Overshadowed
Luke 1:26-38

December 22, 2002

If popular wisdom holds true, there are only two days in the year - Christmas and Easter - in which I have a chance at interpreting what the Christian faith is all about. Christmas Eve we are too busy shouting and singing and being silent in the presence of the God Who Is With Us.

This Christmas story is really not that different from Easter. The Resurrection goes beyond what rational minds can comprehend, and once we cut out all the commercialism, sentimentality, and Kris Kringle-isms out of this season’s story, what remains in the Bethlehem stable is just as non-rational. Mary and the baby are more than just adorable and cute - they point us to the essence of Christianity itself.

Physiology plagues our perspectives on Easter and Christmas. A definitely dead body being raised back to life is almost matched by the birth of a child by the agency of the overshadowing of the Holy Spirit. Early Christianity had the idea that Mary received the Holy Spirit through the ear and in that way gave birth to Jesus. Do not try this at home! The Holy Spirit is the Father of the Son - the Trinity gets more confusing all the time.

For Protestants like ourselves, the Virgin Birth seldom is discussed. We live without its dilemma or anxiety. Mary is still The Mother and Jesus is still the Baby, but that’s the case anyway. Somehow that’s like saying Jesus was a great teacher and nothing more spectacular than that. There is something more in this incredible story that really matters and is really, fully true.

“In the sixth month” of Elizabeth’s pregnancy is when the action begins, an odd time. Zechariah was a temple priest whose turn it was to perform the rites in the Holy of Holies of the Jerusalem Temple, the most God-filled space on earth. An anonymous angel confronts him, telling him that he will have a special son. Zechariah laughs - because he and his wife Elizabeth are getting on in years, a sort of Abraham and Sarah deja vu. This angel didn’t like laughing and struck Zechariah dumb, unable to speak until the child is born. The child is the one we know as John the Baptist.

The action switches up north to Nazareth of Galilee where an angel visits Elizabeth’s cousin Mary. But Mary’s messenger had a name, Gabriel, perhaps the most famous angel of Old Testament lore. Mary was engaged to Joseph, but was still a virgin. We always want to know who is a virgin in these stories.

“Greetings, favoured one! The Lord is with you!” Mary may be young and a small town girl, but she is not naive. She looks the angel upside and down wondering what kind of opening line is this. She did not answer him, but we can guess what kind of looks he received.

Gabriel had to keep the conversation going. You have found such favour with God that you are going to be pregnant and bear a son Jesus who will be great, the Son of the Most High, the Messiah, and so on. For the moment, though, all Gabriel implies is that Jesus is just going to be a regular very famous person.

Mary must have had lawyer genes, for she caught some inconsistencies here. And how is this going to happen while I am still a virgin? I am not married.

The Holy Spirit will come upon, and the power of the Most High will overshadow you. Therefore, the child to be born will be holy. He will be called the Son of God. Gabriel adds the information about Elizabeth’s now six month pregnancy - who nobody thought would ever get pregnant. Nothing will be impossible with God.

Wow! God’s power is going to overshadow Mary’s human power. Jesus will be human while he is the Son of God and Mary is the way. Just as Jesus would die and yet live again, there is so much paradox and contradiction and impossibility by our way of thinking that most of us cannot think straight about it. No wonder for so many church people the only way to deal with this overshadowing divine intervention and virgin birth is not to think about its implications at all and simply say yes or no.

But when we don’t think about it, then it’s easy to make Christmas just a big special birthday, no more distinctive than that.

What is distinctive frankly takes some hard thinking. Human beings have always desired to be more than human, to reach beyond our physical and mental limitations, and yes, to become infinite, immortal, godly. Being human, however, we never have been able to really overcome those limitations. You and I cannot be God.

You and I cannot be God, because God is completely free - free most of all of our ideas about who God is supposed to be. God is able to be human. God became human and dwelt among us. The church has found the best way to proclaim how all of this happens by saying that Mary is the theotokos - the God-bearer.

God doesn’t have a mother, but through Mary humanity has a way to receive God into our way of existence. If Jesus were a God like any other god, he would have come into this suffering, bleeding world and performed miracles, taught a new way of life, and ascended back into heaven. There would have been no need to have become human - in fact, it is impossible for God the infinite to become a full finite human being and suffer our limited way of existence.

If God had not become human we would be hopeless, for if it takes a God to perform miracles, then we can’t. Anything Jesus would have taught would have been really fine and wonderful, but we aren’t Gods who can follow that kind of path. When Jesus saved people, that was wonderful again, but being only human how can we ever imitate his actions?

Mary bore God, impossible biologically and spiritually as that sounds, but it points to the fact that you and I can participate in God’s being while still being human. The whole world is changed.

Once there was a church that had fallen upon hard times. Only five members were left: the pastor and four others, all over 70 years old.

In the mountains near the church there lived a retired Bishop. It occurred to the pastor to ask the Bishop if he could offer any advice that might save the church.

The pastor and the Bishop spoke at length, but when asked for advice, the Bishop simply responded by saying, “I have no advice to give. The only thing I can tell you is that the Messiah is one of you.”

The pastor, returned to the church, told the church members what the Bishop had said. In the months that followed, the old church members pondered the words of the Bishop. “The Messiah is one of us?” they each asked themselves.

As they thought about this possibility they all began to treat each other with extraordinary respect on the off chance that one among them might be the Messiah. And on the off, off chance that each member, himself or herself, might be the Messiah, they also began to treat themselves with extraordinary care.

As time went by, people visiting the church noticed the aura of respect and gentle kindness that surrounded the five old members of the small church.

Hardly knowing why, more people began to come back to the church. They began to bring their friends and their friends brought more friends.

Within a few years, the small church had once again become a thriving church, thanks to the Bishop’s gift. Never did hear, though, whether the Messiah showed up. I guess she did.

I do know that the Christ is dwelling among and alive in the midst of this congregation. I do know that Mary is here. doing the impossible by being a human being through whom God is able to overshadow our terribly fallible natures and allow us to experience the being of God.

It takes an extraordinary person to be God’s bearer in this life, and that’s why this Christmas story seems so surreal. This story is trying to tell us the humanly impossible by means of only human words. Gabriel told her all this impossible stuff, this Good News that is crazy, and Mary said then, and we are still able to say, “Here I am.”

Preached by Robert Kitchen
Knox-Metropolitan United Church
Regina, Saskatchewan