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Christ Community Chapel is a church in Hudson, OH, that invites people to reimagine life because of Jesus. Learn more about us at ccchapel.com.
This is a reading from Luke 1:46-56
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
and the thoughts of their hearts.
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.
And Mary remained with her about
three months and returned to her home.
Hey everybody, good morning
and welcome to Christ Community Chapel.
My name is Joe.
I'm one of the pastors here,
and I am really glad that you have come.
All right.
This is the first week of advent
where we turn our eyes toward Christmas.
And I always think that Thanksgiving
is like, a starting line
when that you swallow
that last piece of turkey,
then like, a gun goes off
and it's an all out sprint to Christmas,
Christmas specials
start showing up on TV, have office
Christmas parties, and everywhere you go
you hear Christmas music.
For the most part,
I, I enjoy Christmas music.
Although songs like Sleigh
Bells ringing or chestnuts roasting,
they're fine.
They just kind of miss the point,
because the point of Christmas is Jesus,
that healing has been injected
into the brokenness of our world,
that healing has come for the brokenness
deep down in you and deep down in me.
The passage we just had read to us
is actually the first Christmas carol,
and it's sung by Mary,
the mother of Jesus.
It's commonly called the Magnificat,
which sounds like the word magnificent.
It seems like it's referring
to how great the song is,
but Magnificat is Latin for magnifies.
It's the first line that Mary sings
my soul magnifies
the Lord, and my spirit rejoices
in God my Savior.
Our theme for advent
this year here at TCC is joy.
That's it. Just joy.
And the title of this message
is Joy for you.
And we take this passage
because Mary is overflowing with joy.
It's like it's cascading out of her.
She has come to understand something
and what has happened.
The result of that is irrepressible
and glorious joy.
That's what I want this Christmas.
That's what I want for you this Christmas.
When I say she came to understand
something, what I mean is,
a couple of weeks before she sings
this song, the angel Gabriel pierced her
and tells her
that she's going to have a baby.
And she says, how can these things be?
And Gabriel says,
The Holy Spirit's going to come upon you.
The baby's going to be conceived
by the Holy Spirit.
She has no idea what that means
right now. How could she
at that
moment, she is not experiencing joy.
What she does is she submits
like she knows that
if what the angel said is true, then
all the plans that she had for her
life are gone.
She knows if what the angel says is
true, she's going to be an unwed
mother
with the story that no one will believe.
And she says,
okay,
I'm in.
You know, sometimes obedience is like,
you know,
when you go to a vending machine,
you put the coins in
and you press the button
for the coke or whatever,
and nothing happens.
And then there's kind of
a rumbling in the machine.
And then the coke finally pops out.
That's what happens
sometimes when God asks you to obey him.
You don't really know what God is doing.
You don't know what the result
is going to be.
There's that rumbling.
And then for Mary,
the coke finally pops out.
She finally understands something,
and the result of that
is great, great joy.
All right, let me
read verses 46 through 50
and I'm going to give you my three points,
which are what Mary understood
and what I want us to understand
as we head into advent.
This is where it starts.
And Mary said, my soul magnifies the Lord.
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.
Then this 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.
Mary understood three things.
These are my three points.
She understood three things about God,
and they're all mentioned in those verses.
First, God is mighty, God is mighty.
The second is God is holy,
God is holy, and the third is God
his mercy.
God is mighty.
God is holy.
God is mercy.
All right, first, God is mighty.
Everyone.
So I meet somebody who really struggles
with the virgin birth
like it's just blows their mind.
They can't.
They don't believe it.
They can't understand it.
And I always think that's an odd thing
to get stuck on.
I mean, in one way it's understandable.
In another way, it's
not the way it's understandable.
Mary struggled with the virgin birth
and she had an angel telling her
and when Gabriel says,
you're going to have a baby, she said,
how can that be right?
How is that possible?
And Gabriel in verse 37 says,
nothing is impossible with God.
And that's that's where it's not.
I have I have trouble understanding when
people struggle with the virgin birth,
because if there is a God and
he created all that is,
how difficult is the virgin birth?
Yeah, I love this.
I get into this that the first hundred
and 60 years of modern science,
scientists believed in what was called
the static universe.
What that meant was
they believed that matter
and energy and time were eternal,
that they had always existed.
And the real question
that science needs to figure out
was how matter and energy over time,
kind of organized together
to create such a complex world.
That was their big question,
until a man named Albert
Einstein came up with a theory
called the Theory of relativity,
and that began, just
an avalanche of data
proving beyond a shadow of a doubt
that matter, energy and time
were not eternal,
that all three of those came
into existence in a moment that scientists
call the singularity.
