Continuing the Sacred Story

PROPERS:         4 ADVENT, YEAR C    

TEXT:                 LUKE 1:39-55

PREACHED AT HOLY TRINITY, PENSACOLA, ON SUNDAY, DECEMBER 23, 2018.

ONE SENTENCE:        The coming of Jesus is a dramatic highpoint in the                                              salvation story that is sacred scripture – and continues                                            today, an unfinished story.        

                                    

            In my years before retirement, I was a member of a group called the Board of Examining Chaplains.

            Our task, when needed, was to question graduating seminarians on academic areas in which they had been found lacking on the General Ordination Examinations.

            There are seven academic areas in which a postulant must exhibit competency before ordination to the priesthood.  Appropriately, Scripture is one of those areas.

            Few seminarians came up short in that field – central as it is.  But on those occasions, I was ready with a simple question for the seminarian:  Tell me the story of scripture.

            It is quite simple, really. Spanning the 66 books of scripture – most independent of one another – is a very succinct meta-narrative.

            My question was similar to the question posed to the ancient sage, Rabbi Hillel, in the first century:  Can you summarize the Law while standing on one foot?

            Scripture is made very complex – and, as the old saying, the emPHAsis is on the wrong sylLAble.

            That great collection of books – history, prophecy, wisdom, myth, poetry, letters, and apocalyptic literature – combines to tell us something known as salvation history.  It is the arc of God’s movement through time – from the dawn of time, and if you are receptive, to this very moment… and into the infinite future.

            Each Sunday we read passages from that salvation history– generally from the Hebrew Scriptures, the Psalms, one of the Christian letters, and a portion of one of the four Gospels. Week-by-week, we hear the sacred story of God’s movement through the chosen people.

            Today… this week… we recount a high point in that sacred story.

            God’s intervention in history has reached a personal level.

            Hear the gospel lesson again, I hope with renewed ears:

In those days Mary set out and went with haste to a Judean town in the hill country, where she entered the house of Zechariah and greeted Elizabeth.

When Elizabeth heard Mary's greeting, the child leaped in her womb. And Elizabeth was filled with the Holy Spirit and exclaimed with a loud cry, "Blessed are you among women, and blessed is the fruit of your womb. And why has this happened to me, that the mother of my Lord comes to me? For as soon as I heard the sound of your greeting, the child in my womb leaped for joy. And blessed is she who believed that there would be a fulfillment of what was spoken to her by the Lord."

            On Monday night and Tuesday, we will commemorate that holy anticipation reaching its climax – in a stable in Bethlehem, with farm animals looking-on as the savior of all humanity comes into the world… as an infant.        

            We seldom place this momentous event in its proper perspective.  We tend to see the birth of the Messiah as a stand-alone event.  And it is so much more than that.  It is so much more powerful than that.

            The trajectory of God’s movement in the world is summarized so well in Eucharistic Prayer C of Rite 2:

From the primal elements you brought forth the human race, and blessed us with memory, reason and skill. You made usthe rulers of creation. But we turned against you, and betrayedyour trust; and we turned against one another.

Again and again you called us to return to you.  Through prophets and sages you revealed your righteous law.  And in the fullness of time, you sent your only son, born of a woman, to fulfill your Law, to open for us the way of freedom and peace.

            The blessed event which we recall on Monday night is the climax in the drama between God and his people. It is expansion of his covenant to all people.

            Think back.  We are told that God originally made a covenant with a solitary person – Abram, a man living among his people in the Euphrates Valley, modern-day Iraq.  Abram became the patriarch of a Semitic people, known as the Hebrews.

            That covenant was later expanded to embrace the descendants of Abram – now known as Abraham. That expanded covenant included the tribes of Benjamin, Reuben, Simeon, Levi, Judah, Dan, Naphtali, Gad, Asher, Issachar, Zebulun and Joseph.

            When the chosen people were enslaved in Egypt – because a Pharaoh had arisen who knew not Joseph – there was the original Passover, the Exodus out of Egypt, and dramatic act deliverance at the Red Sea.  It was the seminal event of delivery in Old Testament days.

            Salvation historycontinued.  The people were given the Law – God’s gift for structuring their lives and culture.  But history tells us the people turned away from that gift and chose to live life on their own terms.  They neglected the poor.  They trusted in their alliances with other countries.  They lived in an unjust society.

            So, the prophets spoke – bellowed their messages, really.  They called the chosen people to account – calling them to return to the covenant relationship with the One who had called them into being.

            War, destruction, and dispersion of the people took place.  The God-chosen land and his chosen people had been torn asunder. Babylonian, Persian, Greek, and Roman dynasties ruled the land and people.

            But it was not, as Paul Harvey said, the rest of the story.

            There may have been 300 years of seeming-abandonment, but God was not finished.  Time would be fulfilled.

            So, it was to be that an angel appeared to Mary in the tiny village of Nazareth in the Galilean hill country.  And the greatest chapter of story began to be written.

            It was, as we believe, on a midnight clearthat the God became human and dwelt in the form of a vulnerable infant. 

            The dramatic expansion of the covenant – to folks like you and me – had begun.  God had made landfall.  Over the next thirty years, that expansion would be made clearer and clearer.

            And more:  Over the next 20 centuries, the heirs of that blessed incarnation, the church, have debated just how far that expanded covenant reached.  But it has expanded.

            As the marriage rite says, “What God has joined together, let no one put asunder.”

            God continues to call to us.  His work is not done.  Nor is ours. The covenant – so dramatically incarnated on that cold, middle-eastern night – is ours to share.

            The upshot to the Examining Chaplains’ question: God continues to call to us.  Again and again, we rebel.  But God does not give up.  He continues to pursue us. Even to the point that he becomes one of us.