Back to Sermons Back to Home

As you have probably realized by now, today marks the beginning of the Advent Season, which are the four Sundays before Christmas and Christmas Eve. We have our first Advent candle lit, our church is decorated all pretty thanks to Barb and the rest of the worship team. Tonight we’ll decorate our Chrismon tree, and I hope to see a lot of you there. It’s going to be a really good time together, and hopefully a tradition we can carry on. We have really started to anticipate Christmas.

For you kids and you kids at heart, I know you are anticipating Christmas, too. I know we are all hoping for Santa to come, hoping for lots of toys. I told my family this year that I’m starting to get tired of practical presents. This year, I just want toys. Christmas is so much more fun when you get toys, right?

How many of you like to be surprised at Christmas time? You like getting up on Christmas morning with no idea what might be in those packages under the tree? OK, how many of you hate surprises? How many of you know what is in every single package before you open it? My wife should be raising her hand.

I’m going to tell on her a little bit, because, well, I have a microphone and I can. The only time I have ever surprised Holly was when I proposed. She has guessed or figured out every gift I have ever given her since then. I already did most of my Christmas shopping. Foolishly, I used the credit card. When the credit card statement came in the mail, she looked to see what store I had shopped at and how much I had spent. She then got online and went to that store’s website and figured out what items at that store cost what I spent, and through a process of elimination, has already figured out what she is getting for Christmas. It’s like being married to someone in the CIA. I can’t do anything without her figuring it out! Maybe from now on I should just tell her right away when I get her something and spare her having to go to the work of figuring out what it is.

You know that’s kind of like what God did with Israel. You have to kind of understand what Israel had been going through. You really have to understand the whole story to understand just what it was like in Israel at the time the angel came to Mary. You have to go all the way back to Abraham in the book of Genesis. God promises Abraham that someday every nation on the earth will be blessed through him. He promises that he will make his name great. His grandson Jacob then has these 12 boys who become the 12 tribes of Israel. And they are forced to move to Egypt because of a famine where they were living. In Egypt, their family grew huge. In fact, they began to outnumber the Egyptians, so before they could take over, the Egyptians made them into slaves. For hundreds of years, this family, which at this point were known as Hebrews, were slaves in Egypt, until God sent a man named Moses to deliver them and take them into the land that God had promised to Abraham. After another long time of wandering and fighting, they finally became settled in that land, the land that is today Israel. Eventually, they had a King named David, and David was a good king and it was promised to him that his reign would last forever. Unfortunately, his sons were not as Godly, and eventually, the kingdom was split, and a group of people called the Babylonians came and captured the Hebrews, who were now called the Israelites, and they took them back to their home country where they lived in captivity.

Now, it was at this point that a man named Isaiah, who was a prophet, wrote the words that Lois read for us earlier: The Lord will arise upon you, and his glory will appear over you. Nations shall come to your light, and kings to the brightness of your dawn. It’s as if God is saying, there’s a light at the end of the tunnel. Something great will happen to you. Again in Isaiah, it says, “The virgin will be with child, and will give birth to a son, and he will be called Emmanuel, God with us.” And the prophet Micah also wrote, “But you, Bethlehem, though you are small among the clans of Judah, out of you will come for me one who will be ruler over Israel.”

These prophecies and others became known as prophecies of a Messiah, one who would come and would take back the throne of David, and would make Israel a great nation again. The prophets were telling the people, “Have hope!” God will restore us. God has not forgotten us. Even in the midst of being a captured people and being removed from the promised land, God has not taken his eye off of us.

So the people waited. Finally, they were allowed to return back to their homeland, but no sooner did they get there then a Greek man named Alexander the Great came in and occupied the area. Just when things had been looking up, they were oppressed once again. Now, if you can remember all the way back to last year, we talked about the Maccabees, a group of Jews who actually overthrew the Greeks in Jerusalem. The people began to think, maybe one of these men is the one who the prophets were talking about. Maybe one of them is the Messiah.

But no sooner did they think that then the Romans came in and once again occupied the area. It had been over 400 years since Isaiah and Micah and the other prophets had told the people that a Messiah, a Savior was coming. And every time the people thought they saw that light at the end of the tunnel, their hopes were dashed. Do you think maybe the people had started to lose hope? Do you think some had begun to think, “Maybe this is as good as it gets. Maybe we are meant to be the doormat of civilization, with greater nations wiping their feet on us throughout history. Maybe this is our lot. Maybe…God has forgotten his promise.”