Right.
And what this is,
this is really interesting to me.
So I get it.
I get geeky about this, but,
when he was like, figuring out
his famous equation equals n squared,
he kept making a mathematical mistake.
And there was a Russian mathematician
named Alexander Friedmann who wrote him
several times and said, I see the mistake
you're making in your equation.
If you're correct that I think
your equation will work
and your theory will be proved right.
And finally, Albert Einstein
wrote him back and he said, I have known
about that mistake for a while,
but I could not get myself to correct it.
Then he said, this
because if my theory is correct,
the question about the universe
is no longer
when or how,
but who.
What Einstein understood
was that his theory implied a creator.
And if there is a creator
who created all that is really,
how hard is it for him to fertilize an egg
without any help, right?
This whole idea
that Jesus came means that
not only did Jesus come,
but the gospel came.
The good news
that God is the God of the impossible,
that God can save someone like you
and someone like me
without violating his justice.
And he does it with Jesus
going to the cross.
Christmas is a time when we celebrate
like it's like that kid's song
that we taught our kids a long time ago.
My God is so big, so strong and so mighty.
There is nothing my God cannot do.
That's the first thing
that goes that Mary understands,
that begins to build this joy,
that she realizes
there's a God in heaven
and there is nothing that he cannot do.
That's the first thing.
The second thing comes from
the same verse, is that God is holy.
It says, for he who is mighty has done
great things for me,
and holy is his name.
Holy holiness is scary.
At least it should be.
It's the aspect of God that is so pure
that it is overwhelming, that
it is actually dangerous to come close to
pure goodness.
Like pure evil
is too much for a human being
to actually experience.
And holiness is the the.
The best analogy that I can get for
holiness is electricity.
I mean, electricity is wonderful,
but electricity is very dangerous.
You don't
you don't
approach electricity on your terms.
You approach electricity on its terms.
You don't go willy nilly into electricity
grabbing live wires.
Right.
It will always have the same impact.
I worked as an electrician's
apprentice
one summer when I was in college,
and, the owner of the company
was a friend of the family.
That's how I got the job.
Because I've told you over and over again
that I am not handy right at all.
So the first day of work,
I was riding with this electrician
and I said, listen,
I thought I'd come clean.
Listen, I just want you to know that,
I don't know much about tools or anything.
Right?
And I still remember
he was driving and he said,
yeah, you can't be as bad as the kid
I had last, last summer.
And I said,
I think that might have been my brother.
And he goes, oh, my, oh, God, like that.
But the thing I remember about
this guy is that he worked very fast,
and sometimes he wouldn't
turn the breaker off.
And one day he was moving too fast
and he touched a live wire.
It knocked him off the ladder
and he almost bit his tongue in half.
You don't mess with electricity.
That's holiness.
That's holiness.
You know, in the Old Testament,
the Jews would worship at a place
called the Tabernacle, which was a tent.
And then later on the temple right in.
And both structures were built
to, to show the Israelites that the closer
you got to God, the more dangerous
it became because of his holiness.
In fact, there was a the closest
anyone could get to God
was called
the Holy of Holies was a little room
that only one person
could go in once a year.
That was the high priest,
and before he went
in, he had to bathe himself a certain way.
Then he had to put on certain clothes,
and then he had to make a sacrifice
and bring the blood in for his own sin,
to atone for his sin
before he went into the Holy of Holies.
He would have bells put around his robe
and a rope tied to his ankle, just in case
he was not approaching God on God's terms.
And he dropped dead.
They would know
because the bells would quit ringing,
and they could pull him out with the rope
that was tied around his ankle.
Holiness is scary.
Mary includes it in her song of joy.
She is not scared of the holiness of God.
Right. You know, there's a famous,
like, passage in a book by C.S.
Lewis called The Lion,
the witch and the wardrobe.
It's a kid's book. It's a great book.
But the Christ figure is,
a giant lion named Aslan.
And one of the little girls,
when she hears about Aslan,
she says, well, is he a safe lion?
And the answer comes back.
Of course he's not safe.
Nobody said anything about him being safe.
He's good.
He's the king.
I tell you, that's what Mary understood
about God,
that he was holy.
But he had become
safe for her because of his goodness.
You know, there's, a weird story
in the Old Testament where Moses
goes up on the mountain, to get the Ten
Commandments on Mount Sinai.
And, he and God tells
Moses, tell the people, don't
even touch the mountain,
because my holiness
has gone down through the soil.
