Christmas wk 2 12/19 (Nermalis Vera).

What does it say about God that he chose to come into the world through the means of absolute vulnerability? Right up front, I want to give you the answer to our question and the meat of today's message. The vulnerability of the Christmas story teaches us that the vulnerability of our lives is sacred space. The vulnerability of the Christmas story teaches us that the vulnerability of our lives is sacred space.

We're going to be reading out of Luke chapter 1, verses 26 through 38.

In the sixth month of Elizabeth's pregnancy, God sent the angel Gabriel to Nazareth, a town in Galilee, to a virgin pledged to be married to a man named Joseph, a descendant of David. The virgin's name was Mary. The angel went to her and said, Greetings, you who are highly favored. The Lord is with you. Mary was greatly troubled at his words and wondered what kind of greeting this might be. But the angel said to her, Do not be afraid, Mary. You have found favor of God. You will conceive and give birth to a son, and you are to call him Jesus. He will be great and will be called the Son of the Most High. The Lord God will give you the throne of his father David, and he will reign over Jacob's descendants forever. His kingdom will never end. How will this be, Mary asked the angel, since I am a virgin? The angel answered, the Holy Spirit will come on you, and the power of the Most High will overshadow you. So the Holy One to be born will be called the Son of God. Even Elizabeth, your relative, is going to have a child in her old age, and she who was said to be unable to conceive is in her sixth month. For no word in God will ever fail. I am the Lord's servant, Mary answered. May your words to me be fulfilled. Then the angel left her.

Luke 1:26-38

This little chunk of scripture where the angel is coming, talking to Mary, telling her you're pregnant. It's called the Annunciation. This is the beginning of our Christmas story. It's Mary finding out Jesus is coming.

You know what? I think the reality is we would all love for every time God speaks to us for it to be in the Annunciation. I would love if every time I had a question or if I had a new direction or a new revelation to wake up in the morning and find the angel standing there and tell me exactly what was about to happen. We would all love such clear and precise revelation. But this is the reality. The cost of revelation is that it's going to ask something of us. You receive revelation as a gift, but at the same time you receive notice that all you have planned is changing. Everything is about to change. Most of all, you're about to change.

Maybe that's a welcome change. Maybe right now you're in your spot where you're like, you know what, I could use some change God. I could use a little shake-up in my life. Maybe you don't want an annunciation because you want God to change something in me. But the reality is that revelation, that transformation that revelation brings, you have no control of.

This annunciation that Mary got meant that she was going to be transformed in a way she could not control. Revelation is a hard gift to receive. It's one that I truly believe God desires to give us. This is how I know God desires to give us revelation. The entire point of scripture is to reveal who God is. That's like the whole mission of the Bible. It's a revelation of God. It is God's deep desire to reveal himself to us. In order to receive this gift of revelation, we must be willing to give up everything else to receive it.

If you're willing to accept that like Mary was, you'll find that our ordinary lives become the scene that God sets these insane, mysterious, divine, and sacred stories.

Mary's ordinary life

Mary was the very definition of ordinary. She was just a regular girl. She was of age to be betrothed. At the time when a man would get engaged, that man would come to her and his new in-laws. They would like talk about her dowry, how much money would be exchanged in this marriage. Then when it was accepted, the groom would leave, go back to his father's household, and basically build onto his father's house, like build a new space to bring his bride back to.

So when we meet Mary and she's getting this revelation that she's pregnant, she's already betrothed. Joseph is building a home for her at his father's household. He's not there. Now Mary's finding out she's expecting. She was completely and totally ordinary, average.

And this insane thing happens to her and she becomes the vessel for the miracle that we call Emmanuel. You know what I think is really cool, how ordinary and how normal this is. God is going to come into the world and fully reveal himself the exact same way every other human does. I'm just going to have a body. And that's like step one. I need a body. And this is how he decides to do this.

