Biblical Text

You can read Luke 1.26-38 here.

Sermon Video

You can watch the sermon video here.

Sermon Transcript

[Note: The actual sermon will differ somewhat from what I had typed.]

The last time I preached, we dealt with Matthew’s account describing how an angel had visited Joseph to tell him that, though the child conceived in Mary was holy, Joseph should not be afraid of Mary or the child and that he should not think about having a non-consummated marriage with her that was tantamount to a divorce. Today we turn to the Gospel of Luke and focus our attention on the Annunciation to Mary.
While Christalaya does not have any denominational affiliations, we do have strong Baptist leanings. And we are also most heavily influenced by Protestant theology. While this has a lot to commend it for, there is one massive thing that I find somewhat lacking in Protestant circles – we just don’t give Mary her due. We rarely, if ever, speak of her in our churches. During Advent, we may sing Mary Did You Know? but for the rest of the year she remains unknown to us.
We are perhaps afraid that, were we to pay her any attention, people would, in droves, begin to transform that attention – that reverence – into worship. That this has happened in the past, and still does today, would barely be contested by anyone. But the fault for this lies with the church leadership – leaders who did not teach their congregations clearly and who allowed false worship to spread throughout the churches. That is not Mary’s fault and it is time now, five centuries after the start of the Protestant Reformation, to restore Mary to her rightful place in the church.
Do I sense some of you shifting uneasily in your seats? Are you starting to wonder what I mean and if I intend to take you down a slippery slope on which Mary is given too much importance and on which we will be tempted to remove Jesus from the center of our faith? Then, do not be afraid.
You see, I am quite sure that you will not have any issues with what I say once you have heard it all. We need to restore Mary to her rightful place in the church because the church has, for the most part, taken one of two extreme routes. On the one hand, we have given her adoration that borders on – and in some cases crosses over to – worship. On the other hand, we have ignored her completely, treating her as though she were of absolutely no importance. The first position makes us risk becoming idolaters, for Mary is not God and should not be worshipped.
The second position makes us lose out on learning how to live coram deo – that is, in the presence of God – for she gives us many examples of how faith is made tangible in life. So one of our tasks for today, one minor task for today, is to restore Mary to her rightful and proper place within the church.
The major task, of course, is to understand what God was doing and has done in and through Jesus’ conception and birth. In order to accomplish these two goals, I have split this sermon into two parts. In the first, I wish to draw three parallels between our passage and the account in Genesis 1 – the void, the vehicle and the voice. In the second part, I wish to discuss what Luke was trying to do through his narrative about the Annunciation to Mary.
So let’s start with the parallels. Our first point of parallel is the void. In Genesis 1, we read, “Now the earth was formless and empty.” This is in verse 2. But in verse 1 we read, “In the beginning God created the heavens and the earth.” But before God began the major chunk of creation that is described in the rest of the chapter, the earth was formless and empty. It was simply a big rock floating in the heavens, devoid of character, lacking purpose. It was formless, having no clearly defined regions, and empty, having no clear reason for existence.
In a similar way, Mary was created by God. But as her own words indicate, she could not have children since she was a virgin. Her womb, though designed by God to bear life, was, due to her situation, a void, a space only filled with impossibilities. Just as we are told that the Earth had no form and was a void, an emptiness, that had no clearly defined reason for being, so also Mary tells Gabriel that, since she was a virgin, her womb could not fulfill its biological purpose.
So we get to the second parallel – the vehicle. In Genesis 1, right after we are told that the Earth was formless and void, we are told that the Spirit of God hovered over the Earth. As long as the Spirit of God was inactive the Earth could not move beyond the desolation of formlessness and vacuity.
As long as the Spirit of God did not act on it the Earth would remain purposeless and empty, a barren, empty wasteland floating aimlessly through the emptiness of space. But once the brooding Spirit of God began to act on the Earth, the Earth began to have a purpose – that of bearing life.
In much the same way, in response to Mary’s wondering question about how his words could be fulfilled in the face of the fact that she was a virgin, Gabriel tells her that the Holy Spirit would overshadow her.
The verb ‘to overshadow’ means ‘to render something less important’. Something would normally be important and carry great weight, but, in light of something new, that important thing is made less weighty and made to carry less importance.
Mary being a virgin presented a genuine and normally impossible obstacle to her becoming pregnant. Her objection to Gabriel was based on a real situation of impossibility. The Old Testament had numerous instances where a formerly barren woman had become pregnant. We can think of Sarah, and Hannah as prime examples of this. Through them, God had previously demonstrated his power over the death of barrenness. However, all these women had husbands and had conceived in normal, natural ways without anything out of the ordinary happening to them.
