Sunday 12 • 24 • 17

In the sixth month, the angel Gabriel was sent from God to a city of Galilee named Nazareth, to a virgin betrothed to a man whose name was Joseph of the house of David, and the virgin's name was Mary. And he came to her and said, greetings, O favored one. The Lord is with you. But she was greatly troubled at the saying and tried to discern what sort of greeting this might be. And the angel said to her, do not be afraid, Mary, for you have found favor with God. And behold, you will conceive in your womb and bear a son, and you shall call his name Jesus. He will be great and will be called the Son of the Most High. And the Lord will give him the throne of his father David, and he will reign over the house of Jacob forever. And of his kingdom, there will be no end. And Mary said to the angel, how will this be since I am a virgin? And the angel answered her, the Holy Spirit will come upon you, and the power of the Most High will overshadow you. Therefore, the child to be born will be called holy, the Son of God. And behold, your relative Elizabeth, in her old age, has also conceived a son, and this is the sixth month with her who was called barren. For nothing will be called impossible with God. And Mary said, behold, I'm the servant of the Lord. Let it be to me according to your word. And the angel departed from her. And Mary said, my soul magnifies the Lord, and my spirit rejoices in God, my savior. For he has looked on the humble estate of his servant. For behold, from now on, all generations will call me blessed. For he who is mighty has done great things for me, and holy is his name. And 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, and he has brought down the mighty from their thrones and exalted those of humble estate. He has filled the hungry with good things, and the rich he has sent away empty. He has helped his servant Israel in remembrance of his mercy as he spoke to our fathers, to Abraham and to his offspring forever. — Luke 1:26-38, 46-55

This is the time of year when lots of words that are Bible words are sort of thrown around in advertising and movies and songs. So the word "miracles" is something that you will hear and see in Christmas specials and in advertising in the mall and I'm pretty sure Mariah Carey probably has a song about miracles at Christmas time. So I want to tell you the Bradford Miracle Christmas story from 2005. I've shared this once before but lots of y'all weren't here back when I shared that.

In 2005, my family lived in Downtown Philadelphia where we were planting a church and I don't really know why we did this but we decided that Susan and our kids, four kids at the time, would head down to Tennessee to visit extended family early. I would stay around in Philly for a couple more days and preach our Christmas Eve service and then fly down to meet them. We packed up the car, filled up the car top carrier with Christmas presents for kids and extended family, and they took off down 81.

It was a bad day with a lot of freezing temperatures and they got down near Abingdon, Virginia and hit black ice and the van spun out of control and hit the guardrail. Everybody was okay—okay enough to drive the car off to the next exit. Susan got a hotel room for the night and eventually the car was declared totaled. But here's the weird part of the story.

I'm back in Philadelphia and later that evening, I get a phone call from a guy from Virginia who was driving home from work that night from Home Depot. As he's driving down 81, he sees this gigantic thing in the median of the highway. So he does what you would do, right? He pulls over his pickup and sees what it is and opens up the car top carrier and finds it filled with presents. He put it in the back of his truck, figured this belonged to somebody, and took it home. He began unwrapping presents until he got to one that was a packaging box that had a return label for my family. He looked up our information on the Internet and called me and said, "Hey, I have your Christmas. Where can I take it?"

I called Susan. I mean, crazy, right? He took it that night to the hotel where they were staying and we got our Christmas presents. He got a good Samaritan award from Home Depot and you get a sermon illustration out of this.

So why do I tell that story? Well, we call that the Bradford Christmas miracle story. But is that a Christmas miracle? That's a question you guys can answer me. I love when you talk to me. So not really. That's a story that warms our hearts, that tells us people aren't as mean as they sometimes seem.

It's really encouraging that there was a person there that was that kind and that deliberate and that much follow through. But it's not strictly speaking a miracle. A miracle is when God suspends the laws of the universe to do something that only he can do. Laws of gravity, laws of time, none of those were broken in order to return the presents to us. But this story that we just read is a story of miracles.

Three miracles that I want to point to you this morning. First, that God became a child with real skin, a real person, born to a real family. Second, that the mother, Mary, should remain a virgin. And finally, that Mary believed all this. When an angel showed up and told her this is going to happen, she said, okay. Those are the miracles. Let's consider each of these for a moment. This is a short sermon, so y'all better buckle in. It's going to be over real fast.