This is the absolute height of vulnerability. Why? Because in the time of Jesus, one-third of all babies died during childbirth and one-fourth of all mothers died while childbearing. This was the most dangerous thing that could happen. Being pregnant was exciting, but it was deadly.

Traditionally, women would spend the entire day of their pregnancy preparing to die. They would get pregnant and the first thing they would do was write a will or prepare to grieve their child. Childbirth was, and in many ways still is, the most vulnerable state of humanity for both mother and child.

The God that first revealed himself by fire, who flooded the earth, made a rainbow, created everything, literally led the Israelites to victory, overcoming entire nations, sent a pillar of fire and a pillar of clouds, made bread fall from the sky. He decided to come to earth as a baby in the most vulnerable state of humanity.

Scott Erickson says:

We will always take our most important stories and sacredly set them apart so we remember them for the rest of time. But this process becomes unhelpful when we separate our own fleshly humanity from the humanity found in these sacred stories. When we dismiss the naked fleshiness under all the fancy clothing, we can dismiss ourselves from being ones who could also find ourselves in a sacred story. If the incarnation insists on anything, it insists that our vulnerability matters to God.

Jesus was crucified naked. Nakedness was shameful and the Roman soldiers were going after his humiliation. But honestly, none of us wants to see the naked King of Kings when we enter into a sanctuary. So I get it. It's holy reverence that implores us to put a loincloth on his body. But to be clear, this is an editorializing of the story, even if it is only in our mind's eye. We must hold to a vision of a God who shares the fullness of our naked vulnerabilities.

Being vulnerable is being human

Here's the thing about being human. It is by definition being vulnerable. Any real connection you make in your life requires vulnerability. Incarnation, by simple definition, is what it means to become incarnate. It was the process of becoming seen. This was the process that Jesus chose to come and make himself seen.

To be seen is to be known. To be known is to risk being loved or being rejected. To be seen is to be vulnerable. But even more than that, there's an element of our very existence that is so vulnerable. Why is it that when someone gets pregnant you don't find out until they're like three to four months pregnant? These miscarriages are really common. It's a really normal thing that happens. It's vulnerable. There's a level of vulnerability that exists from the very beginning.

Everything about the Christmas story is vulnerable.

I love Christmas. I like to pretend that I'm the star of a Hallmark Christmas movie and everything is beautiful. Fun fact, when I first moved here, there was like snow. I got here in January and there was just snow sitting perfectly on all the trees. I literally looked at my sister and said, I moved off on my Christmas movie. I got over it really fast. In the moment I was like, it glitters and it's fluffy. It's perfect. So I love Christmas.

But this year is a little bit different to me. Every single year for Christmas, all of my friends that we all grew up together, everyone kind of lives all over the place now. But we do this thing called Holidaysmas. Basically what we do is we give each other Christmas presents, eat Thanksgiving food, and dress in costumes. Because we miss all of the major holidays together, so we do it all out of one. It's the most fun thing ever. We have the best time. Everyone comes together. We catch up. I'm super excited. We're doing it this week when I get home.

But it's tainted this year. And I'll tell you why. Because part of being human is you're born, and that's vulnerable, and you die, and that's vulnerable. This year we lost one of our friends that we grew up with. My friend Sebastian. He was shot in July earlier this year. So this year, I'm really excited to go home and celebrate with my friends. But there's grief, and that's vulnerable.

I'm really excited because my whole family gets together on Christmas. We eat all of the best food. There's music. It's so fun. My grandfather passed away this year. The last time I saw him in person was last Christmas. So there's grief, and that makes it vulnerable.

So this Christmas, this week actually, I'll be sitting down with one of my friends from high school whose mother passed away this year. She wants to ask me, how is God still good? Being human is being vulnerable.