However, Mary’s situation was different. It is not that she had tried to become pregnant and had failed. Rather, she was a virgin and fully intended to remain that way till she was married to Joseph. In this situation, her being a virgin was an obstacle heretofore never overcome.
But Gabriel tells her that the Holy Spirit would overshadow her, sweeping away her normally impossible obstacle as though it were nothing.
Just as the Spirit of God had hovered over the Earth and had overcome its lifelessness without any other agency, so also the Holy Spirit would come over her and overcome the lifeless impossibilities of her womb and fill it not just with the possibility of life, but with the actuality of life. The Spirit of God was the original vehicle of creation, bringing life out of what was lifeless, giving form to what was formless, assigning purpose to what was purposeless.
In a similar way, the Holy Spirit alone would be the vehicle bringing in Mary, a new life inside her, thereby fulfilling the biological purpose of her womb in a new way.
And that brings us to the third parallel – the voice. In the account of Genesis 1 we repeatedly read the phrase, ‘And God said’ followed by a description of how whatever God said came to pass. The biblical account of creation in Genesis 1 was not written in a vacuum. Rather, given the structure of the narrative and the concerns it addresses, it seems very likely that the final form of the account was reached somewhere in the 6th century BC, during the Babylonian exile of the people of Israel.
There, living in a polytheistic society and faced with accounts of creation that insisted that the Earth was either evil, or the byproduct of the dismemberment of an evil, defeated god, or the waste left over from a battle between the gods, the Israelites reflected on the central affirmation of their faith – that there is only one God, a good God.
And they framed an account of creation to explain how creation by a good God would have happened. And they insisted that, far from being evil or the product of a struggle between good and evil deities, creation simply followed from the good and gracious decree of the only true God. They insisted that, since God has no rivals and, since God is wholly good, he needed to simply speak things into existence and that whatever he spoke into existence would necessarily be a reflection of his goodness and, therefore, good. And since he was the only God, there could not be any opposition to his will and his word.
In the same way, Mary realizes that, if God had some purpose for her, there was no way anything could thwart it. And in case there was any doubt about this in her mind, Gabriel tells her, “No word from God can ever fail.” And so Mary responds, recognizing the truth of the angel’s words and submitting to this truth by saying, “May your word to me be fulfilled.” Recognizing the irresistible nature of God’s word, Mary does the wise thing and submits to it, acknowledging, thereby, that God’s word cannot be hindered and that God’s word is always good.
So we have seen these three parallels – the void, the vehicle and the voice. Through these we see Mary being logical in recognizing the genuine obstacle that her situation presented; being humble in accepting the explanation Gabriel gives of how God would overcome the obstacle; and being submissive in surrendering to the revealed word of God. All of us can learn a lot from her and we should not allow abuses by others to prevent us growing in our discipleship to Jesus by learning from her.
That brings us to the second part of this message – What does all this mean? Why does Luke tell us these details? What is Luke trying to communicate to the reader by framing his narrative with these three links to Genesis 1? I think there are two things.
First, we must remember that Mary’s situation was quite a precarious one. She was not yet married to Joseph. Yet she was going to become pregnant. An unmarried girl who became pregnant was not something that was considered socially acceptable. It was repugnant in those days and, within Israelite society, carried with it the connotations of idolatry. Just as worship was a recognition of a covenant with God, so also sex was a recognition of a covenant of marriage. And so sex outside the marriage covenant was akin to a breaking of the covenant, the prime example of which is idolatry.
So Mary would have been looked down upon and would have been stigmatized for the rest of her life. After all, the only way a woman could get pregnant in those days was if she had sex with a man. So the natural conclusion would have been that Mary had sex with someone who wasn’t her husband.
But Luke has told the reader that Mary’s situation was because of God’s Spirit which served as the vehicle for creation mediated through God’s irresistible speech. And so Gabriel tells Mary, and us who read Luke’s Gospel, that the child whom she would bear was not unholy, but holy; not profane, but sacred; not to be rejected, but accepted. The circumstances surrounding this child’s conception were indeed weird, strange and bizarre.
But the child was the Son of God, the one to whom God was giving the Davidic throne, the one who was holy, that is, set apart, for a new thing that God was initiating. The new manner in which Mary conceived was not to be taken as something abhorrent but as a sign that God was doing something new. But what is this something new?