And then…there was a little girl. Young, maybe a teenager. If you haven’t seen the movie “The Nativity Story” yet, go rent it. It does a great job of depicting what Mary and Joseph might have looked like, and what the area and mood might have been like. It is very well done. An angel comes to this girl, and the account of their meeting was read for us earlier. A young girl, from a family that doesn’t matter who lives in a place that doesn’t matter, is visited by an angel. And the angel says, “Greetings, favored one! The Lord is with you.”

And the scripture tells us that Mary was “much perplexed” by this greeting. That’s probably putting it mildly. Do you think Mary wanted to say, “Favored one? God is with me? I think you have the wrong person.” Then the angel says, “You are going to have a little baby boy!” OK, now I know you have the wrong person. “He will be great! And he’ll be called the Son of God, and God will give him the throne of David. He will reign forever, and his kingdom will have no end.”

Now Mary would have known the prophecies. She would have known that the people were hoping for God to send a king. And she would have realized that that’s what the angel was talking about: fulfilling those prophecies. The coming of the Messiah was going to be the greatest event in the history of Israel: greater than the Exodus, greater than David and Solomon, greater than the Maccabees. And here was an angel telling a poor, oppressed, teenage girl that this Messiah would come through her.

And she said to the angel, “How can this be, since I’m a virgin?” But I’m guessing there was more to that question than just the technicalities of how this sort of thing happens. The question was about more than just the birds and the bees. I think the question was really, “HOW?” How is it that the greatest even in the history of God’s people, and the world for that matter, going to happen through her? How is that even possible? I don’t think she lacked faith really, but the idea that this could happen through her just seemed ridiculous. She wasn’t married, her family was poor, her future husband was a blue-collar man, their town was dirty, impoverished, and oppressed. How could this possibly happen?

But I think the angel spoke softly to her when he told her that the Holy Spirit could come upon her. Not just to impregnate her with God’s son, but to give her strength and courage. And then he said the line upon which all hope is based; the belief that literally can give us hope in even the darkest of situations, and the answer that I think Mary was really looking for. The angel said, “For nothing will be impossible with God.”

For nothing will be impossible with God. Isn’t that the though upon which Mary’s hope, and our hope, is based? Isn’t that the idea the breeds all hope? Nothing will be impossible with God.

You know, as I was reading this passage, I began to wonder, did God really need to tell Mary what he was doing? He’s God, can’t he just do what he wants? He doesn’t need Mary’s permission. If he wants his son to come through her, then he can do that. So why? Why tell Mary who this child will be? Why tell her where this child will come from?

I think maybe Mary needed reminded. I think she needed reminded that nothing will be impossible with God. I think she needed reminded that there is hope. I think maybe all of Israel needed to be reminded that God had not forgotten them. It’s as if he’s saying to all of Israel, “Look, I haven’t forgotten you. It just wasn’t time yet. You are not too far gone to be rescued. See? I can even rescue you through a lower-class little girl. I can save you through her. There is nothing I can’t do! Nothing will be impossible for me. Have some hope. With me, you should never lose hope.”

As we enter this Advent season, and Christmas is in sight, maybe we need reminded that part of what this season is about is remembering that with God, there is always hope. Nothing will be impossible with God. With God, we should never lose hope. If God can save a nation and perform the greatest miracle in the history of mankind through an impoverished little girl, surely he can meet our needs. Surely our situation is not too far gone for God to rescue us.

Through a flood, through the passing of children and loved ones and what seems like more than our fair share of tragedy, it’s easy to lose hope. It’s easy to lose hope when we realize just how vulnerable and fragile our lives are. It’s easy to lose hope when your marriage has been on the rocks and you don’t feel like you can hold on any longer, when your job is in a dead end, when it seems like every time you pull yourself up off the ground you get knocked right back down. Sometimes that light at the end of the tunnel seems so dim that you’re not sure it’s even there anymore. Have you been there? Are you there right now?

Here the words of the angel, meant for Mary, but also for you and for me: For nothing will be impossible with God. Nothing will be impossible with God. I don’t care what hole you are in or how dim that light seems, there is always hope with God. That is what Christmas reminds us of. It reminds us that we have a God powerful enough to rescue and save us from the deepest and darkest pit. The psalmist tells us that it doesn’t matter where we go, God can and will find us there. The highest mountain, the deepest valley, it doesn’t matter. God is there. And where there is God, there is hope.

Because of Christ, we have a new hope. A hope that one day everything will be made whole again. We will live in paradise with him and we will see the face of the one in whom we have put our hope. Because of the cross, hope can never die. And I think that Jesus wants us to remember that. And he gave us a sign to remember that by, when on the night before his death, Jesus sat in the upper room with his disciples…

Van Buren United Methodist Church

Van Buren, Ohio

Pastor Dan Metzger