The reality of life is that it's vulnerable. We're vulnerable to sickness and pain and loss. Our lives are called the messiness of being human. I don't know what your 2021 looked like. I don't know what boring, messy, fun, exciting things happened this year. Maybe you lost someone. Maybe you had a miscarriage. Maybe you had a breakup. Maybe you moved, got a new job, lost a job, started a new relationship, had a baby. Made some new friends, lost some friends, graduated college, started college. Maybe you got married, maybe you got divorced. Maybe it was the best year of your life, or maybe it was the absolute worst. Either way, you existed in the vulnerability of being a human being, subject to not being in control of the world around you.

Like Mary. Mary, in one moment, when Gabriel comes and tells her you're having a baby, she lost her entire reputation. She awaited the very likely possibility of being stoned to death for adultery by a community that she loved. She went from being an unmarried virgin to being 14 and pregnant. Married who said yes to the miracle that in the moment probably felt like a curse.

I can only imagine how she felt. I can only imagine how many times she wondered why God would choose her, of all people, to do this. I can only imagine how scared she was. I feel like having a kid is a rather scary concept in general, let alone when nothing is going the way it's supposed to. When everything is upside down and chaotic, I imagine it's rather terrifying.

I would love to sit down with Mary this Christmas and I would love to ask her some questions. I want to ask her how she faced the possibility of getting stoned. How she faced the ridicule and the abandonment of the people she was up with, who raised her, who she loved. I want to ask her how she worked up the nerve to reveal that she was pregnant. I want to ask her how she grieved all she'd ever known. How does she face knowing that her life would never be the same?

How did she hold out hope that all the pain, all the loneliness, all the confusion was going to become something beautiful? I want to ask her if she doubted. I want to ask her if she was scared. I want to ask her if as his birth came closer, did she get more excited or did she just freak out?

I thought she'd know the answer to that.

I want to ask her about the pain of the first Christmas. There was no snow. There were no Christmas lights. There were no songs and all the Christmas caroling and all the things. There was pain. I want to ask her what that was like. Because your baby is vulnerable, and vulnerable is never easy.

I also want to ask her what it was like when the joy came back. Because I think it did. I think that when she saw the face of her son and her savior, the joy just rushed back and made sense again for a second. I think that when she looked into his eyes, she saw the light of the world that they had been waiting for.

Mary is a Jewish girl. She grew up hearing the stories of the Messiah, of the Son of God, of this man that would come to save them. And she's looking into his eyes. I think that when she held him to her chest and his tiny little body was breathing, she sighed the deepest and sweetest sigh of relief. I think that in that moment, when she was looking at the face of living hope, everlasting peace, and the truest joy, at the end of all the grief, she got Jesus in the form of a helpless and vulnerable baby.

The incarnation

Isaiah 9:6 says:

For to us a child is born, to us a son is given, and the government will be on his shoulders, and he will be called a wonderful counselor, mighty God, everlasting Father, Prince of Peace.

Isaiah 9:6

What does it say that wonderful counselor came to us wrapped in the vulnerability of humanity? It says that Jesus became human so we could know that he had nothing to hide. He came as vulnerable as it comes. He hid nothing from us. He lived in our complicated world and our chaotic existence. He lived in the mess of our lives and made himself relatable.

He somehow, the God of the universe cares to relate to me and to you. What does it say that the everlasting Father came to earth with the vulnerability of meeting a father? Jesus chose to subject himself to the possibility of being rejected by his father. That's the role that he chose. It says that he knows the needs of our heart. He knows we need to know that we are not orphans. We are cared for and loved and protected and cherished.

He is everlasting Father and he loved me and he loved you enough to show us what it was like to be Father. What it was like to receive love. What it was like to receive that protection and to make ourselves vulnerable enough to be loved.

What does it say that the Prince of Peace chose to come into the world and risk being killed by the government that is resting on his shoulders? It says that the Prince of Peace, the one who carries the government on his shoulders, understood that in his vulnerability was power. He bestows that same power to us when we step into the reality of our vulnerability.

Mighty God. What does it say about Mighty God that he chose to come to the world as a human being?

