Luke 1:46-55

I have a little quiz today. I want you to try to remember your five most important Christmases. I want you to remember five different Christmases that had a significant event. It can be a positive moment when you were given a trip around the world. It might simply be a peaceful moment. I have told you about Ed at my last church. He was a character and became a Christian late in life. But he had a beautiful zeal. He was in charge of coffee hour on Christmas Eve for four services. It was always quite an evening. The last service ended about midnight and everyone was off their homes about 20 minutes later. At 12:30, Christmas morning, Ed and I sat in the church dining room with one last cup of hot chocolate. It became an important shared moment because Ed had shared the work of the evening in a way that no one else had done.

 But there are crises in the Christmas season too. If you go away to college, you are living with your friends and seeing them every day. Then at one of the most important days of the year, you all leave your dorms and spend the holiday apart from each other.

 So your assignment is to recall the five that come to your mind most easily. A little music please. Now I want you to reflect on Mary’s Christmas. We have read today the Magnificat, the famous Bible passage where Mary sings of her trust in God and her belief that she carries the Son of God. This was written after conception and during her visit to Elizabeth to whom she went for advice. So it is written fairly early in the pregnancy.

 According to the song, Mary understands that God has blessed her incredibly even though she had now social standing. She sees correctly that future generations will call her blessed. She affirms that God’s most powerful understanding of values is to bring relief to the poor and rebuke the haughty. When our nation talks about values, Christians need to return to foundational texts such as this one. It is so famous that songs have been made from it and yet we forget that four of the verses speak directly to the issue of poverty and wealth and what God wants.

 Now let’s look at some moments of the birth of Christ that Mary does not mention in her song. Mary is almost certainly a young woman with many scholars assuming that she is 17 years old. Does it not seem that God put too great a burden on one so young? And then there is Joseph’s unbelief when Mary first mentions the pregnancy. He is resolved to divorce her. That must have been a happy conversation in Matthew 1 where is says wryly, ‘She was found to be with child.’

 And the conditions of the time were uncertain. Some of you have lived where the government is unstable or untrustworthy. You simply can’t make easy plans to travel. Israel was under Roman occupation. There are many places now in the world where you check a web site from day to day and find which roads are open. Too bad for the unlucky traveler who goes on the day it suddenly closes. Two months ago, some Vietnamese pastors were arrested for using a road into Cambodia that was usually not strict. Suddenly it changed.

 And even when Mary and Joseph got there, there was no place for them. Now, with historical perspective, we see that Jesus was born in that way to show the poor of the world, the hurting of humanity, that he loved them and came for them. If you are hurting today, I can think of no more compelling way to tell you that God loves you than to read the Christmas story. But Mary could not really see all this before the fact.

 So Mary has a complex story of Christmas where she can report it as the best or worst thing that ever happened to her.

 I read an article in the secular media of a guy who was badly injured in war. I believe it was the Korean war. The wounds will give him problems for the rest of his life. And yet his attitude is cheerful and the interviewer asked him how he could possibly be happy given his trials? His answer could have been given by Mary. He responded, ‘I had to decide to look at what I had or what I lost.’

 Mary chose the parts of the Christmas story on which she wanted to focus her mind and from that came these famous words. And so we return to the quiz on Christmases you remember. Look at the five memories you retrieved. Do you remember moments of loss or moments of blessing?

 Our lives are all filled with gifts of grace and points of loss or failure. You did not choose to experience much of what life has handed you. Mary was not advised of her rights to refuse a blessing when God chose her to bear the savior. What you get to choose is what you decide to look at – what you have or what you lost.

 It would be unfair to Mary to assume that God kept her in a daze during this whole tumultuous time of Jesus’ birth. She was dealing with the unplanned pregnancy, the difficult trip to Bethlehem, the lack of a home in which to deliver a baby, and the rumors of Herod’s wrath and the flight to Egypt. All of these things happened as well as the star, the shepherds, the wise men, and the comforting presence of God’s glory.

 Mary chose none of them. What she chose was to believe that if you trust the Lord, God takes all these strands and weaves them into a beautiful story that makes sense and helps others. And there is no greater gift that you can give others than a picture of your life as lived with God’s grace.

 Much of what awaits you in 2005 are things that you did not choose. There will be plenty of gifts, And there will be some loss. What you get to choose is whether or not you believe that God is making something good out of all those pieces. What you get to choose is what to look at – the things you have or the things you lost.