Speaker 1: Thank you, team.
Speaker 1: We're going to be reading from Luke, chapter 1.
Speaker 1: Luke, chapter 1, verse 26.
Speaker 1: In the sixth month, the angel Gabriel was sent by God to a town in Galilee called Nazareth, to a virgin engaged to a man named Joseph of the house of David.
Speaker 1: The virgin's name was Mary, and the angel came to her and said greetings favoured woman.
Speaker 1: The Lord is with you.
Speaker 1: But she was deeply troubled by this statement, wondering what kind of greeting this could be.
Speaker 1: Then the angel told her do not be afraid, mary, for you have found favour with God.
Speaker 1: Now, listen, you will conceive and give birth to a son, and you will name him Jesus.
Speaker 1: He will be great and will be called the son of the most high and the Lord.
Speaker 1: God will give him the throne of his father, david.
Speaker 1: He will reign over the house of Jacob forever and his kingdom will have no end.
Speaker 1: Mary asked the angel how can this be, since I have not had sexual relations with a man?
Speaker 1: The angel replied to her the Holy Spirit will come upon you and the power of the Most High will overshadow you.
Speaker 1: Therefore, the Holy One to be born will be called the Son of God.
Speaker 1: And consider your relative, elizabeth.
Speaker 1: Even she has conceived a son in her old age and this is the sixth month for her who was called childless.
Speaker 1: For nothing will be impossible with God.
Speaker 1: See, I am the Lord's servant, said Mary.
Speaker 1: May it happen to me as you have said.
Speaker 1: Then the angel left her.
Speaker 1: Do you ever watch award shows like the Oscars or Logies?
Speaker 1: Or maybe you read about someone online who's won an award and they're all like, oh, what a surprise.
Speaker 1: This is so humbling.
Speaker 1: And you think really, you know, if anything I've read about you in the press is anything to go by, you don't seem like a very humble person.
Speaker 1: The reality is, in many parts of life you don't need a whole lot of humility to get ahead.
Speaker 1: In fact, it could get in the way, and humility is even starting to get a bit of a bad rep in some people's mind.
Speaker 1: Some people think of humility as meaning that I have to think little of myself.
Speaker 1: It's associated with negative self-image and that's not what humility is at all.
Speaker 1: It's having a realistic understanding of ourselves.
Speaker 1: But someone once said humility isn't thinking less of myself, it's thinking of myself less, if you get that distinction.
Speaker 1: So it's a pity people's thinking has become twisted like that because humility may not count very much in some parts of life, but it's enormously important in the kingdom of God.
Speaker 1: Numerous biblical proverbs tell us humility comes before honour, which certainly seems to have been Mary's experience.
Speaker 1: Here's a peasant kid.
Speaker 1: She probably was a kid.
Speaker 1: Girls could be betrothed as young as 12 years old in ancient Israel, waiting a year before getting married.
Speaker 1: Now, that was probably an exception, but it was possible.
Speaker 1: Most likely, though, mary was a little older, she was probably still in her mid to late teens.
Speaker 1: A peasant girl in a nowhere town, in a backward province of an occupied country, and yet God chose her to be his mum.
Speaker 1: There's all of that, and particularly that last statement through your head in the angel announced to Mary that her baby, who she was to name Jesus, would be called the son of the Most High.
Speaker 1: The first time we encounter that title Most High is actually when Abram, the father of faith, was blessed by a priest.
Speaker 1: Melchizedek, king of Salem, brought out bread and wine.
Speaker 1: He was a priest to God Most High, and he blessed him and said Abraham is blessed by God Most High, creator of heaven and earth, and blessed be God Most High, who has handed over your enemies to you.
Speaker 1: And Abraham gave him a tenth of everything to you.
Speaker 1: And Abram gave him a tenth of everything.
Speaker 1: And the very next story is God making a covenant with Abram.
Speaker 1: And then the angel proclaimed to Mary that Jesus would reign on the throne of his father or ancestor, david.
Speaker 1: He would rule over the house of Jacob, which is Israel, forever, and his kingdom would have no end.
Speaker 1: And this fulfilled ancient promises God had made to King David.
Speaker 1: When your time comes and you rest with your ancestors, I will raise up after you your descendant, who will come from your body, and I will establish his kingdom.
Speaker 1: He is the one who will build a house for my name and I will establish the throne of his kingdom forever.
Speaker 1: And then we read in Isaiah.
Speaker 1: You might be familiar at this time of year, for a child will be born for us, a son will be given to us and the government will be on his shoulders.
Speaker 1: He will be named Wonderful Counselor, mighty God, eternal Father, prince of Peace.
Speaker 1: The dominion will be vast and its prosperity will never end.
