For People Like Us

For People Like Us

Rev. Dr. Tom Sorenson, Pastor

December 20, 2015

Scripture: Luke 1:39-55

Let us pray: May the words of my mouth and the meditations of all of our hearts be acceptable in your sight O God, our strength and our redeemer. Amen.

So Christmas is almost here. On this coming Thursday evening we will gather for our traditional Christmas Eve service to proclaim the birth of Jesus and welcome him once more into the world. We’ll read the old familiar stories. We’ll sing the old familiar carols. The choir of my former church, Monroe Congregational UCC, will join us and share their music with us. Our music group will sing too. We’ll light our candles from the Christ candle in the Advent wreath and take the light of Christ into our hearts and out into the world. It really is a special time of year. Thanks be to God!

We just heard a couple of those old familiar stories that we’ll hear again on Christmas Eve. Both of our readings this morning come from Luke’s story of Jesus’ birth. They are among the only true Advent texts in the whole Bible because they are among the very few texts that actually talk about a coming birth of Jesus Christ. They are about Mary going to visit her relative Elizabeth after he has been conceived in her by the Holy Spirit but before he is born. We hear of Mary’s meeting with Elizabeth, whom the text calls Mary’s relative. Then we hear Mary sing of the promise her as yet unborn son will bring to the world. She does that in the second reading we heard, the magnificent poem known as the Magnificat, from its first word in Latin. Many of us have sung it in Latin: “Magnificat anima mea Dominum.” The Magnificat is beautiful ancient poetry. It’s so beautiful that it’s easy to overlook how revolutionary it is, but I’ll leave that issue for another day. Today I want to focus on Mary’s praise of God and her description of herself, of her station in live. There’s a lot for us to learn and to celebrate there, so come along as we join Mary as she begins her hymn to God.

The Magnificat begins with Mary saying “My soul glorifies the Lord and my spirit rejoices in God my Savior, for he has been mindful of the humble estate of his servant. From now on all generations will call me blessed, for the Mighty One has done great things for me—holy is his name. His mercy extends to those who fear him, from generation to generation.” NIV Mary is fully aware of the awesome thing that God has asked her to do. She is to do nothing less than give birth to the Son of God. God the Holy Spirit has created God’s own Son within her, and she will bring God’s own Son into the world. That’s the great thing God has done for her. Now, that would be a truly remarkable thing for God to do with any women, but Mary is aware that it is particularly remarkable that God has done it with her. In her song she refers to her “humble estate.” Now, we actually know very little about Jesus’ mother Mary. The Christian tradition, especially the Roman Catholic and Orthodox traditions, have spun a lot of stories about her. They have constructed whole doctrines around her. That’s OK I guess, but we Protestants don’t go in for that sort of thing so much. We want to know what the Bible says, and the Bible says next to nothing about Mary. About all we know is that she was a woman from the tiny backwater town of Nazareth. We think her husband was a carpenter, or perhaps a stonemason. In Mary’s world that would mean he amounted to essentially nothing, for tradespeople like carpenters were the lowest of the low and poorest of the poor in that world. We know that Mary was Jesus’ mother, and there are references in the Gospels to Jesus having had brothers and sisters, presumably but not definitely from Mary. We know that Matthew and Luke say that Jesus’ conception was from the Holy Spirit, not from Mary’s husband Joseph. That’s about all there is in the Bible about Mary.

It’s not much, but it is enough to tell us at least one really important thing. It tells us that Mary was a person of utterly no significance. Only her family and friends knew she even existed. No one else had ever heard of her. She’s done nothing to bring attention to herself. She’d accomplished nothing remarkable before she became Jesus’ mother. I think she means all of those things about herself when she sings of her “humble estate.”

She wasn’t anyone special, yet she is the one God chose to become the mother of the Son of God. Some parts of the larger Christian tradition say that was because she was especially virtuous; but the Bible doesn’t say that, and I think it’s really important that it doesn’t. See, we learn from Mary—and from many other stories in the Bible—that God prefers to work primarily through people of no special repute in the world. God works through ordinary people. God even works through sinners. Not that Mary was much of a sinner, but Jacob was. He cheated his brother out of his inheritance, was married to two sisters at the same time, and had children not only by them but by their maids. David was. He raped Bathsheba and had her husband killed to cover up his crime. Moses was. He was a murderer, having killed an Egyptian who was abusing a Hebrew slave. Paul was. He approved the mob stoning St. Stephen to death before Paul’s own conversion to the faith of Jesus Christ. I guess compared to these titans of the Bible’s stories Mary was a bit of a saint, but she wasn’t anyone special. God chose someone in no way special to be the mother of God’s Son.

God chose someone in no way special to be the mother of God’s Son, and that, folks, is extraordinarily good news indeed. Jesus came into the world by a mother who was no one special. He came into the world as no one special. He grew up as no one special, an insignificant boy in an insignificant town, probably learning to follow in Joseph’s footsteps as a carpenter or stonemason. And all of those truths about both Jesus and Mary tell us something really important about both Jesus and the God he represents on earth. See, Mary and Jesus were people like us. Or at least Mary was, and Jesus was until he began his extraordinary ministry of teaching and healing and living into his identity as the Son of God. They were people like us. Good enough people. Decent, caring people, but not people of any extraordinary importance. Not people the world knew anything about, at least at first. Not famous people. Not powerful people. Not rich people. In other words, about as much like us as a person from that very different world could be.

They were people like us, and God came through them precisely to people like us. God didn’t have to come into the world as a nobody, but could we really relate to a Christ who was rich and powerful? I don’t think I could. I don’t know what it’s like to be rich and powerful. I’ve never been much of either. But I have been, and am, a person a bit like Jesus and Mary. A person of no particular repute. A decent enough person, but not a special one in any significant way. Jesus came as a person like us for people like us. O yes, Jesus may be for the rich and famous too; but mostly Jesus is for people like us. People the world doesn’t think much of but people God loves more than we can ever imagine. People God loves infinitely, and our finite minds can’t ever grasp fully what that means. We can understand that God came precisely to people like us. Ordinary people doing the best we can. Ordinary people deeply needing God’s forgiveness. Ordinary people deeply needing God’s grace. Ordinary people needing to know that even if the world doesn’t think much of us we aren’t insignificant in the bigger picture of things. Ordinary people who need to feel God’s love and God’s care. That’s what we’ll celebrate this week at Christmas. God coming through a woman like as a man like us for people like us.

That my friends is the great good news of Christmas. The Son of God born as a traveler with no place to stay come not to people of worldly importance but to people like us. Come to show us that to God we matter. To God we matter a lot. To God we matter enough to be born for and even enough to die for. Come to show us that God loves all of God’s people, not just the ones the world thinks matter. That’s what Christmas is all about. Thanks be to God! Amen.