(December 22, 2002 Sermon Transcript)

Luke 1:26-38

        Dear friends in Christ, as we gather on the fourth Sunday of this Advent Season, the text writes, if you’ll pardon the expression, an expectant note in a somewhat strange key. We are gathered together this day, to get ready, on this last Sunday of Advent, to get ready for the birth of our Lord, Jesus Christ. And so we are compelled to just get on with it. Bring on the cake, light the birthday candles, sing "Happy Birthday Jesus!"

        But let it be said, that the day of Christmas is, in fact, the first of the season, not the ending. It seems we have almost a photonegative of reality; the world vs. the church. Everything builds up to Christmas in the world, and suddenly Christmas comes, and after the day is had, the season is over, and we start getting ready for Valentine’s Day, or whatever comes next.

        But in the church it is not so. For in the church, Christmas is just the first day in the Christmas season, a day and a time in which the birth of our Savior continues to be celebrated an additional forty days.

        Be careful. Throughout the course of this sermon, numbers become important. So get ready to crunch the numbers and to do the math!

        God has told us that we should expect the impossible from Him. And so, we read this text and we say, " He sure does.. A virgin is going to conceive and the son of God will be carried into human flesh and He will live among us". And our cynical mind says, "No way, Jose".

        God has always told us to believe in the impossible. In fact, I would suggest to you that faith has as its object that which is seemingly impossible. Otherwise, faith would not at all be required of us. For indeed God grants to us all kinds of things.

        First of all, remember Elizabeth. Here she is, Elizabeth, old enough to be your grandmother, pregnant out to here with a baby who will be called John, and who will be known as John the Baptist. And we find that this little boy, is going to be the greatest among the prophets, according to Jesus, that no flesh born of woman would be greater than him, other that Jesus Christ our Lord.

        And then remember Zechariah, the old priest, who, by lot, takes his turn at the altar to offer incense, and as a result is visited by an angel who expresses to him a promise that in his old age, his wife will bear a son, and he will be called John.

        And then, operating under the mode of "this is too good to be true", he does not quite believe the message of Gabriel, who stands before him. (How do you not believe an angel standing before you?) And so he is struck dumb for ten or nine months. And so he learns the lesson that we should believe what God’s word says. He did not think it was possible but with God all things are indeed possible.

        Now at the risk of making your head spin a little bit, please understand that Gabriel did not speak his first word about this in the setting we have just described. That is, to Zechariah. Nor for that matter, to Mary. Instead we found those words recorded in the Book of Daniel, written hundreds of years earlier. For in Elizabeth’s sixth month, we are given the exact time. And indeed, from the time of the announcement (here comes the numbers) made to Zechariah to the time the announcement is made to Mary, to the time Christ is born, to the time Jesus is then present at the temple for circumcision and for dedication, that indeed we find a rather interesting number. For when we add all the numbers up, it comes to 490 days, or seventy weeks.

        Now Daniel. For in Daniel, we read, Seventy 'sevens' are decreed for your people and your holy city to finish transgression, to put an end to sin, to atone for wickedness, to bring in everlasting righteousness, to seal up vision and prophecy and to anoint the most holy.

        Exactly seventy weeks, as Daniel was told by the angel Gabriel, from the time of the announcement of the angel Gabriel until the time Jesus was presented at the temple.

        When God makes promises He always keeps them. Indeed when Daniel was making the prophecy, he has to be asking himself, "This sounds impossible!" But with God, of course, nothing is impossible.

        God is born. God is made flesh. He dwells among us, and He does so at a specific time. It is announced at the sixth month of Elizabeth’s pregnancy.

        And then, there is the place where all of this is to occur. A town called Nazareth. My wife, my dear Linda, who is home ill today, has a clear distinction that she makes when we do our travels. We drive through small towns, and we drive through what she sometimes classifies as "dippy little towns".

        Now, let me explain. (Is anyone here from Encino, New Mexico? Good!) Pagosa Springs is a small town. Encino, New Mexico is a "dippy little town". You are able to tell that when you drive through it. if you don’t know where it it, you’ll have to look it up in your atlas. It’s not too far from Vaughn. That probably won’t help you much. But there is a difference.

        In the eyes of Judah, Nazareth was a "dippy little town". It was a four-mile walk to go to the nearest Walmart from there. Or whatever constituted a Walmart in those days. If you wanted to do some serious shopping, you had to go by foot out of a back road out of Nazareth to get to another town to do anything. It wasn’t held in very high regard.

        You’ll recall one of Christ’s disciples told that this was Jesus of Nazareth, responded with scorn, "What good can come from Nazareth?" Often times, during the course of Jesus life, He was referred to, rather condescendingly, as "Jesus, of Nazareth", you see.

        God would say, with Him even Nazareth is possible, as the home of the Messiah. While the world would say, "what an unlikely spot". Indeed, with God, even Nazareth can be the home of the one who saves the world.

