Broadway Christian Church · Columbia, Missouri

Morning Worship · December 21, 2008

Fourth Sunday of Advent

Prayer of the Day

Gracious and loving God, this Sunday we wait patiently and expectantly for the birth of your Son, our Savior, Jesus Christ. Today, we pray that you will help us be mindful of the reasons for why we celebrate Christmas. Give us the strength to reach out to others and to share your message of love, light, and life. Through Christ we say together, Amen.

Scripture

Luke 1:46-55

And Mary said,

“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.

His mercy is for those who fear him

     from generation to generation.

He has shown strength with his arm;

     he has scattered the proud in the thoughts of their hearts.

He has brought down the powerful from their thrones,

     and lifted up the lowly;

He has filled the hungry with good things,

     and sent the rich away empty.

He has helped his servant Israel,

     in remembrance of his mercy,

According to the promise he made to our ancestors,

     to Abraham and to his descendents forever.”

Message

What Will You Do With Your One Precious Life?

Jacob Thorne

I want to begin by sharing with you a story taken from Anne Lamott’s Traveling Mercies. Anne Lamott is one of our contemporary spiritual writers. To be honest, I don’t always enjoy her writing, but sometimes her writing is just so brutally honest and full of self-introspection, she forces you to examine your own life.

At one point in her life, Anne tells a story of her realization that she had almost reached the end. One night, in an evening filled with alcohol and drugs, she fell into bed. As she was almost asleep, she writes:

I became aware of someone with me hunkered down in the corner. I just assumed that it was my father, whose presence I had felt over the years when I was frightened and alone. The feeling was so strong that I actually turned on the light for a moment to make sure no one was there. Of course, there wasn’t. But after a while, I knew beyond any doubt that it was Jesus. I felt him as surely as I feel my dog lying nearby as I write this.

I was appalled. I thought about what everyone would think of me if I became a Christian. It seemed an utterly impossible event to happen. But I felt Jesus just sitting there on his haunches in the corner of my room, watching me with patience and love. Finally, I fell asleep, and in the morning, he was gone. The experience spooked me so badly that I thought it was an apparition born out of fear, and self-loathing, and booze. 

One week later, when I went back to church, I was so hung over I couldn’t stand up for the songs, but this time I stayed for the sermon, which I thought was ridiculous. But the last song was so deep, and raw, and pure I could not escape. It was if the people were singing in between the notes, weeping and joyful at the same time. I felt their voices, or something, rocking me in its bosom, holding me like a scared kid, and I opened up to that feeling, and it washed over me. I began to cry, and I left before the benediction. 

I raced home. When I opened the door to my houseboat, I stood there for a few minutes. Then I hung my head and said, “I quit.” I took a long, deep breath, and I said out loud, “All right. You can come in.” So this was my beautiful moment of conversion.

You see… Anne’s call to conversion was an interruption – a moment of true inconvenience. At one point or another in life, we are all interrupted. There is little or no warning. A change is forced upon us. We receive a phone call in the middle of the night. Our job suddenly comes to an end. A birth or a death occurs in the family. Whatever the change may be, our lives are no longer the same.

Our Scripture this morning, taken from the gospel of Luke, is a story of interruptions. Gabriel swoops down and announces God’s plan to Mary. A decision-making process does not exist. There is no opportunity for Mary to have a conversation with God. God does not ask for permission. All Mary can do is receive what God has offered.

When we read this text, it is easy to imagine how Mary must have felt. After all, we know the most basics of the story. Mary was a young girl. She wasn’t married. She faced the fear of persecution and abandonment. And as I’m soon to learn – very soon, I think – Mary recognized that having a child definitely causes a few disruptions in your life. A few.

But what I often fail to remember, and perhaps you do as well, is the fact that all of our lives are interrupted by the birth of Jesus. So often, in the church, when we speak of Gabriel’s visit to Mary, we talk of the visit in terms of an annunciation, an announcement. But Mary’s realization that she’ll give birth to Jesus Christ is much more than an annunciation. It’s an incarnation that begins with Mary and continues to the present day with us. We are related intimately to Mary and Jesus. You and I, we are like Joseph. We refuse to distance ourselves from the birth of Jesus. We receive what God has offered, both with the birth of Jesus and with all the other events that take place in our lives.