The God-Man Miracle

There's a lot of stuff in that announcement to Mary. A lot of great news that God gives there about the coming of his son. The angel says that Jesus would be great, that he'd be holy, he'd be the son of the most high, he would reign over the house of Jacob, the throne of his father David. But here's the big one—that he would be a person, that he would be a human person. We call this incarnation. So if you go to Mexican restaurants and you order things that say con carne with meat, this is where we get our word incarnation. Jesus as a person, God as a person with meat on his bones. That is an amazing miracle. It is contrary to anything we might expect. It's contrary to what we would imagine. The God of the universe who made humanity becomes something that he made. It kind of defies philosophical explanation.

And if you think that's hard for modern people to understand or to appreciate, it was just as hard for people in the first century. The Jews to whom Jesus came, a Jewish man, born a Jewish baby, they could not handle the incarnation. They considered it blasphemous news that God who is apart and holy and above could become a human being. In fact, it was viewed as if early Christians were saying there were two gods. And so the Jews rejected this information. They were like, this can't be.

The non-Jews, the Gentiles—if you've studied your Greek mythology or your Roman mythology, you know they have these gods and goddesses, but the Greeks believed that they were of a completely separate being and order. For flesh and spirit to come together, those are radically opposed to one another. So if we have a hard time with this, we are not the first people on the planet who had a hard time believing that this miracle happened.

Even today, I think a lot of us struggle with this. A lot of people, we struggle with this. This is embarrassing. And so a lot of Christians throughout the years have tried to help out God with this one. Let's turn it into a nice metaphor. God sort of lives among us even today, and those words take away the power of the fact that this is a raw miracle that boggles our interpretation and our understanding. That God would become a living human being is hard for us to understand, but it is not beyond what God can do.

Now, people like to say silly things like, "Can God make a rock so big that he can't lift it?" Ridiculous statements. But the reality is God can do anything that is consistent with his nature. God can accomplish anything that is consistent with his nature. The fact that my brain can't get around it and your brain can't get around it should not be that surprising to us. If we have a God who we say is this eternal and this all-powerful and this from the beginning and this so high above us, what should be amazing to us is not that God would do this and we can't understand it. It's that we can understand anything that he does. That he would condescend in any way that we could understand—that this is miraculous.

So why is this so essential? Why is it so essential that we as a church would say, hey, this is a hill we die on? Christians throughout the centuries have said, this is a hill we die on: that God became a person. Why does that matter so much? It matters because it's essential for us understanding our salvation.

Only sinful people are under God's wrath. We've been reading about that through Romans all this fall. We are under God's wrath and under his judgment for our sin, and only another human can replace a human in God's system of justice. Only another person can replace me as a sinner and be punished in my stead. It's really important that you understand and believe this really happened, not metaphorically, not lyrically, but actually.

The Miracles of Christmas

The second miracle we see here is the miracle of Christmas—that Mary should remain a virgin. This miracle was not as much a problem for the early church. In fact, it didn't become really a problem until the beginning of the twentieth century. There's a book written by one of the guys who founded the seminary I went to in Philadelphia who wrote in the early part of the twentieth century, sort of the definitive statement on why the virgin birth matters so much.

Why do we care about this so much? Again, we don't have any idea how this worked. I'm not going to stand up in front of you and say, "Here's how this worked. I've got this figured out," because this is a miracle. How is it possible for God to cause a woman who has never been married, who's never been sexually active, to bear a son? It's a miracle.

Why do we care about it? The virgin birth is so important to us because it testifies to the fact that Jesus was sinless. He did not inherit a sin nature in his conception, and it places the point of his incarnation not sometime later in his life, but nine months before he was born—at conception. Jesus comes to us as sinless.

Again, it's really important you understand that Jesus had to be a man in order to take my place. But it's also really important that we hold to this: Jesus was God and sinless, because only a sinless God is able to honestly pay for my sin, pay for your sin, pay for the sin of all whom he substitutes for—all who would believe in him. This is essential.

Mary's Belief

But here's the biggest one: Mary's belief. I want to press on that for a second. I think sometimes we think of things like virgin birth and incarnation—those are the real miracles. Yeah, those are amazing. But what I find the hardest to believe is that Mary believed this. That Mary believed this.

Remember, Mary is a girl. She is not a woman. She would have been in CTK's youth group. In fact, she would have been in our middle school youth group. Scholars estimate she was thirteen or fourteen years old when this happened. And when the news comes to her, she receives it.

I want to put this against the reaction of her uncle. Her uncle Zechariah—we know this is an older man who receives the news that John the Baptist is going to be born to his wife—and he doesn't believe it. In fact, he asks for a sign. He's like, "I can't believe this." And this is a man who had spent his entire career working in the temple. He spent his entire career in the temple. He doesn't believe it. But the thirteen-year-old girl does.

