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Atlantis ‹the domain of the Stingray›
Seen it all, done it all, can't remember most of it.
‹anonymous›
Atlantis: the domain of the Stingray
14Dec
2011
Wed
23:29
author: Stingray
category: Sermons
comments: 0
trackbacks: 0

Mid-week Advent III

Luke 1:39-56

In the name of the Father and of the + Son and of the Holy Spirit. Amen.

We have, this evening, a text which on the outset seems insignificant, Mary travels to visit Elizabeth, greets her, and the baby in Elizabeth’s womb moves at Mary’s greeting—seemingly insignificant...until we get to Mary’s song, the Magnificat.

Last week, we heard of the Annunciation, when Gabriel announced to Mary that she would bear the Savior of the world, and we heard in that text the very conception of the Son of God in the flesh—we heard, right before our ears, Mary becoming the Mother of God. We heard the significance last week: Jesus is Lord and Savior, even from the moment He was conceived.

This week, however, our text immediately follows last weeks. Gabriel leaves Mary, who has just spoken that marvelous sentence of faith, “Behold the maidservant of the Lord! Let it be to me according to your word.” (Luke 1:38) Now, she has packed up, and she makes her way out of Nazareth to a city of Judah. She enters the house of her relative, Elizabeth, whose husband had six months previously been visited by the same angel with similar news: “[Y]our wife Elizabeth will bear you a son, and you shall call his name John.” (Luke 1:13)

This is no insignificant text, though. For one thing, Luke records it for us as inspired by the Holy Spirit, and He wouldn’t have done so for no reason. For another, something amazing happens after Mary enters the house and greets Elizabeth. John, now six months along, leaps in Elizabeth’s once-barren womb. The Word of God is clear, this isn’t the simple kick or punch that so many who have carried a child are familiar with. John sprang with joy in Elizabeth.

Elizabeth and John are in the presence of the Creator of the Universe, mere days or weeks into His nine-month gestation. In what can be used as an argument against abortion, the Son of God and Son of Man is little more than a clump of cells recently implanted into the womb of Mary, and Elizabeth and John react. John does what he was sent to do, as Gabriel announced to his father: “[H]e will turn many of the children of Israel to the Lord their God. He will also go before Him in the spirit and power of Elijah, ‘to turn the hearts of the fathers to the children,’ and the disobedient to the wisdom of the just, to make ready a people prepared for the Lord.” (Luke 1:16-17) Yet without a voice, John here acts as the finger that was spoken of this past Sunday; filled with the Holy Spirit, he leaps for joy, pointing out to his mother that Immanuel is present—God is with them! He is that little clump of cells implanted in Mary’s womb.

And Elizabeth speaks:

Blessed are you among women, and blessed is the fruit of your womb! But why is this granted to me, that the mother of my Lord should come to me? For indeed, as soon as the voice of your greeting sounded in my ears, the babe leaped in my womb for joy. Blessed is she who believed, for there will be a fulfillment of those things which were told her from the Lord.

“Blessed are you among women, and blessed is the fruit of your womb!” Gabriel’s words to Mary are repeated: “Blessed are you among women!” (Luke 1:28, TR) Why? Because, “Blessed is the fruit of your womb,” Mary! The fruit of your womb, Mary, is my Lord. Elizabeth speaks in faith as she confesses that He who is ageless is now younger than her in the womb of a young maiden.

Insignificant? Hardly—the events of this text have as much and even the same significance as the pericope preceding: God has taken on human flesh and blood, and though divine, he comes fully human, sharing completely in our humanity as He starts out as cells and zygote and blastocyst and fetus to birth to life to death.

John has prepared the way; now Jesus will have His say. Even here, still in their wombs, John and Jesus speak. John leaps and points. Jesus gives His mother His Word, too. And, as she spoke in faith before Gabriel left, so now she speaks in faith regarding her estate:

My soul magnifies the Lord,
And my spirit has rejoiced in God my Savior.
For He has regarded the lowly state of His maidservant;
For behold, henceforth all generations will call me blessed.
For He who is mighty has done great things for me,
And holy is His name.

With some slight modifications, we can repeat these lines of ourselves, speaking and singing them in faith like the Mother of Our Lord. For by faith, our souls do indeed magnify the Lord, as we proclaim Him to friend and neighbor. By faith, our spirits rejoice in God our Savior, and He repeated comes to us in Word and Sacrament to give us the forgiveness of our sins that He won for us on the cross. By faith, we recognize our lowly states, we servants of the Lord—recognizing the total lack of ability to save ourselves and trusting solely in our God-made-flesh to have done it for us—and on account of our God-given faith, all generations of believers can call us blessed, as we refer to our faithful departed of blessed memory. All of this because He who is mighty has done great things for us, and His name is Holy—His name is YHWH, the One who was, and is, and is to come—His name is Jesus, for He has saved us, His people, from our sins.

