Preparing our hearts for Christmas
Advent 4B | Luke 1:26-38
As a kid, I’d wake up on December 24th, we’d have been out of school for days (back then we’d get almost three weeks!) and I’d come running out of the room ready for Christmas and the world would be like:
Yeah, it’s not here yet.
My Dad would be working and sometimes my Mom did, too. Later on, we’d start decorating that day or finishing our shopping. My Dad, of course, would start his.
And then, sometime around 4 or 5, when the sun would start to go down, it would start. You could feel the slow build up as stores closed their doors and lights would come on and dinners are being cooked and candles are being lit and organs start playing those favorite hymns, then it would feel like Christmas.
All that sensation of buildup feels weird when Christmas Eve lands on a Sunday because we don’t get to anticipate the same way. We have church to do in the morning because it’s Sunday! But it’s also not Christmas early…
It’s a weird sensation.
A bigger story of Christmas
If you’ve been around the church awhile, you know we have a funny relationship with tradition. And one of those traditions is to celebrate the season before Christmas as Advent. Then with Christmas day, we have a short season of twelve days. Then the season after the Epiphany.
We’ve come to see these seasons as distinct and separate. We use blue or purple in Advent and white for Christmas.
And we know that the culture has long treated the season before Christmas Day as if it were the Christmas season. And yet, it is all wrapped around the celebration of a particular day we have come to know as Christmas. And with it, the particularity of a story of a baby born in Bethlehem.
This is natural, of course. The incarnation is the big deal.
And yet, there is more story to the big story. There’s a reason Christmas pageants draw from Advent and the wise men coming a couple years out to round out the story. We know there’s a bigger story. And that we need the story to be bigger than the birth of a baby.
Bigger than a baby
In Luke’s telling, the birth is a verse. But the story takes up the better part of two chapters.
And it begins with Mary’s cousin’s husband. His name is Zechariah and he is a priest. An angel comes to him to tell him that his prayers have been answered. His wife, Elizabeth is going to have a baby, he is to name him John, and that he will be the harbinger of the messiah.
And Zechariah hears this and is like…yeah, I hate to point out to you that we’re past the sell by date, if you know what I mean. And the angel takes it in. Here is a priest serving at the altar and an angel shows up declaring that God is going to do this miraculous thing and Zechariah’s response is…disbelief?
So the angel shuts Zechariah’s mouth and says that he’ll be able to talk again when the miracle happens.
This is the bookend the evangelist uses to help us relate to the miraculous. And to Mary’s place in it. They pair these couples: Zechariah and Elizabeth with Mary and Joseph to help us put the main event in context.
It’s about faith.
So then the angel comes to Mary and says
“Greetings, favored one! The Lord is with you.”
And Mary thinks that is the weirdest greeting. Because she couldn’t imagine being favored.
And the angel tells her the plan—this is a really big deal!—including a bit about the one who is to come before her son, John. That her cousin, Elizabeth is the first proof of the miraculous work God is doing right now.
Mary hears about the whole scheme and she agrees to join in.
From here, Mary goes and visits her cousin, whose baby leaps in her womb at the presence of prenatal Jesus. And then Mary unspools the greatest declaration of faith: the Magnificat.
‘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.
Surely, from now on all generations will call me blessed;
for the Mighty One has done great things for me,
and holy is his name.
And she goes on to declare the vision of God as raising up the lowly and bringing down the powerful. Of feeding the poor and impoverishing the rich. The very substance of Jesus’s message about the Kin-dom.
Mary knows this about God. And she shares that with the world.
And then John is born and Zechariah’s tongue is loosed and he joins Mary in proclaiming the greatness of God.
This is the setup.
We are inheritors of a faith born of miracles and unmerited favor. Of devotion that is not about blessing alone. But blessing for the unblessed. To care for the uncared for. Hope for the hopeless. Grace for the repentant.
So when we finally do get to the birth, we have something we can actually rejoice! A faith that bears fruit in justice and righteousness. Which connects the grace and mercy of God with a world so in need of it.
That we are so prepared to receive the Good News of what God is doing, that we hear the greeting without surprise.
“Greetings, favored one! The Lord is with you.”
That favor isn’t justification or something for other people, but a gift offered to all of us.
And the Good News that God is with us, not merely coming again in the future, but present here in our midst, transforming the world as we speak has us go Yeah. Makes sense.
This is how we prepare.
We prepare our hearts for the bigger story of Christmas. That when we hear the words of birth and sing carols of praise, we aren’t filled only with joy of nostalgia, but hope in believing. Because we know the bigger story.
A story of saving grace. Of bringing the Kin-dom into our world.
And of so many good things.
Love, hope, generosity, compassion, wholeness.
Good things for this community and all of these people. Our blessing. Shared with us to share with each other. The greatest gift exchange where we all get to serve and receive. And of all that gifting, we all receive love.