“Nothing”

As we continue to experience the Word of the Lord together, Let us Pray. Give us we pray, O God, thoughts higher than own thoughts, prayers better than our own prayers, powers beyond our biological possibilities, that we may spend and be spent in the preaching and hearing of Thy Word. Amen.

Open your ears and your hearts to hear The Word of the Lord. Luke 1.26-38.

The Word of the Lord…Thanks be to God.

Nothing will be impossible with God. Nothing. It stares us in the face, especially at this time of year. I’ve got all sorts of impossibilities that I’m trying to overcome. I’ve got shopping to accomplish people. And I’ve got family to plan for and around. We love living near all our relatives, don’t get me wrong. But everyone’s got a holiday tradition, and we all want to spend some of this precious time together. And you certainly can add others. You’ve not only got all of the offerings that we as a church have put on the calendar, you’ve got office functions. There’s not enough. There’s not enough time, not enough money to buy everyone the gifts we’d like to, not enough exercise machine availability to work off the not enough healthy type food that is consumed. Our lives are whirlwinds, how can we think that nothing is impossible. Impossible is woven into our existence.

Abraham Heschel once suggested that humans do not live by needs alone, but by hopes, which we can barely articulate. ‘A person is what he or she hopes for.’ Though we try to manufacture hopes with our busyness and cheerful yet unrealistic optimism, we find virtually all of our home-grown attempts to instill hope simply masquerade as hope, but do not fill the deep and profound need we so desperately await.

This story in Luke finds a setting that seems ordinary enough. Here is a young woman, probably around 12 years old, with the same basic hopes and expectations of any ordinary Jewish girl of that day: to marry, bear children, care for a household, work hard, and grow old.

There seems to be one constant with the traditional Advent passages. Fear is present. “Do not be afraid, Mary,” the angel says in verse 30. It is understood that one might have an ordinary fear when visited by an angel. It is present when the angel speaks to Zechariah in verse 13, to Joseph in Matthew 1, and to the shepherds in chapter of Luke. Fear is common in this time of year, as we read about it seemingly every week leading up to Christmas.

And fear is as much a part of our condition as the need for hope. Frederick Buechner suggests that Mary is not the only one in this scene to be trembling:

She struck the angel Gabriel as hardly old enough to have a child at all, let alone this child, but he’d been entrusted with the message to give her, and he gave it…As he said it, he only hoped she wouldn’t notice that beneath the great, golden wings he himself was trembling with fear to think that the whole future of creation hung now on the answer of a girl.¹

But Mary’s fear seems different from our fears, which often lock the doors of our hearts from wonder. Hers is a holy fear that somehow keeps the heart open to mystery and hope, demonstrating that fear and faith can co-exist in the same human heart.

Gabriel explains in verse 35, that “The Holy Spirit will come upon you.” O how the Holy Spirit gets us out of so many jams! Gabriel mentions Mary’s cousin Elizabeth, as if conceiving in old age is equivalent to conceiving as a virgin, and then ends with that statement, “Nothing will be impossible with God.”

We don’t know how long Gabriel had to wait for an answer. We’ve always assumed that the answer came quickly, and perhaps it did. But, we do know that Mary loved to ponder things in her heart, and I like to think that everyone has to wait during advent, and not even archangels get off scot-free. I hope Gabriel had to wait, that would be some poetic justice. But after waiting, Mary spoke with a simplicity and depth few, if any, preachers can muster. “Here I am, the servant of the Lord; let it be with me according to your Word.”

I have asserted this year during one sermon that the opposite of love is not hate, but fear. I John 4.18, “Perfect love casts out fear.” To live an Advent hope is not to live in denial, that the fears aren’t founded or real. There is plenty to fear, and the principalities and powers thrive on exploiting those fears and realities. Nor is Advent hope to live in passive resignation without claiming responsibility for that hope.

Perhaps as we approach the manger and hold perfect love, love divine, in our arms, our fear might be a holy fear, full of wonder, mystery and surprise. For we see that nothing is impossible with God, not even a young woman giving birth in which the outpouring of divine love and a distilling of human love is found in a child.

Think about that. Off in the fringes is found the hope for the future, for the world. Imagine it is 1809. The international scene is tumultuous. Napoleon is sweeping through Austria; blood is flowing freely. Nobody then cared about babies. But the world was overlooking some terribly significant births.

That same year, Alfred Tennyson was born to an obscure minister and his wife. The child would one day greatly affect the literary world in a marked manner. On the American continent, Oliver Wendell Holmes was born in Cambridge, Massachusetts. And not far away in Boston, Edgar Allan Poe began his life. It was also in that same year that a physician named Darwin and his wife named their child Charles Robert. And that same year produced the cries of a newborn infant in a rugged log cabin in Hardin County, Kentucky. The baby’s name? Abraham Lincoln.

If there had been news broadcasts at that time, I’m certain these words would have been heard: “The destiny of the world is being shaped on an Austrian battlefield today.” But history was actually being shaped in the cradles of England and America. Similarly, everyone thought taxation was the big news – when Jesus was born. But a young Jewish woman cradled the biggest news of all.

The waiting is almost over, but through our waiting we have found meaning, fashioned from our hope in the One who has indeed come. He lives within us, as he lived within an ordinary girl in an ordinary town year ago. And we find that our despair and fear are no matches for a God for whom nothing will be impossible. Let us live without fear and in the assurance that with God, nothing is impossible. Amen.