-Christmas songs tend to make me laugh. As I was growing up my favorite was ‘Joy to the World’ which I found out wasn’t written as a Christmas song! Based on Psalm 98, focused more on Jesus’ second coming than His first.

-As I’ve been in ministry myself for a number of years now, my favorite has become ‘O Come All Ye Faithful’ because it gets to the primary focus of the Christmas season: “O come let us adore Him!”

-But now we’ve also got more contemporary Christmas songs, like “You’re a mean one, Mr. Grinch” or “All I want for Christmas is you.”

-There are 3 songs that make me at least chuckle, if not LOL every year: Little Drummer Boy. After having kids, I don’t think any mother after giving birth would nod to a little drummer boy once the baby is asleep. First, who wants a snare being hit next to a sleeping infant, but secondly have you ever heard a little kid play drums? There is nothing calming or quiet about it!

-Which gets me to my second one: Silent Night. Has anyone ever heard of a silent baby? They’re only quiet when they sleep, but on top of that, the delivery is the opposite of calm and bright. Someday I’ll do a Christmas series ruining Christmas songs for you.

-The last song that makes me laugh is ‘Mary, did you know?’ which is the inspiration for this sermon series, mostly because I see this meme float around every Christmas. Written in 1984 as a poem for a church Christmas musical, it eventually came together as the song we know today in 1991, but it asks a series of questions of Mary, like “did you know that your baby boy would save our sons and daughters, has come to make you new” and the reason I think it’s funny is because Mary is explicitly told the answer to all these questions in today’s text! No, she didn’t know every little detail about Jesus’ future life, but she did know the primary direction His life was going to take!

-Please stand with me, as we read Luke 1 and hear exactly what Mary knew.

PRAY

-I’ve shared this before, but the other thing I think of each Christmas is Bilbo Baggins, who is described in LOTR as “the most unlikely creature imaginable” to find the ring, similarly, Mary is the most unlikely creature imaginable to be chosen as the mother of God’s Son.

1. The Most Unlikely Creature Imaginable (26-38)

-A couple things I want you to keep in the back of your mind for every Christmas season: 

-First is that we’re coming off 400 years of silence

-Second is we’re dealing with real people who had full lives, emotions, hopes and dreams just like we do. It can be easy for us to separate these stories from reality because it’s just words on a page.

-Finally, don’t forget how incredible this is! I at times feel like the Grinch this time of year: I have to go back and preach the same texts I’ve done numerous years in a row, I’ve heard this same story every Christmas as far back as I can remember, it’s way too easy to just slip into sentimentality and gloss over just how significant the incarnation is. God literally took on flesh, the Creator became creature, the author of history entered history. What human would come up with a story like that to provide salvation to the world? 

-Friends, we’ve seen this over and over this past year as we’ve walked through Revelation, God is in control, His plans can’t be stopped, His ways are right and good, but it is going to run in conflict with the way the world trains us to think and live. His ways are better, but we are tempted to live by the ways of the world. Christmas is our annual reminder to not become seduced by the dragon, but to live in the way of the sacrificial Lamb, who came not in power or influence, but came in obscurity, with nothing, to a poor family living in a tiny community.

-6^th month refers to Elizabeth, wife of Zechariah who was a priest. An angel had just appeared to him to tell him that in their advanced age, they would have a child (we’ll see them again in the next section), but just as God has a history of redeeming childless wombs, here we see Him doing it again.

-I don’t know if you’ve ever considered this, but the story of Jesus is littered with barren wombs until God intervenes. I don’t think it’s too much of a stretch to take that idea to mean that you can tell which side God is on by the way someone cares for infants and children. God loves when families grown, and Satan hates it. There’s a reason God has to overcome so many childless women.

-Nazareth: tiny, backwoods town. Didn’t have any extrabiblical accounts of it until the 1960s, so insignificant that no other historical accounts thought it worthy of a mention. There’s a reason Nathaniel says “Can anything good come out of Nazareth?” John 1:46.

-Surprisingly little is said about her – we know her name, that she was engaged, and that’s about it.

