4 Advent, Year C

"God is Getting Ready, Too"
Given on Saturday, December 23, 2006 at Church of the Redeemer, Cairo, IL; and on Sunday, December 24, 2006 at St. Stephen’s Church, Harrisburg, IL.


God’s getting ready, too….

All through Advent, our readings have been preparing us for the arrival of Jesus Christ, whose birth we celebrate on Christmas Day.

Remember back with me to some of the major themes of our Advent Gospel readings:

On our First Sunday of Advent, we heard Luke 21, and the reading which called us to “wake up” for the “kingdom of God is near!”.[1]

For the Second Sunday, the theme was the witness of John the Baptist, the “voice crying in the wilderness, ‘prepare the way of the Lord, make his paths straight.’”[2]

Then, last week, we heard John the Baptist tell the crowds who’d come out to see him to “bear fruit worthy of repentance.”[3]

All the while that our readings have been calling us to “get ready”, we recognize from our reading for today that God has been getting ready, too.

As we begin to look at the Gospel reading for today, Luke, chapter one, we should back up into the earlier part of this first chapter to see the various things that have taken place, which lead up to today’s encounter of Mary with her cousin, Elizabeth….look at the various pieces that God is putting together: Gabriel’s announcement to Zechariah (John the Baptist’s father) that his barren wife will bear a son,[4]and Gabriel’s announcement to Mary that she will bear the “son of the Most High”.[5]

And now, in today’s reading, we see some more of the pieces coming together, God’s “getting ready”:

We should begin by remembering Gabriel’s work in telling Zechariah and then Mary that they would soon have baby boys coming into their families….God is making His plans known.

Then, we should take careful note that God is able to work around the impossible: Luke makes it clear that Elizabeth was old, and was also barren.[6] As if that wasn’t enough, Mary told Gabriel that she was a virgin, and without a husband.

Notice the work of the Holy Spirit[7] in the reactions of the baby in Elizabeth’s womb, as well as Elizabeth’s praise of Mary, which will be echoed in just a minute in Mary’s song, the Magnificat (“From now on, all generations will call me blessed”).[8]…God is “making connections” between the various persons who will carry out His will. We might call these reactions “divine encouragement” that God’s will was being carried out.

Of great importance to Luke is the fact that God works with the down-and-out, the humble of the earth.[9] Mary was most likely only a peasant girl, perhaps in her teens when Gabriel came to tell her the news of God’s plans for her and for the world.

Well, what lessons can we learn from “God’s getting ready” as we hear it today? Perhaps the following are important for us to look back over our shoulder to see God at work in each of our lives:

First of all, God is going to “get the word out” somehow…We might recognize God’s voice when we hear someone else say something to us that seems to “resonate” especially deeply (perhaps, in itself, the work of the Holy Spirit, working with our spirit?). We might hear God’s voice during our Scripture reading, perhaps a verse that seems to leap off the page at us….there are countless ways God speaks to us. How has He spoken to us in times past?

Then, remember that God works around the impossible….the barriers and obstacles we face in life are nothing to God. How has God opened the closed doors in our lives?

God “makes the connections”….I used to have a spiritual director once who said, “We often know what God’s will is by what God makes possible!” How true! How true in my own life, as one closed door suddenly and unexpectedly opened to a wider and better view than I had ever been able to imagine….that’s how God works….And, God’s plans for us are always better than our plans for us: imagine how we might remember Mary, if she had told Gabriel, “No, tell God to get someone else.” (I think Mary could well have said, “No”.) But, we call her “blessed” exactly because she said “May it be to me as you have said.”

God can only work with the humble…the proud and the mighty, He will remove from their seats. For God to be able to use us for His purposes, we need to be like potter’s clay, moldable in God’s hands, just as Mary was.

So, God is also “getting ready” for the birth of His Son, working with the human beings who would be faithful to God’s plans.

God is also getting ready for the rebirth of His Son in our hearts. May we be blessed for answering, with Mary, “here we are, the servants of the Lord.”

AMEN.


[1] Luke 21: 25 - 31
[2] Luke 3: 1 - 6
[3] Luke 3: 7 - 18
[4] Luke 1: 5 - 25
[5] Luke 1: 26 - 38
[6] Note the parallels to Abraham’s wife, Sarah (Genesis 17: 15 – 19), who was also old and unable to bear a son.
[7] The work of the Holy Spirit figures very prominently in Luke’s Gospel, and also in the Acts of the Apostles, also written by Luke.
[8] Like 1: 48
[9] God’s care for and use of the humble is a consistent theme throughout Luke, as is God’s use of women to carry out His plans.