        The angel Gabriel makes his announcement also to a rather unlikely woman. Using the word "woman" is stretching the term a little bit. It seems that, at most, Mary was about 14 years old! Perhaps 13. And yet, there she was, this young maiden, a peasant girl, perhaps picking out her wedding invitations. And then suddenly the angel Gabriel appears to her, which would have been astounding enough, but then he says to her, in the midst of all her terror and fright in the presence of a holy angel, he says to her, "Oh you who are a highly favored one", and she had to wonder, "What does this mean?" - a good Lutheran question, by the way.

        And so, he responds to her. He explains it clearly to her in verses 32 - 34 of our text. He says, He will be great and will be called the Son of the Most High. The Lord God will give him the throne of his father David,and he will reign over the house of Jacob forever; his kingdom will never end.

        "Oh and by the way, you’re going to have a baby, and it will be by the Holy Ghost."

        I wish I had a videotape of Mary’s face at the time of this announcement, because I am convinced that her jaw hit the floor of whatever she was standing over, and yet one must marvel at the grace of this young lady as she says, May it be to me as you have said. Let it happen. If this is the way in which I may serve God, so be it.

        So what does it mean to have favor with God? To be pregnant before your wedding day? To be the one who is to give birth to God’s Son? To be the one to give birth to the One who is to be the fulfillment of every Messianic promise ever made by God? To be the one who listens again to promises of Genesis 3:15, that the seed of the woman will come and finally crush the head of the serpent? That the One who sits on David’s throne will be sitting there forever and ever?

        And indeed, that the One who is conceived and born by the virgin will be called "Emmanuel", God-with-us, from the prophet Isaiah. A virgin mother? An eternal king? The son of the most high God in human flesh? Impossible! But I tell you, that with God we’ve come to expect the impossible.

        She asks a pretty good question of the angel. Mary was greatly troubled at his words and wondered what kind of greeting this might but the angel said to her, "Do not be afraid, Mary, you have found favor with God". And then she asks, "How will this be," Mary asked the angel, "since I am a virgin?"

        Pretty good question. And she gets the answer. The angel said, "The Holy Spirit will come upon you, and the power of the Most High will overshadow you. So the holy one to be born will be called the Son of God.

        Now our sexually cynical world laughs or even dismisses such a claim. It is simply impossible. Indeed we are just a little too scientific. Or maybe we are just a little too sophisticated or just a little too street smart and we think of such things as being a "tall tale" from the sense of the world’s perspective. And we say that this is all terribly unspiritual anyway.

        But let me tells you what rides on this truth that scripture reveals. What rides on the virgin birth is clearly the very heart of what the Christian faith stands on and believes. Remember the words to the meaning of the second article of the creed? These words: That Jesus is true God, begotten of his father throughout eternity, and also true man, born of the virgin Mary. Consider the ramifications if it were not so.

        The virgin birth has to be so. If the One who is to be born is to be called God. The divinity of Jesus Christ Himself is at stake with the whole idea of the reality of the virgin birth. And if Jesus Christ is not deity, if He is not God, then when He dies on the cross, then only a man dies. And there is no payment for your sin, nor mine. And then the purpose of his coming is totally thwarted. And there is nothing ahead of us but sin, death, the grave, and hell itself.

        All of this rests on the virgin birth and we ought not dismiss it at all lightly. For we must remember that with God, all things are indeed possible. He is, after all, the second Adam. He is the new head of all humanity. It is from Him that all God’s children yet again come, as was intended by the first Adam and thwarted by sin. And so our salvation itself is dependent on the divinity of the One who was to be born to Mary. And that divinity cannot be, unless of course, He is born of a virgin. This child of Mary, is also then our substitute. He is the world’s redeemer. He is the one who comes, I guess you could call it, sort of covertly, secretly. Not with flash of armies or sailing of navies, but from "no-name" Nazareth, conceived of a peasant woman.

        Of course that’s’ not the way we would have run the show. We would have run it differently. We ask, "is that any way for God to act?" And I would answer to you, "Absolutely!" For God has always demonstrated his power through weakness. He demonstrates his power through a baby lying in a manger. He demonstrates his power through a seemingly insignificant itinerant preacher who travels not very far from his birrthplace in any time through his life. And yet, his influence has been greater than any army, or navy that has every sailed or marched.

        Please understand that God does things his way. And all I can say is, "Thank God He does". Because He is the one who is wise. And He is the one is knowledgeable, and He is the one who has at his very heart our salvation, and our redemption. And so He does it exactly the way it should be done. How else would God do it?

        And so , if we had had an ultrasound of Mary’s baby, we would have seen nothing particularly unusual. It was, after all, a baby. And we might add, a baby boy. And so we find this; that we must trust our ears, rather than our eyes. We must trust what God’s word says because God can only speak the truth. It is, I think, good preparation for Christmas, if you will.

        Yes, close your eyes and open your ears. A virgin will conceive and bear a son. And you see, it happened just as God said it would He is king of king and lord of lords and He is holding our humanity perfectly before the father, pointing out the nail prints and the scar in his side, yet to this day, to demonstrate that your sin and mine has been paid for. And that guilt can no longer be consigned to us, because his son has taken away the stain of sin, and taken away the guilt and shame which should have proceeded from it And has, rather, given us fellowship with Him, now and forever.

        It is time we realize again that, most certainly, all things are possible with God. In Jesus’ name, Amen