We exist from vulnerability to vulnerability. This is just the reality. We come into the world and our entire existence is run on this thing called a placenta in your mother. If it stops working, you stop working. Completely vulnerable. Then you come into the world and you're 100 percent helpless to sustain yourself. You fully relied on your mother. Then you figure out how to use a toilet. You learn how to eat food. You figure out that you need to take the training wheels off the bike because it's going to move faster.

Then you go through puberty and I don't have to explain why that's vulnerable. Your young adulthood is full of vulnerabilities in relationships, finances, figuring out your career and your major and all the different things. Then it's like your 30s and 40s. It's full of vulnerabilities. There's failed marriages, careers changing. Realizing that life didn't turn out the way you thought it was going to.

Life keeps going and the vulnerabilities keep going too. The kids move out. You retire. You don't know what defines your everyday life anymore. Your body becomes more vulnerable. The conversation about the reality of your death becomes more common.

If Jesus is Almighty God, what does it say about him that that's how he chose to come into the world? From vulnerability to vulnerability.

I'm going to read a little excerpt from this book. It's called The Honest Advocate by Scott Harrison. He says:

If Jesus embodied mightiness through an overcoming of physicality, he would have appeared in a golden onesie, ripped like a CrossFit trainer, kicking the can of anyone in his way. But instead, I would find a humble servant wrapped in human vulnerability who's obedient to that vulnerability all the way to death, even if it happens to be death on a cross. Jesus is mighty not because of his capacity to overcome hardship, but because of his willingness to go through human hardship like we have to do. It is this compassionate empathy that has the power to transform the human heart.

How does God restore what it loves? By being with what God loves. How does love defeat its enemy death? By accepting it and going through it. How does God show himself to be mighty? God humbles himself and owns being human. God accepts the humility and weakness of being born. God accepts the humility and vulnerability of eventually dying. It is this mighty ground that God saves the world through.

Could it be that the doorway to experiencing God with us this season is the particular vulnerability we find ourselves facing? Whether it's in health, heart, or home, our lives will always have a particular vulnerability to them. May we not see this vulnerability as the place of failure because of our inability to overcome it, but as the very invitation to partner with mighty God through it. To make your present stage of life be the mighty ground for divine participation.

Closing: vulnerability is sacred

The reality of the Christmas story is that it is one of the most vulnerable moments of existence, and yet it is one of the most divine and sacred. Life can come from barren places. Completely ordinary people can partake in the divine. The vulnerability that we so readily run from is the very thing that God wants to make sacred. Those cringy parts that we hide and run as fast as we can from, God wants to make holy.

The vulnerability of the Christmas story teaches us that the vulnerability of our lives is sacred space. So as we move, I want us to pause and just meditate on the reality of this massive, powerful, incredible God that cares about the things that we kind of hate. These parts that we don't like. These parts make up the majority of our life. God chose that to reveal himself. God chose to overcome by going through our lives and by being with us. That's how he chose to restore us, by coming to earth and being with us.

So I'm going to invite you all to stand up to your feet.

Jesus, thank you. Thank you because even though it doesn't make sense and it's not glamorous and it's not pretty, you chose to come into this world the same way we do. You chose to have a mom that didn't know what she was doing and was figuring it out for the first time. You chose to step into a place full of rejection and pain and loneliness.

Somehow in the midst of that, you overcame everything so that we could live, so that we could love, so that we could worship you. Lord, I pray that in this time, in this moment, you reveal the power found in stepping into you and owning our vulnerabilities. Only when we own those weaknesses and trust them to you, that's the reality of the Christmas story. You choose ordinary people and their real human lives. As weak and messy and crazy as it is, that's what we choose to do miracles in. That's what we choose to call divine. That's what we create as sacred. That's what we call holiness.

So I pray that as we seek you and we seek your holiness and we look for those things, we realize it's found in those messy parts of our lives and our hearts. Lord, we thank you and we invite you into this space. Amen.