Pardon The Interuption

"Pardon the Interruption"

Luke 1:39-45

December 20, 2009

St. Thomas Episcopal Church

Stephen D. Palmer

In the name of one God, Father, Son and Holy Spirit. Amen.

“Hi.” I am honored to be asked by Matt to preach this morning. To offer a comment on the Holy Scriptures is a privilege, especially for a lowly youth director!

 A little while ago my wife and I visited Paris for about a week. We saw the normal sites: the Eiffel Tower, the Arche de Triumph, the Louvre. We also made a point to see several of the many ancient and famous churches. We saw the famous rose windows in Notre Dame; the floor to ceiling stain glass windows at St. Chapelle; we saw one church that looked like it could have been a temple of Zeus, and finally we climbed hundreds of stairs up to Sacre Coeur. 

All of these churches were strange and beautiful in their own ways, but one thing they consistently had in common was a high place and respect for Mary the mother of Jesus.  From golden icons of Mary holding the infant Jesus, to ornate rosary prayers to Mary, to large marble statues of Mary holding the body of the crucified Jesus, it was clear that there was something about Mary. 

But such icons and statues makes us protestants a bit uneasy though doesn’t it? For such doctrines as the immaculate conception, virgin birth, and the assumption Mary seem suspiciously roman catholic. Just kidding. But in all seriousness, in mainline American protestantism Mary has faded into the background of significant Biblical characters, she has been neatly boxed away with bubble wrap in the attic along with the colored lights, plastic tree, the giant statue of Frosty the snowman (not that I have one), and the ceramic nativity scene only to be taken out and dusted off once a year around Christmas. 

But are our Catholic brothers and sisters totally off base with their emphasis on Mary? I mean they’ve been at this Christian thing a long time, they can’t have gotten everything wrong. I’d like to reflect with you this morning on the possibility that the life and story of Mother Mary is pregnant with significance. Mary has a lot to tell us about God’s saving plan for us and about what true discipleship is all about. 

Being a youth minister has certain side effects...but beyond an alarming amount of gray hair before my thirties, one of the side effects of youth ministry is that I often find myself viewing the world from the stand point of a teenager. Reading the story of Mary with this lens on is what has convinced me that the story of the virgin birth is undoubtably a story of youth ministry, because only a teenager would be this dumb! When the angel visits Mary and says, 

“[KNOCK KNOCK] Excuse me, pardon the interruption, sorry to wake you up in the middle of the night. I just came to tell you that you are going to be blessed by God. But you know all those careful college plans you have, cancel them. All those wedding plans, yea they are up in smoke. Call the preacher, the caterer, and the flower decorator and tell them that it’s now all off. Joseph will likely abandon you and save his own family name; and if he turns you in to the authorities you might just get stoned, but we’ll cross that bridge when it comes. 

You will for sure be shunned by your church community even if they feign politeness; people will give you weird looks and whisper about you over cookies and coffee during the fellowship hour, and no one will believe that you are actually carrying God’s son (not even the always sensible people of the 21st century will believe you). No one in your community will open their home to you, even at Christmas, not even if it means you have to give birth in the middle of the street! God’s going to really screw up your life by calling you into ministry this way, but you’ll be doing some good for the world, and people everywhere for all time will call you blessed. Now what do you say to that? Sound like a good deal?” 

Only in the ears of teenager would that take root. Only a 9th grader would have the guts to take God up on that, only a youth could look that Goliath in the face and say 

“Here I am, the servant of the Lord; let it be with me according to your word...My soul magnifies the Lord, and my spirit rejoices in God my Savior, for he has looked with favor on the lowliness of his servant.”

Regardless of the fact that I’ve never met a youth, or an adult for that matter, who is that articulate, especially in the presence of an angel; but regardless of that, no rationale self-interested adult would have said that! Mary’s parents would have perhaps advised her to go visit the local Herod clinic and have this little problem taken care of quietly and privately. 

