I Christmas, Year B

“MARY’S JOURNEY, AND OURS”
Isaiah 9: 2 – 4, 6 – 7; Psalm 96; Titus 2: 11 – 14; Luke 2: 1 – 20
A sermon by The Rev. Gene Tucker, given at The Church of the Redeemer, Cairo, IL; and at St. James’ Memorial Church, Marion, IL; December 24th, 2005

Last week, we had occasion to talk with our four year old granddaughter on the phone. When we said “hello, Mira”, she answered back, “no, I’m not Mira, I’m Mary!” As the conversation went along, each time we used her name, Mira, she would say, “no, I’m Mary!”

It turned out that she had been in a Christmas pageant at her preschool, and so had come home, telling her mother that she was Mary, and that her two year old sister, Sasha, was Joseph, and that her baby doll, Chiccho, was Jesus. She went around the house, acting out the Christmas story, complete with sheep and shepherds. I guess that many parents have had the same experience at one time or another with their children. It is a great blessing to see even very young children begin to grasp the essentials of the Christmas story, the story of God’s saving act in sending Jesus Christ to enter this world.

But somehow, it seems that our understanding of the Christmas story often stays at about a childhood level….Let me explain what I mean by that: We tend to look at the birth of Jesus Christ pretty much as we see it in our Manger scenes, which are complete with all the elements: the newborn Jesus, Mary and Joseph looking on, the shepherds and their sheep, perhaps some cattle or a camel or two, and even, maybe, the Wise Men. Usually, there’s a star overhead, with straw scattered around the manger itself. Sometimes, we get angels hovering overhead.

We think that all of these elements came together in perfect order, like it would in a fairy tale, just as we see it in our manger scenes.

What’s more, we often may be led to think that we know all there is to know about Jesus’ birth.

But there’s much more to the story than the manger scene would suggest. So, let’s look at some of the elements of it, from Mary’s perspective, for Mary’s journey is also our journey with Jesus Christ…..

First of all, when Mary and Joseph arrived in Bethlehem to register for the census, they already knew that the baby who was to be born was going to be special….No doubt, Joseph had told Mary about the dream he had, in which he was told that Jesus was going to be born of Mary, through the work of the Holy Spirit, and that the son to be born would be called “Immanuel, which means, ‘God with us’.”[1] And Mary had, most likely, also told Joseph about the angel Gabriel’s visit, in which Mary was told essentially the same thing, and that the child would be called “the Son of the Most High.”[2] But no one else knew about the uniqueness of this baby.
Perhaps Mary asked herself “how will the world know that this child is ‘God with us’?”. Or, perhaps Mary quietly wondered, “what form will Jesus’ work in the world take?”

The answers to Mary’s question weren’t long in coming, for pretty soon, the shepherds arrive, telling a fantastic story about angels appearing to them, saying that that had been told that the Messiah, God’s anointed one,[3] had been born in Bethlehem, and that this baby will be the Savior of the world, the Lord. We should pause for a moment at this point and look more closely at these words, “savior” and “lord”…..”Savior” indicates someone who will save people from someone or something. “Lord” indicates sovereignty over someone, in this case, God’s sovereignty.

But Mary and Joseph’s knowledge didn’t stay a secret for very long, for notice that Luke tells us that the shepherds went around telling everyone the news that they had heard from the angels….already, the story is getting out into the wider world.[4]

It’s easy to forget that God’s wonderful work in the birth of Jesus Christ was difficult to understand at the beginning….that’s one of the handicaps of being able to read the entire account of Jesus’ birth in the Bible….because we have the “reader’s perspective”,[5] we can see the whole picture….

Or, at least, we think we can see the whole picture.

The premise of this sermon is to suggest that we are in the same position as Mary….Mary, Luke tells us in verse 19 that Mary “pondered” all these things in her heart. Actually, the Greek word literally means that Mary was “putting together”[6] Mary was putting all this information and these experiences together.

For Mary, her walk with Jesus involved a lot of “putting things together”….Mary did some more treasuring (Luke uses a very similar phrase to describe Mary’s reactions)[7] as she reflected on Jesus’ statement when He was 12 years old and had been left behind in Jerusalem, where He fell in with the teachers in the Temple, when He said “don’t you know I have to be about my Father’s business?”[8]

Then, as Mary watched Jesus’ ministry unfold, and witnessed the miracles He did, she came to understand a little more about who He is. As she watched Him enter Jerusalem on the back of a donkey on Palm Sunday, she saw a little more and understood a little more. As she watched Him hang in agony on a crude wooden cross on Good Friday, she understood a little more. Then, when He appeared in His resurrection body on Easter morning, she began to see the pieces really come together.

Little by little, Mary came to see how God’s plan of salvation was working out.

It was suggested earlier in this sermon that our journey with Jesus is much like Mary’s journey….

Our journey with Christ begins with a knowledge of Him….like Mary, we learn first just who He is, as Savior of the world, and as Lord of all life, including our life. The source of our knowledge is Holy Scripture. It’s from the pages of the Bible that our knowledge springs.

We see Him going about His father’s business in our lives, speaking with the authority that comes from God alone.[9]

From there, we begin to see His working in our lives, making changes, sometime miraculous changes as we are delivered from debilitating doubts, and from addictions which threaten to snuff out our lives, literally or spiritually. We see Jesus working on other people’s lives in similar ways….that’s one of the main reasons for the Church to exist, so that we can see Christ working in each other’s lives.