So if they touch the mountain,
they're going to die,
and they're going to want to come.
They're going to try to
break through to get to me,
because the pure goodness of God
is what we long for,
what we were made for.
And we are, like Maus, drawn to a flame.
But Mary says,
God has done something for me
with the coming of Jesus.
That makes it so that I don't
have to run away from the holiness of God.
But I can run toward him.
I can run into his arms.
She says, God is mighty, God is holy.
And then my third point is God has mercy.
This is what he says.
She says, my soul.
I'm going to read the whole four verses.
My soul magnifies the Lord.
My spirit rejoices in God my Savior.
For he's looked on the humble state
of his servant.
For behold, from now on
all generations will call me blessed,
for he 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.
There is a movement of love
that is the greatest movement of love
our world has ever known.
It is weaved into the fabric of who
we are.
It's a three part movement.
Is the three part
movement is to give up, go to and be with.
That's it.
Give up, go to be with every mother knows
that movement.
Instinctively a mother hears her child
cry out in another room.
She drops what she's doing and runs to her
child.
That's giving up. Go to be with.
If you have a great friend,
you count on that movement.
If you call your friend in the middle
of the night and say, I need you now,
a friend who loves
you will crawl out of bed,
put on his coat, meet you at the hospital.
He will give up. Go to be with
700 years before the angel Gabriel appears
to Mary to tell her
that she's going to have a baby.
The prophet Isaiah writes this.
This is in Isaiah seven
says, therefore the Lord himself
will give you a sign.
Behold,
the virgin shall conceive and bear a son,
and shall call his name Emmanuel.
That same prophecy is reiterated
by an angel
to Joseph in the Gospel of Matthew,
and he adds,
you shall call his name Emmanuel,
which means God with us.
What Mary realized is that
God had joined in that movement,
that the coming of Jesus was God giving
up, going to being with.
And that's about all
she understood at that time.
But she also understood that the the baby
she would hold was white hot
with the holiness of
God, yet she could hold him
because God had come
with mercy, and that mercy was in Jesus.
Then going to the cross
and dying on the cross for us.
You know, I remember
I mentioned the tabernacle in the temple,
that before the priest could have, the
high priest could ever get close to God.
The high priest had to make a sacrifice
for his own sin and bring that blood
sacrifice into the holy of Holies
to atone for his sin.
This is what the writer of Hebrews says
about Jesus says he entered once
for all into the holy places, not by means
of the blood of goats and calves,
but by means of his own blood, thus
securing
an eternal redemption.
It says that Jesus blood was different,
right?
That Jesus blood was not for his own sin,
but for your sin, for my sin.
And then the Gospels tell
us the moment that Jesus dies
on the cross, the curtain in the temple
that separated the Holy of Holies
from the rest of the temple
tore into.
And what that meant was
that God had done something
that would allow
people like you and people like me
to run to him
and not away from him.
So what Mary understood,
and that resulted in great joy,
was that there was a God
who is mighty,
who could do the impossible,
who could come as a human being
and pay the price
so that somebody like you
and somebody like me could actually
be saved without violating his justice,
that God was holy, that he wasn't safe.
But he was good.
He was good. And then finally, the God
was mercy
that God would provide a way
to heal the brokenness deep down
inside of us that would inject broke
healing into the brokenness of our world.
So it would never be the same.
So this is my thing
as you go in this sprint toward Christmas,
as you see Christmas specials
pop up on TV as you
go to office, Christmas parties,
as you hear
Christmas music, whatever that music is,
be reminded
of the Magnificat
of what Mary sang about God.
Be reminded that you serve a God
who is mighty,
who can do the impossible, who is holy,
but above all is mercy.
And then sing with Mary.
My soul magnifies
the Lord,
my spirit rejoices in God my Savior.
And let joy be the theme in your heart.
Let it be irrepressible
and glorious joy for you.
All right. Would you pray with me?
Father in heaven, we come to you.
And, Christmas is usually not a time,
at least for me, that I think
of your mighty, mighty
ness, your holiness, your mercy.
I think of Jesus.
But that is why you sent Jesus.
That is why Jesus came.
And the whole movement
to give out go to be with is overwhelming.
I pray for, all of us, as we approach
Christmas.
That will be a time where Joy would begin
to well up inside of us
as we understand what Mary understood.
And we worship you where we say our souls
magnify the Lord, and our spirits rejoice
in God our Savior. Thanks.
Thanks for joy.
Thanks for Jesus.
We pray this in his name.
Amen.