An adult Mary, wise in the ways of the world, would have told the nice angel that she was busy, and her career path couldn’t be interrupted, or that she had Christmas shopping to do. She would have emailed the angel on her blackberry on her way to her next meeting, 

“Dear Mr. Gabriel, Thank you for the offer. But please tell God that interruptions aren’t really in my 5 year plan right now. Thanks for thinking of me though, maybe we can work something out next time. Give my best to the Holy Spirit. Yours, Mary.” 

As excavators and archeologists of Scripture, I think we can pause right here because we have come across our first treasure. In one word, in young Mary’s “yes”, we have the whole Gospel in microcosm. In Mary’s acceptance of the ministry of becoming the Mother of God, we have a small picture of the entire work of Salvation. To use an analogy from high school calculus, we have in the story of Mary the inner derivative of entire Gospel trajectory. 

In the book of Genesis, we have the story of how it all began. God spoke, and light came into the darkness. Nothing came into existence without God’s initiation. God then created the world, all things that creep, fly, or swim, and finally God created humans in His image. Eve was visited by a fallen angel and given a choice. She fell into sin by a tree, and then served Adam. From their cooperative action the whole world was ruptured and cast back into darkness. The humans were thrown out of the kingdom of the garden and enmity was placed between all of Eve’s future children and the serpent. 

The New Testament starts similarly to the Old Testament, with a Genesis. Matthew begins literally with the “Genesis” of Jesus. Then we are told a new version, a reversion, of the fall story in the garden. In this new Genesis, God’s word again creates light in the darkness by creating a new life where no life could possibly come from, a virgin. 

Like the original nothingness of the universe, the virgin birth means that humanity by itself could not conceive it’s own salvation, it’s own redemption, its own re-creation. Salvation comes only from the word of God. In this new Genesis, Mary, the new Eve, is also visited by an angel.  Mary is given a choice, a chance to do God’s will instead of break it. She is given the opportunity to give her son Jesus to the world. Instead of serving the fruit of sin to Adam by a tree like Eve did, Mary serves the fruit of her womb, Jesus to us by tree as our first priest. Eve in cooperation with Adam plunged the world into the darkness of sin and death and had us thrown out of the kingdom of the garden, but Mary in cooperation with Jesus brings light back into the world and undoes sin through incredible selfless sacrificial love, defeats death with resurrection, and ushers us back into the Kingdom of God. And as predicted, the age long battle between Eve’s sons and the serpent is finally ended when the Mary’s son crushes the snake’s head as it mortally wounds him.

In a few moments we will join our voices with many from around the world in the ancient Nicene Creed. We will confess that we believe that “For us and for our salvation, [Jesus] came down from Heaven, by the power of the Holy Spirit he became incarnate from the Virgin Mary, and was made man.” This is what we say every week. Perhaps then it will surprise you to hear that in the last 150 years it has become fashionable to dismiss the doctrine of the Virgin Birth as mere myth and science fiction. But to me, the story of Mary is too rich of a source for our lives to simply be tossed aside under the questionable reasoning the such things are simply scientifically impossible. Such reasoning seems to me argumentatively faulty, but more importantly it seems to me to miss the real point about the doctrine of the virgin birth. 

To me Mary’s story tells me about God’s redeeming plan, and living a life where I am able to hear God’s call and respond courageously. When God calls, I want to be like Mary. When God wants to interrupt my life with a crazy and scary opportunity I want to have the freedom and courage to be like Mary. I want have the hospitality in my heart to love and befriend others; I want to have the financial solvency in my wallet to give generously and responsibly; I want to have space on my calendar for those who need a friend who can be interrupted; I want my house to have an extra room for Jesus to rest his head; I want to have an extra seat in my car for the stranger who needs a ride; I want every aspect of my life to have the free and friendly space necessary for hospitality. If Mary’s story tells us anything it tells us that God interrupts our lives. He doesn’t wait for us to be ready. That’s what the Gospel is; God’s story breaking into our own. Are you ready to let God interrupt your life and see where His plans will take you? Let’s see what happens if we start saying “yes” when God calls. He changed the world with one teenager’s “yes”, what can He do with yours? 

Amen.