We begin to understand a little more of Jesus servant ministry as we stand with Mary, looking at His sacrifice on the cross for our sins, and for the sins of the whole world. We can’t understand it, as we look at it…..how can the Son of God, “God with us”, come as a servant to suffer and die a horrible death in order to redeem us?

But we begin to understand the larger picture, as we “put it all together” on Easter morning…Jesus’ resurrection begins to make sense of it all, for the final enemy, that is, death, has been conquered for all time and for eternity. His victory is already our victory, His victory will be our victory when our life in this life ends.

Mary must’ve done a lot of pondering and treasuring…..that’s normal and natural, given the fact that God is at work in the events of Jesus’ life. Whenever that happens, it’s not “business as usual”. And God’s business is being done in your life and in mine, every day. So, we journey with Christ, seeing Him work in our lives, changing us, redeeming us, giving us the guarantee of life forevermore in His name.

Our task is to learn more and more about God’s working in our lives, and then to do what the shepherds did, to turn right around and tell everyone the Good News.

AMEN.



[1] Matthew 1: 18 - 25
[2] Gabriel’s announcement to Mary is found in Luke 1: 26 – 38.
[3] “Messiah” literally means “the anointed one”. The Greek equivalent is “Christ”, which means the same thing.
[4] Verses 17 & 18
[5] Which is how a writer refers to it, that is, the ability to look back on events and see the whole story after it had happened.
[6] The Greek word is symballousa, which comes from the prefix sym (meaning “together”) and the verb ballo (which means “to place, or put”).
[7] Luke 2: 51 “His mother treasured all these things in her heart.”
[8] Luke 2: 41 – 52 contains the entire story.
[9] Luke 4: 32 says that Jesus’ hearers were amazed at His message, because it had authority.

3 Advent, Year B

“WHOSE MINISTRY IS IT, ANYWAY?”
Isaiah 65: 17 – 25; Canticle 15 (for the Psalm); I Thessalonians 5: 12 – 28; John 3: 23 – 30
A meditation by The Rev. Gene Tucker, given at St. Stephen’s Church, Harrisburg, IL; December 11th, 2005


Recently, when Bishop Beckwith made his annual homecoming to the Church of the Redeemer down in Cairo, I got up at the time of the announcements to welcome him “to his church”. Without so much as blinking an eye, he responded “well, it’s not my church, it’s God’s church”…..I stood corrected!

Actually, my slip of the memory and the bishop’s response are in keeping with a theme I’ve heard often over the years: “it’s not our ministry, but Christ’s ministry”. So, you can imagine, having heard this time and again from various sources, that it’s easy to become sensitive to a ministry that has an individual’s name in it, instead of the Lord’s….We could probably cite many examples, from the ranks of the televangelists, to local churches whose name reflects the importance of an individual, rather that the Lord’s.

Well, the question of whose ministry it is describes our Gospel reading for today, from John, Chapter Three…..

John the Baptist’s disciples come to him, saying that people are beginning to go to Jesus’ disciples for baptism….It’s as if (if we could paraphrase their comments) they are saying “wait a minute, don’t you (John the Baptist) hold the franchise on baptisms?”. Or “isn’t yours the registered trademark for repentance of sins?” They seem to be concerned about loss of religious turf, if you will.

This problem….that is, the competition between the disciples of Jesus and those of John the Baptist, would exist for many years….In fact, when we read Acts 19: 1 – 7, we can see that, some 30 years later or so, St. Paul encountered a group of John the Baptist’s disciples in the city of Ephesus, who had known of Jesus’ work, but who had been baptized into John’s baptism, which was a baptism of repentance of sins only. Paul told them, “John baptized with the baptism of repentance, telling people to believe in the one who was to come, that is, in Jesus.”

Now, this sort of a concern didn’t die with the end of the New Testament period…..Evidence abounds that the same concerns John the Baptist’s disciples had are alive and well in the 21st Century…..

Look at the televangelists (they’re always a good target for criticism, aren’t they?): How many ministries bear the name of the televangelist, instead of the Lord’s name? I won’t mention any examples, but invite you to take stock in your own minds, based on your own observations. Too many, I would guess, bear the name of an individual, and not the name of the Lord.

In our local communities, is there jealousy when a ministry is undertaken by one church, and not by another? It happens, you know.

In our local church, oftentimes it is far too easy to think that people will want to be in the “limelight” as a result of a ministry they undertake. It seems as though the motivation for the ministry’s unfolding is to get the credit for the successes. People also can and do become quite territorial about the ministries they undertake…I invite you to fill in the blank for St. Stephen’s:___________________ Does any of this exist here at St. Stephen’s? Hopefully not!

All of these things invite the onlooker’s focus to be on the individual, and not on the Lord.

What was John the Baptist’s response to his disciples in our Gospel reading for today? The text from might seem to be a little confusing….essentially, John says that, even as in ancient Israel there was a bridegroom’s friend who made all the arrangements for the wedding, and then rejoiced when it all “came off” well, even so, John rejoiced in the ministries being undertaken by Jesus and His disciples, knowing that God is receiving the glory, not any human being.

So, the challenge comes to us today in the form of three questions….

1. Do I really know the Lord Jesus Christ (I think getting to really know the Lord is a lifelong pursuit – there is so much to learn!);
   
   
2. If I do know the Lord, then just who am I serving; and
   
   
3. Can people see the Lord when they see me undertaking a ministry in the Lord’s name?

Food for thought.

AMEN.