That brings us to the second thing that Luke is telling us through his narrative. He is telling us that, by overshadowing Mary with his Spirit and enabling her to conceive through unprecedented means, God was announcing that he was on the verge of doing something entirely new. So what was the purpose of the virgin conception?
While believing the virgin conception of Jesus, some early church fathers asked the question, “Was the virgin conception essential for salvation?” That is, could Jesus have not done his work if he had been conceived through natural means? Very often the answer was that this was done so that he could be sinless. But this stems from a warped view that sex is somehow unclean or sinful or impure. Otherwise, why would we insist that Jesus had to have been conceived without sex?
This warped view of our sexuality does not stop there. After all, Mary was fully human. So she was sinful like we are. If Jesus was fully her son, then would it not be the case that her sinfulness would rub off on him?
To avoid this conclusion some Christians have proposed that Mary herself was conceived in an immaculate way, without any taint of sin. But this view is neither supported nor required by scripture and misunderstands why Jesus was conceived while Mary was a virgin. On the other hand, some church fathers rightly concluded that Jesus could have redeemed the world even if he had been born through natural means. But then this begs the question, “If Jesus could redeem the world even if he had been conceived through normal means, then why was he conceived while Mary was a virgin?”
And to this question all the answers are similar – God did this to demonstrate his power. This seems like a go-to answer for Christians when facing a difficult question. If you’re stumped, just say, “God did it to show his power.” This is because we have not learnt from our scriptures. What do I mean?
Jacob gains courage to face his battles after being permanently broken by his heavenly adversary. Moses realizes that he need only speak to a rock to get water from it. The walls of Jericho crumble at the sound of worship. The Midianites self-destruct at the sound of breaking pots and trumpet blasts. Elijah finds that God is not in the Earth shattering events but in a gentle whisper. Zechariah announces that God’s deliverance will not come through a show of superior military strength but through the work of his Spirit. And Paul discovers that he is strongest when he is most vulnerable.
Our God, the true God, does not have to display his power to us or to anyone. He does not have to do what insecure rulers do – flex their muscles to show who is in charge. Rather, our God, the true God, works through the power of weakness. Further, while Christmas is important to us, it is not the central event of our faith. That remains and will always remain Jesus’ crucifixion and resurrection. So while we believe that Jesus was conceived while Mary was a virgin, this is a standalone item of faith with no other doctrine being dependent on it.
If we did not have the passages in the Gospels of Matthew and Luke about Jesus’ conception, nothing really would have changed with regard to the Christian faith.
So if God did not orchestrate the virgin conception to demonstrate his power and if the doctrine of the virgin conception is not theologically load bearing, then why did God do it? As usual, the answer is – and this should not surprise you – in the context.
The conversation between Mary and Gabriel clearly link with the account of creation in Genesis 1, as we have already seen. These links to creation tell the reader that what God was doing in and through Mary, announcing that he was on the verge of doing something new, was related to creation. In other words, God was announcing that he was on the verge of initiating a new creation.
But please note what I am saying. The conception of Jesus in Mary’s womb is not the new creation. That was simply an announcement that new creation was around the bend. It is important that we understand this. The events surrounding Christmas, beginning with the Annunciation to Mary by Gabriel, are simply a seed – the seed that gives life to a rumor of new creation.
A rumor of new creation. What does that mean? New creation was a part of the Jewish hope. They knew that Yahweh was a good, just God. However, due to human sinfulness, evil and injustice were allowed to hold sway over not just the lives of humans and the relations between human groups, but also over the good creation that humans were no longer able or willing to govern justly.
And the Jews knew that Yahweh, being a good God, could not simply sweep all this evil and injustice under the rug, but would have to remedy it. The beliefs in the resurrection and new creation were the answer to the question, “How will God set things right?” Humans had marred God’s good creation and so he would begin a new creation. Human sin had brought on the plague of death and so resurrection would be God’s response by defeating death. However, this was expected at the end of the age when history, as we know it, would come to an end.
But God was going to upset the expected timeline. There was going to be a change in the program. And God does what any organizer would do when announcing a major change in expectations – give a heads up. Christmas is, in other words, God saying, “There’s going to be a change in the timeline you expect and this will happen quite soon. So here is a sign for you to know this is going to happen soon.” The Annunciation, followed by Christmas, was was the start of the rumor, the greatest rumor in human history, the rumor that announced the biggest change in expectations, the rumor of new creation.