When we receive what God has offered, perhaps we, too, respond in the same ways that Mary first did. Before she begins to sing, Luke tells us that Mary is frightened. 

Today, the word “frightened” has such a negative connotation, when we think of someone being frightened. We have images of despair, images of negativity, and an inability to respond to the situation at hand. But in the ancient world, during the time of Luke¸ to be frightened did not mean that you are paralyzed and unable to respond. The book of Proverbs reads, “The fear of the Lord is the beginning of wisdom.”

When a change comes before us, it is OK to be reluctant. Change is always difficult to accept. We know that when things change, they will never be the same. But to say that we are frightened, at least from the perspective of the ancient world, is to say that we can experience wisdom and new opportunities.

When Anne Lamott was sitting in church the Sunday she felt so badly, she said the songs were raw and intimate, like someone singing in between the lines. Perhaps consciously or even subconsciously, Anne recognized that singing songs of praise are one of the oldest forms or traditions for honoring God. 

Miriam sings in the book of Exodus. The nation Israel sings in the book of Amos. The Psalms are an entire book of songs. Hannah sings in First Samuel. And the earliest Christian church, lacking writings that witnessed to Jesus, was known for preserving memory through worship and through singing. Mary was so steeped in Scripture, all she could do was sing songs of praise.

When you spend time looking at Mary’s hymn, it becomes clear that Mary’s praises have a lot to say about how we are called to be followers of Christ. Mary demonstrates that God works powerfully in those who are ordinary. We know this to be true, but sometimes those simple observations are incredibly difficult to accept. Mary’s praise can’t help but lead to the question, “How are you letting God work through you? How do you respond when your life is interrupted?”

On the one hand, Mary’s Magnificat seems to be a reversal of all that is. God brings down the powerful, scatters the proud, and sends the wealthy away empty-handed. But on the other hand, God doesn’t replace the rich with those who are less fortunate. God’s work reaches deeper and farther. The angel Gabriel tells us that the birth of Jesus is good news for all. 

One of the main points of Mary’s song is a point that is often overlooked. It is that in bringing down the powerful and raising up the lowly, God brings both the powerful and the powerless into a place where they both are able to experience God’s mercy and to embrace God with one another.

For many of us, me included, we have made the Christmas story sentimental. There is the outstanding courage of Mary, the beautiful innocence of the baby Jesus, and the exotic indulgence of the Magi. But what about us? What about you? The Christmas story just does not happen just to us, but also through us. 

Each of us stands to be touched, to be claimed, to be possessed, to be changed by the power of the incarnation. When our lives are interrupted, when we hear the story of Mary, we are called, as if for the first time, to let our guard down and to allow the work of God’s Holy Spirit to grasp our lives and work through us. God is going to intervene in your life. It’s up to you how you will respond.

As I was preparing for this morning and thinking about Mary’s song, I reflected on a conversation I had several weeks ago with a young man named Amir. Amir is from Iraq. He grew up in the city of Baghdad. He came to Columbia in October to pursue a calling in journalism. Next fall, he’ll begin taking classes at the “J” School. At one point during our conversation, I asked, “What was it like to live through the war?”

Amir looked at me for a few brief moments. He paused. Then he said, “It was terrible. The first night of the war, 100,000 bombs were dropped on my city. They were dropped on schools, and churches, and public buildings. Fourteen of my friends were killed that night – close friends. They were friends I had grown up with.”

As I listened, I wasn’t really sure what to say. What could I say? After our conversation, we had the opportunity to worship with one another. As we sat in that great sanctuary downtown of First Christian Church, and as we sang with one another, I couldn’t help but have hope.