Speaker 1: He will reign on the throne of David and over his kingdom to establish and sustain it with justice and righteousness, from now on and forever.
Speaker 1: The zeal of the Lord of armies will accomplish this.
Speaker 1: And these are twin poles of covenant and kingship run throughout the Bible.
Speaker 1: So covenant is about relationship.
Speaker 1: It was expressed through agreements that God made with his people, first with Abraham and then with the whole nation of Israel on Mount Sinai.
Speaker 1: And the covenant on Sinai is particularly.
Speaker 1: We often associate it with law and legalism and so on, and we often think of it as something that's quite burdensome.
Speaker 1: But really it was about shaping a culture and an identity for the people of God, and by following God's righteous instruction, israel would become a distinct people and a light to the other nations.
Speaker 1: That was God's intention anyway.
Speaker 1: And in Jesus the covenant goes to the next level.
Speaker 1: And the writer of Hebrews says the Lord has sworn and will not change his mind.
Speaker 1: You are a priest forever.
Speaker 1: And because of this oath, jesus has also become the guarantee of a better covenant.
Speaker 1: That's covenant.
Speaker 1: What about kingdom?
Speaker 1: Well, kingdom is about responsibility.
Speaker 1: It's about authority that go together.
Speaker 1: Kings are meant to protect their citizens and uphold justice.
Speaker 1: Now, we have a whole lot of other expectations on government nowadays, but they're kind of the minimum, aren't they?
Speaker 1: Law and order and security.
Speaker 1: God gave the kingdom to David and his descendants as an eternal covenant, and when the Davidic kings ruled in accordance with God's covenant, the nation prospered.
Speaker 1: Most of them did that very poorly, of course, and none perfectly.
Speaker 1: And so the Davidic kingdom came to an end when Israel was occupied by the Babylonian empire and most of the population was deported.
Speaker 1: But that leaves us with a problem.
Speaker 1: Didn't God make a promise to David?
Speaker 1: How is that going to be fulfilled?
Speaker 1: Well, the kingdom in that form ended, but the promise didn't, and Jesus would re-establish the kingdom and not simply a kingdom in perpetuity to his descendants, but he was to reign over it forever.
Speaker 1: And so in the book of Revelation we see a vision of Jesus in the heavenly throne room with the multitude singing you are worthy to take the scroll and open its seals because you were slaughtered and you purchased people for God by your blood from every tribe and language and people and kingdom.
Speaker 1: And so this child, the promised Messiah, was the fulfillment of scripture and the hope of the angels scripture and the hope of the angels.
Speaker 1: When the angel announced that Mary would fall pregnant unsurprisingly, she was curious to know what that meant.
Speaker 1: How is this going to work Now?
Speaker 1: She was engaged, so you'd kind of expect the child to emerge through the natural processes of events.
Speaker 1: She seems to have intuited that that wasn't the plan, but that's what you'd have expected.
Speaker 1: But on the other hand, she and her fiancé were no one special.
Speaker 1: I mean, how could she possibly bear the Messiah?
Speaker 1: But of course, no, it wouldn't be through natural processes.
Speaker 1: This would be a miracle of God.
Speaker 1: The power of the Most High will overshadow you.
Speaker 1: This is actually a hyperlink, a reference to other times.
Speaker 1: The presence of God overshadowed people and places and, not least of all, the tabernacle.
Speaker 1: If you remember back into the desert wanderings of Israel, if you're familiar with that story, one of the things that happened is we see the presence of God overshadowing the tabernacle.
Speaker 1: Many ancient theologians considered Mary a kind of tabernacle bearing the dwelling place of God.
Speaker 1: And because Jesus will be miraculously conceived by the Holy Spirit, the angel says he will be called the Son of God.
Speaker 1: Now, the title Son of God doesn't always refer to Jesus' divinity.
Speaker 1: It often, probably most often is a messianic title, a title to Jesus as Messiah, the anointed one, the promised one.
Speaker 1: And Jews did expect Messiah to have a unique relationship with God.
Speaker 1: In fact, in chapter 3, verse 38, luke finishes Jesus' genealogy with Adam, the son of God.
Speaker 1: Adam was uniquely created when God formed his body from clay and breathed into him the breath or the spirit of life.
Speaker 1: But no one thinks Adam was divine.
Speaker 1: And so, given all of this, that the Jewish expectation of Messiah and that he'd be called the Son of God, that Adam is the Son of God, not divine, in Luke, a lot of scholars think that Luke didn't intend here to signal Jesus' divinity, that he is God, when he told this story, but rather to signal that he is Messiah.
Speaker 1: You know, it seems to me that if Luke didn't intend this connection explicitly, it's not very far away.
Speaker 1: And in fact, john was also a miracle baby, but he was a normal human being, born through the normal process of events.