-Notice that there’s nothing in Mary that makes her worthy of being favored. She didn’t achieve this by doing something special or by being born in the right family or living an exemplary life, what’s most significant about Mary is that she obeyed God’s commands. That’s it. She did what’s possible for all of us to do: hear God’s Word and respond in obedience. 

-Friends, you can find favor with God! The key to understand what’s happening here is God speaks, and Mary responds with obedience. This is a picture of what salvation looks like. God speaks through His people, and through His Word, and ultimately through His Spirit as the dead are brought to life. When that happens, suddenly we have favor with God! 

-Obedience doesn’t mean Mary has no questions, she knows where babies come from! And she’s never had the opportunity to create a baby.

-But what we view as impossible is nothing to God. The word “overshadow” here is used often in the OT to talk about God’s presence descending on a place. There were times where Moses couldn’t enter the tabernacle because the cloud that signified God’s presence “overshadowed” the tabernacle. This isn’t (as some have argued) the Holy Spirit taking on flesh to have intercourse with Mary, this is a unique creation. Just as God had opened the womb of so many of Israel’s ancestors, what’s going 1 step further and creating new life in a womb?

-Because of this unique conception, He will be called “the holy one” and the Son of God. This was considered fairly normal at the time.

-All Jews thought of themselves as God’s children. In fact, even the name that this child was given was one of the most common names in the 1^st century: Yehoshua (Joshua) Iyasous (Greek) meaning “God saves.” Once again, this is demonstrating the ways God chooses to work in the world is through what we would see as weakness. A normal child with the most common name, born to a poor woman in a tiny town that no one cared about.

-However, this child is unique among all humans because He has no earthly Father, just a heavenly Father.

-This also shows us the way salvation comes about in all our lives. What could you do to save yourself? Nothing! What could you add to merit God’s salvation? Zippo! But what’s impossible with us is nothing to God.

-See most of us are similar to Jesus. Not worth much based on what the world values. Not smart based on worldly standards. Yet God still chooses those exact people to bring them into His family because nothing is impossible with God.

-Connects to a story Jesus tells about how difficult it is for a rich person to enter the kingdom of heaven, his disciples say then heaven must be impossible, Jesus replies “with God ALL things are possible.” Think of the hymn ‘Rock of Ages’ “Nothing in my hands I bring, simply to the cross I cling.” We trust that Jesus is who He said He is and we are saved.

-This brings us to the next section of this text.

• The Second Most Unlikely Creature Imaginable (39-45)

-Mary hurries south to see Elizabeth. Remember the angel had told her that her relative was pregnant, even in her old age, so I think Mary rushes there to see if Elizabeth is truly pregnant, or if the angel was pulling a fast one on her.

-Hurry is a bit of a relative term, couldn’t drive, people would generally walk everywhere, so Mary would have to travel somewhere between 3-4 days (80-100 miles)

-I read onetime that God’s speed is 3 mph, that’s how fast Jesus walked, and some estimates say He spent as much as ¾ of his ministry walking, to Jerusalem, back to Capernaum, back to Jerusalem, and we get frustrated when 70 mph isn’t fast enough!

-Already we see the way people should respond to the arrival of Jesus: John in the womb leaps for joy, and Elizabeth is filled with the Holy Spirit.

-Blesses Mary (again, not for anything she’s done, because Mary is obedient) We see that explicitly: (45) she who has believed what the Lord has spoken. That’s the way God works: He speaks, we should respond. But how often do we not respond? How frequently are our hearts too hard to fully obey God? Mark Twain quote. 

-The Bible’s purpose isn’t just to comfort us (although at times it does that) in many cases the Bible’s purpose is to make us UNcomfortable because it asks something from us. Think of Rom. 3:23 “For all have sinned and fall short of the glory of God.” All. That includes me! That tells me I’m a sinner, I have fallen short, thankfully it doesn’t stop there because it goes on to say “and are justified by his grace as a gift” That means there’s hope, and that I need to live differently.

• Respond with Praise (46-56)

-Magnifies: to make greater. The blessing given to Mary is an opportunity for her to continue praising God.