It seems to me that we cannot proclaim peace in our lives and live lives shaped by hope for the future unless we are willing to pray for the world as it really is, with its long history of misery and terror. We would prefer, perhaps, that Christmas would give us a short break from all of the anxiety in everything that takes place around us, but unfortunately that’s not what the Christmas message is all about. The message of Christmas is that Jesus is born through us, and we are called to announce his birth to the rest of the world. We are called to speak with confidence.

Perhaps the most amazing aspect of Mary’s song is that although the events had not yet taken place, Mary is so sure that God will do what is promised and is already proclaimed as an accomplished act. Mary sings, “God has shown strength with God’s arm. God has scattered the proud. God has brought down the powerful. God has filled the hungry. God has helped Israel.”

So, what will you do with your one precious life? When your life is interrupted, which it no doubt will be, how will you respond? Will you respond with great reluctance? Will you be paralyzed by fear? Or will you respond with confidence and proclaim the works of God before they have already been accomplished?

I want to close with a final story. It’s a story I have shared with the youth before. I think it is particularly fitting for this morning. It’s a story about a lady named Sara Miles. Sara Miles grew up in a typical family. 

Both of Sara’s grandparents, on each side of the family, were missionaries. Her father, whose parents were American Baptist, grew up in the mountain provinces of Burma. Sara’s mother was associated with an organization called the Untied Mission and grew up in the Middle East and spent most of her early life growing up in Baghdad. While Sara’s parents cherished memories of growing up with stars in the deserts, elephants, and tropical rainstorms, they were both extremely disillusioned when they came back from being missionaries and were introduced to the small-town churches in America. By the time they were teenagers, Sara’s parents had decided they no longer believed in God.

By the time Sara was born, her parents completely rejected any notion of church. So while both sets of grandparents were missionaries, Sara grew up not having much of an idea about what “church” meant, or what “God” meant. All she knew was that her parents had, for some reason, rejected any form or notion of God.

When Sara was 18, she decided to leave home for good. She entered an obscure college called Friends World College. Friends World College didn’t have any formal course work. In fact, it still exists today. Maybe you have heard of it before. The college believed the best way to get an education was to travel to another country, and to let others, without any prior knowledge that you are coming, educate you. (This is a true story. If you were a parent, wouldn’t you be happy that your kid decided to go to college, and this is what it consists of?) With nothing more than a toothbrush and a couple of dollars, Sara boarded the bus to Mexico City and left home.

As she continued her college experience and her life experience, she bounced around from country to country. She spent a lot of time as a student and a journalist in war zones, third-world countries, and in all forms of danger. It was kind of her specialty. For years she traveled. She was always searching. But if you were to talk with her, she would say she never knew what she was searching for.

Then one day, at the age of 46, while visiting a city in California, Sara walked into a church, just randomly off the street. She ate a piece of bread, took a sip of wine, and realized in that moment that her life had been changed forever. To her great astonishment, and, as she says, to her great inconvenience, Sara somehow, in those brief moments of communion, experienced Jesus. 

She realized in a spit second that she was called to devote her life to feeding people. So that is exactly what Sara did. She opened a food pantry. She started providing hundreds of families with groceries each week. Sara would routinely trudge through housing projects in the rain. She remembers sitting on the curb and wiping the nose of a psychotic man. She remembers sticking a battered woman’s 357-Magnum into the trunk of her car. She became a Christian. She became connected to others. Something was always tugging at her. Today, Sara’s food pantry provides more than 300 people a day with food.

Not all of us are called to open food pantries. Not all of us will experience the unusual conversion that Anne Lamott experienced. But what we will experience, guaranteed, is an opportunity to respond to God. We have the choice to decide if we want to reach out and become a follower of Christ. We have the choice to hear the annunciation of the birth of Jesus. We have the choice to decide if we will let the baby change our lives forever. How will you live your one precious life?

Through Christ we say together… “Amen.”

Benediction

Gracious and loving God, give us the peace to pause and reflect on your presence in our lives. We give thanks for your steadfast love and faithfulness. Remind us that you are the Alpha and Omega – the beginning and the end. All that we are and all that we have yet to be may only be done through you. Amen.