But, our Lord in gestation is not done yet:

And His mercy is on those who fear Him
From generation to generation.
He has shown strength with His arm;
He has scattered the proud
In the imagination of their hearts.
He has put down the mighty from their thrones,
And exalted the lowly.
He has filled the hungry with good things,
And the rich He has sent away empty.

God shows mercy to those who fear Him, who see their lost condition and need for a savior, and who recognize Him as their God and Savior. But through the lips of the Mother of God, we hear of warnings against sin:

  • The proud are scattered in the imagination of their hearts.
  • The mighty are put down from their thrones.
  • The rich are sent away empty.

Pride, power, and riches—vices which so easily ensnare us and draw us away from seeing our lost condition and need for a savior, away from a right fear of God and away from His mercy.

Pride boasts in accomplishments and property over and above recognizing Who it is that ultimately gave you the will and work to accomplish things and lavishes His grace upon you in the possessions He allows you to have. Pride says, “I did this, I got this.” What’s more, pride is always condescending: “I did this because I’m better than you.” This leads to the thought in the prideful that others are in greater need of a savior than they; even going so far as to outright deny the need for a savior. Pride tells God, “Go help those who are worse off than me because I don’t need you.” And, as we hear from Mary’s lips, pride is a liar as it is found in the imagination of the heart seeking to convince you that you are better than others (and that others think this of you, too). We recognize pride in the Pharisees to whom Jesus said, “Those who are well have no need of a physician, but those who are sick. I did not come to call the righteous, but sinners, to repentance.” (Mark 2:17)

Power, as we have repeatedly heard, corrupts—absolute power corrupts absolutely. As much as God gives the work and will to accomplish great things and lavishes people with His grace given in possessions, so He also sets up authority and places people in power so that we may all live in good order, with little or no fear of those who would seek to cause us harm as God has set up the office of the sword to exact retribution on those would do cause harm. Power is God’s gift given to people in order that they may serve others. But, corruption creeps in, and the one is power seeks to serve himself by that power; it sets aside the authority placed over him. Power-hunger, even in one with little authority, sets aside the Word of God in order to satisfy the self—to satisfy the Old Adam. We can recognize authority corrupted in David, Jesus’ ancestor, who abused his God-given power to have Uriah killed in order to take Bathsheba, Uriah’s wife, as his own. (2 Samuel 11)

Riches, while also a gift from God, become self-serving in the sinful heart. Money so easily begets greed, which turns one’s eyes off of God and His eternal blessings to gain and busy-ness in this temporal realm. One consumed by greed may even try to measure his worth before God by how much he has: “God must favor me because I have such great wealth.” Therefore, if he comes by more and more wealth, it proves to him all-the-more that God must favor him, so he lusts after more in order to convince himself that he has amassed more and more of God’s favor. Greed is deceptive, much like pride. And, like corrupted authority, greed seeks to be self-serving while God intended wealth to be used in the service of others. And, as with the other two sins warned against, we can recognize the sin of greed in the parable Jesus told of the rich man who tore down his barns to build bigger ones to store his abundant harvest. (Luke 12:16-21)

So, how do we put the two parts together? Simply this. Look at Jesus in our text. While He is God, God the Son through Whom all things were created, He comes in humble means, without power, and certainly without riches. He who could rightly speak what we would say out of sinful pride takes His place among the lowly. He who has absolute power and authority over all creation becomes one with His creation, subjugating Himself under the very laws of nature that He set up. He who knows where every once of gold and silver is located in the entire universe take His place in the womb of a poor maiden from a small town, and is born in destitute conditions where the only gold to be found is the color of the straw upon which He is laid to sleep.

Why does He do all of this? He does it for you. He does it perfectly for you to fulfill all righteousness for you. And then, when the time had come, He took your imperfectness—your pride, your lust for power, your greed—to the cross and was crucified with them; in exchange He gives you His perfect righteousness, which you receive by faith.

He has helped His servant Israel,
In remembrance of His mercy,
As He spoke to our fathers,
To Abraham and to his seed forever.

This is how He shows mercy on those who fear Him, by taking what they deserve—taking what you deserve. And He follows it with grace, by giving you what is rightfully His—that is, what you do not deserve. And He started doing this, as He had promised after creation, by taking up residence in the womb of a lowly maiden, for which John, yet in gestation, and Elizabeth rejoiced. He shared completely in your humanity, lived an ordinary, human life, and died. But, in His divinity, rose from the dead in order to give you the victory over death—grace upon grace!

Therefore, as we have heard three times now over these past two weeks: Blessed is Mary, the Mother of God, because from her womb came the Savior of the world—your Savior.” He is your God from eternity and Lord and Savior even from the moment of His conception. He has done all of this for you, to forgive you for all of your sins.

In the name of the Father and of the + Son and of the Holy Spirit. Amen.

Download media: 20111214.midweekadvent3.mp3 (7.48 MiB)
audio recorded on my digital recorder and converted to mp3
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