news that Mary was pregnant, would have tongues wagging all over town. 

I’ve told some of you the story about my own wedding, how I got a phone call from my mother on the morning of December 24^th, 1982.  She said, “Jim, I’ve been thinking about your wedding.”

“Have you?”

“Yes.”

“If you get married in May, as you’ve planned, three of your brothers will be out of the country or unable to come.  But if you got married, say, next week, we could all be there.”

I wasn’t sure what to say.  I was supposed to pick Christy up that day and drive her to work.  On the way we stopped at McDonald’s to get some lunch.  She took one bite out of her cheeseburger and than I asked her, “What would you think about getting married next week?”

That was the last bite she took.

We talked about it until I had to take her to work.  She was excited by the prospect but didn’t know what her mother would say.  “You’ll have to ask her,” she said.  And so, after I dropped her off at work I went back to her parents’ house and rang the doorbell.   I asked her mother, Lu, to sit down and then I explained the situation.  It was an anxious moment.  I wanted her to say yes but it would mean an enormous sacrifice of the plans she had made, not to mention trying to pull a wedding together in just over a week.  “Let’s see,” she said, gulping.  “The dresses came yesterday, so that’s good.  We can get the cake made in a week.  We won’t be able to have the reception outside so we’ll have to move it inside.  We’ll have to invite people the best we can…”  And as I heard her rearrange her plans I realized it was going to happen: I was going to get married…in a week!

That was on a Friday.  The next day was Christmas, a Saturday, and the day after that I was sitting in a pew at Faith Baptist in Georgetown, Kentucky, where I was the minister of youth and Christy was the pastor’s daughter.  Her dad, Bill Treadwell, stood before the congregation at the end of the service and said, “Most of you know that my daughter, Christy, and our youth minister, Jim, were planning to get married in May.  They’ve decided to move the date up a little bit.  And so I’d like to invite you to come to their wedding this Saturday, January 1.”  But he never told them why we were moving the wedding up nearly six months.  In the absence of information people resort to imagination, and these people must have imagined that we had to get married.  Tongues were wagging all over that small town, but come Saturday the church was full of people who wished us well, threw handfuls of rice, and spent the next nine months waiting for a baby that never came. 

But here’s the truth: if a baby had come six months after our wedding people would have talked, they would have tut-tutted and said “I told you so!” but it wouldn’t have been the end of the world, would it?  And that’s the difference between our time and Mary’s time.  If Mary turned up pregnant before her wedding no one would believe that it was because “the Holy Spirit had come upon her and the power of the most high had overshadowed her.”  They would assume it was either because Joseph couldn’t wait till the wedding or because she, Mary, had done “it” with someone else.  And they may have come to that conclusion, especially if Joseph told them it wasn’t his child.  If they did, Mary could have paid with her life.  According to Old Testament law if a woman was not a virgin on her wedding night, and her husband brought it to the attention of the elders, “then,” the book of Deuteronomy says, “they shall bring the young woman out to the entrance of her father’s house and the men of her town shall stone her to death, because she committed a disgraceful act in Israel by prostituting herself in her father’s house.  So you shall purge the evil from your midst” (22:21).

I can assure you that every virgin in Israel knew that law, and I am equally sure it was their parents who taught it to them.  “If you are not a virgin on your wedding night you could be stoned to death!” they would warn, in an effort to keep not only their daughters but the nation of Israel pure.  I don’t know how often it actually happened then but it actually happened just a few weeks ago—a thirteen-year-old girl was stoned to death in Somalia while a thousand spectators looked on.  She had been accused of adultery, of having sexual relations with someone who was not her husband.  Wouldn’t they say the same about Mary, when she turned up pregnant and Joseph swore it wasn’t his child?  Surely that thought crossed her mind, along with those terrifying images of the men of her town, picking up stones to hurl at her until she was dead.  In some ways this was Mary’s “Garden of Gethsemane moment,” when she realized that letting God have his way with her life could be the end of it. 

I think about Jesus, struggling in that garden, praying until he sweated blood.  I think of him saying, “Father if it be possible, let this cup pass from me.  Nevertheless not my will but Thine be done.”  It seems that when he came to that place where he could submit his will to the Father’s, where he could put his life completely in God’s hands, he found peace.  He got up from that place, came to his sleeping disciples, and said, “Get up.  Let’s go.  Look, my betrayer is at hand.”  Judas betrayed him with a kiss but Jesus didn’t seem surprised or upset.  Throughout his arrest and trial he remained completely stoic, surprisingly serene.  Two of the Gospel writers say he cried out on the cross but the other two say he absolved his executioners, forgave a penitent thief, commended his spirit into the Father’s hands and peacefully breathed his last.  All the struggle seems to have occurred in the garden, when Jesus was pitting his will against the Father’s.  But after he said “Thy will be done,” the struggle was over, and Jesus went willingly to the cross.

So it was with Mary, it seems, and so it is with each of us.  As long as we are struggling with God, wanting our will and our way, we will never have peace, but when we give in, when we say “Thy will be done,” then peace—perfect peace—will come.  Mary, after she had considered carefully what it might cost her, was able to do what the angel asked.  “Here I am, the servant of the Lord,” she said.  “Let it be with me according to your word.” 

--Jim Somerville