When she says, "How can this be since I am a virgin?"—she's not questioning whether this is going to happen. She's saying, "How is this going to happen?" And she shows herself to be submissive and receptive to this miracle over and over. That is the miracle to me—that Mary receives this and says, "Okay."

The Miracle for Us

At this point, there's one more miracle that I want to highlight for you this morning, and that's the one for you. That's the one for me. That's the one for all of us. See, we too must receive this good news. We must receive this good news.

And if you will respond as Mary did and submit and receive this as a gift, you'll find the other two miracles will happen in your life too. God will come in. He will enter in, and he'll do so by no means of your merit, by no means of anything that you've done—just him. Him being born in you.

Two Applications

There are two applications for us this morning. Every year we sing the song "O Little Town of Bethlehem," and I think it's one of those songs on auto repeat so much for Christians that we miss sometimes the power of the words. Listen to the last verse of those words that we sing:

Oh holy child of Bethlehem, descend on us, we pray. Cast out our sin and enter in, be born in us today. We hear the Christmas angels the great glad tidings tell; oh come to us, abide with us, our Lord Emmanuel.

If you haven't owned that verse in your life, if you haven't prayed and said, "I receive this," then you haven't received the greatest gift that there is at Christmas—the greatest gift of God sending his son for you.

And look, one of the things that's hopeful for me is that we don't have to understand it to receive it. We don't have to be able to explain all the ins and outs. I've stood up before you this morning as a minister of the gospel and said, "I don't know how much this stuff works." And I hope that you are not deflated by that but rather encouraged, because it is responding in faith to say, "Yes, I need this for me."

So that's one application. If you're not a believer in the Lord Jesus Christ, my urge to you this morning is make your Christmas a real Christmas. Receive the great gift that God gives us in his son.

For those of you who are Christians, who've said, yeah, this is true for me and I checked the boxes on everything you've said, this is my exhortation to you. Would you imitate Mary? Imitate her in these ways.

Imitate her first in the way she understands herself. Did you notice as Ali read these words to us that Mary seems very different from the Mary of the Catholic church for whom is venerated. In fact, she says things like, I am a sinful person who needs a redeemer. She owns the fact that she needs this savior for herself. She comes humbly and simply with open hands. And this should challenge us. Imitate the way that we see ourselves over and over as people always in need of God's mercy and God's grace for us.

Second way we imitate Mary, imitate the way that she understands her circumstance. There's no hint that she thinks that God chose her to be blessed because she was somehow blessed. In fact, that word blessed is one that I've noticed that Christians have stopped using. It's been so borrowed by the health and wealth gospel, prosperity gospel church that we don't like to talk about anymore. We don't want to use hashtag blessed. That sounds weird to many of us. And nobody would look at Mary's circumstances and say hashtag blessed. This is an unwed teenage mom, middle school age, dirt poor, who's about to be on run from the government. Nothing about her circumstances says, wow, except for her. She says, I am blessed because of Jesus.

And so for you, many of you, this Christmas, Christmas twenty seventeen is filled with all kinds of heartache. Some of you look at your circumstances from a year ago or five years ago. You're saying, I remember a Merry Christmas. This is surely not going to be that. This is a hard Christmas for me. This is a painful season for me. And yet I want to urge you to lean in to what Mary has discovered: that being blessed is not about your outward circumstances but who knows you, who loves you beyond all loving, and who has entered into your life.

Finally, imitate Mary with letting go of your fears and worship. My favorite Christmas special every holiday season is the old standard Charlie Brown Christmas. And you know the classical characters—Charlie Brown's known for his shirt with the big zigzag stripe and the same hairstyle. And then there's Linus who's known for always carrying a blanket with him. Throughout all the Peanuts specials, you see Linus carrying his security blanket everywhere he goes. Over and over, it's been a storyline where Sally tries to get him to give it up, and Lucy tries to get him to give it up, and Charlie Brown tries to get him to give it up, and Snoopy does. But there's only one scene where Linus actually drops the security blanket. It's in A Charlie Brown Christmas where Linus explains to Charlie Brown what Christmas is all about. And he goes through Luke 2. As he makes his way through Luke 2, there's a moment where he says the words of the angels:

Fear not

And he drops the blanket. It's one of those hidden gems where I think Charles Schultz is making a very big point to us: that it is in Jesus that we find the healing of our fears and the place where we can let go of those things in our lives that we think have to give us life and make life work for us, and worship.

So brothers and sisters, Jesus—the greatest gift given, the one that keeps on giving. Can we continue to worship and adore and find our greatest hope in him. In the name of the Father and the Son and the Holy Spirit. Amen.