-If you think about it, that’s a great way to summarize the point of worship: to make greater. But it’s not make yourself greater, it’s acknowledging that Jesus is the greater one, that He’s the only one who deserves being made greater. Greater than what? Everything. The whole book of Hebrews is a long explanation of how Jesus is better than everything that came before in God’s plan. He’s better than the sacrificial system, better than any priest, better than Moses, better than the angels, He’s better than everything, and because of that we must respond with worship.

-But why is she looking to make God greater? Because He looked with favor on her humble/poor condition. She recognizes that in God’s view she has nothing.

-This is an example for how we should approach God, humbly and not entitled.

-Kent Hughes.

-Friends, do you approach Christmas as the poor and humble or as proud and self-sufficient? Be honest. Each year we have times and seasons to take time to reflect on certain things, Christmas is our annual reminder that Jesus came for the poor, humble, and lowly, that’s inherent to the gospel message. This is why Jesus said it’s so hard for the wealthy to enter the kingdom of God, it requires admitting that you can’t do it on your own. 

-Not only can you not be saved on your own, you can’t continue growing as a Christian on your own: 

-From generation to generation – this has been God’s plan all along.

-What God does when He saves us is adopt us into a new family. This new family provides as place for you to truly be yourself, a place to find belonging and direction to your entire life. I don’t want to stretch this imagery too far, but the fact that we’re adopted means it at times is going to feel unnatural to us, just like someone who’s adopted is going to at times struggle to figure out their new family rhythms and routines. I don’t know about you, but I often struggle at holidays because my routines are thrown off! God is trying to teach us a new way of living in His family, which is different from the way the world teaches us to live.

-This new way of living is shown through God’s mighty deeds, and as we saw throughout Revelation, it’s the opposite of the way we expect the world to work:

-scattered the proud: those who think they’re self-sufficient, that they’re able to do whatever they want in their own power and strength, like the tower of Babel

-toppled the mighty: who can stand against God? No one! Trust in Him!

-Satisfied the hungry: God provides the solution to the deepest longings of your heart, only when you trust in Him can you be completely satisfied

-Kept His word: God has made promises and delivered on every single one of them. Trust in Him because His ways are good and true. If God has said He’ll do something it’s guaranteed to happen.

-Just like Mary, we are the most unlikely people imaginable to be chosen by God to be his children, if we trust in what He’s said. 

-That doesn’t mean life will be easy, or that you’ll always trust and obey God perfectly. I remember growing up reading the Bible stories and thinking to myself “If I experienced these kinds of things I would NEVER have questions or doubts in my faith.” But friends, everyone has questions and doubts at some point in their life, even Mary. 

-In Mark’s Gospel, we read that early in his ministry, as His fame was spreading, news reached His family, and here’s what they thought. But surely not Mary, right? She had this amazing visit from an angel, you’d think that everyday she’d be reminded to keep faith because Jesus was right there in front of her! Her miracle child! But just a few verses later, Mark says who was there. His mother and his brothers. See, even a visit from an angel eventually wears off. This is why the “camp high” needs to be connected to the truth. Emotions fade, experiences get less potent, but God’s Word remains the same.

-As we enter this Christmas season and look at these 4 characters of Christmas together, I’d like you to think back to why you are a Christian, and if you’re not a Christian, what’s holding you back? Questions and doubts are normal for Christians and non-Christians. If Mary, the mother of Jesus, can have doubts, so can you. But don’t just leave them there. Explore them, doubt your doubts! One of the best things about Christianity is the wealth of knowledge to draw from in studying and researching. 

-But do something. One of our mottos here is 1 step closer: what step are you going to take this Christmas season to grow closer to Jesus? Read a new devotional, read a book on the incarnation (Athanasius, written in the early 300s), read a reflect on Matt. 1-2 or Luke 1-2. 

-Or maybe you need help doubting your doubts. Reach out to me, I’m guessing I have a book or resource on whatever question you’re facing, because Christians have been wrestling with this faith for centuries.