Speaker 1: Now, his conception was miraculous in terms of his parents were very old and shouldn't have been able to have a baby, but the miracle was his parents' age, nothing more than that.
Speaker 1: This child to be born of Mary is not going to have a human father, but be of the Holy Spirit.
Speaker 1: And the angel says that's why he'll be called the son of God.
Speaker 1: And so by the time we get to John's gospel, we read the word was God and the word became flesh, in John 1 and 14.
Speaker 1: And in Mary's womb, god put on human flesh and became one of us.
Speaker 1: And so we say Jesus is not only divine in some sort of sense, but that actually he is God, because there is only one divinity, only one God.
Speaker 1: He is the God of Israel and the God of all creation in human form.
Speaker 1: And, as theologians reflected on this, because that's a big how can this be?
Speaker 1: How, as theologians reflected on this through the centuries, they came to believe that Jesus Christ was one person with two natures, both truly human and truly divine, but only one personality.
Speaker 1: They came to understand that God is one God or one being who exists in a community of persons, a trinity.
Speaker 1: And if you've been around the church long enough, you've probably heard many analogies to try to explain this.
Speaker 1: Some are downright heretical, actually, and some just fall short, because no explanation, really, no analogy, no picture can really be adequate, because God is utterly unique.
Speaker 1: How do we think we can possibly explain a being who's infinite?
Speaker 1: And yet we can't understand God, because the scripture says no one has ever seen God, the one and only son, jesus, who is himself God and is at the Father's side.
Speaker 1: He has revealed him.
Speaker 1: I can't imagine how overwhelming this must have been for Mary In a culturally conservative society.
Speaker 1: She has to break the news to family and friends that she's pregnant out of wedlock, something that in previous days could have got you stoned to death Not in a good way.
Speaker 1: Can you imagine Miracle pregnancy, huh, and the Messiah, no less.
Speaker 1: King of Israel.
Speaker 1: Sure, mary, we believe you.
Speaker 1: When the angel announced to Zechariah he was going to be a father, if you read back the story just before the one we're looking at, he was skeptical and he wanted to know how he could.
Speaker 1: Be sure, this was seriously.
Speaker 1: Like angel, you know how old I am.
Speaker 1: And the angel says sure, here's a sign for you, zechariah, I promise that this is going to happen.
Speaker 1: You're not going to be able to speak until this baby is born in nine months' time.
Speaker 1: Mary also wanted to know, but she wanted to know not because she didn't believe, but because she did.
Speaker 1: How is this going to happen?
Speaker 1: It was simple faith.
Speaker 1: And then, when the angel told her some more details Mary, it's going to be a miracle, god at work in your body she consented just with humble submission.
Speaker 1: It may have been a terrifying time for Mary, but you know she's become revered to a greater or lesser extent throughout history.
Speaker 1: She certainly stands as an example for us.
Speaker 1: Evidently, we can presume she was a pious woman, but no one's perfect.
Speaker 1: I mean who is righteous enough to bear the Son of God.
Speaker 1: Catholic theology, particularly has tried to build a whole edifice of myth around Mary to answer this.
Speaker 1: But that misses the point, because the point is none of us are good enough to bear the Son of God, not Mary as his mother and not us as his disciples who carry his spirit in our hearts.
Speaker 1: Jesus is pure gift.
Speaker 1: Mary didn't earn this privilege.
Speaker 1: She received it with humble, obedient faith and friends.
Speaker 1: If we want to bear the spirit of Christ in our hearts, that's how we need to approach God as well, with humble, obedient faith.
Speaker 1: If we want to be part of the covenant people of God under the rule of God.
Speaker 1: It's not something we can earn.
Speaker 1: We can only receive it.
Speaker 1: And yet, having believed, we start going about the work of the life of faith, the work of the kingdom, the work of the covenant people of God.
Speaker 1: But that's because we've received it as a gift, not so we can try to earn it.
Speaker 1: For you have been saved by grace through faith, and this is not from yourselves.
Speaker 1: It is the gift of God, not from works, so that no one can boast, for we are his workmanship, created in Christ Jesus for good works which God prepared ahead of time for us to do.
Speaker 1: This is the great gift of Christmas and this Advent season, as we celebrate the coming of Jesus, may we receive this gift with humble, believing hearts, as Mary did.
Speaker 1: Let's pray with humble, believing hearts, as Mary did.
Speaker 1: Let's pray, father.
Speaker 1: We thank you that your gift to us is just that a gift, father.
Speaker 1: I pray that you will give us the faith to receive it and, having received it, let it change us, lord.
Speaker 1: Let us go about the work of faith, but, lord, help us to understand what an act of grace it is.
Speaker 1: In Jesus' name, amen.