An Introduction to my Advent Sermons

Assuming that we don't get snowed out this weekend (it's looking possible), I am going to have three sermons this Advent season. The third week of Advent will be our annual Christmas program put on by the Sunday School. We then will be having a worship service on Christmas morning as well, but I haven't decided whether I'm going to continue from my sermon series or just do a traditional Christmas message that morning. Anyway, this is my article for the church newsletter introducing the theme of the Advent sermons.

As Evangelicals, we tend to not spend much time thinking about Mary, the mother of Jesus. We don’t want to elevate her too high or begin to believe a number of extra-biblical things about her. So we relegate her to our manger scenes, where she sits serenely (having just given birth) and remains fairly quiet.

But I think there is something we can learn from Mary. There is an inner strength that we find in her when we read about her in scripture. There is a deep faith, a great love for Jesus, and a contemplative spirit that treasures the experiences that God has given her. Scot McKnight, a professor at North Park University, has written a book about Mary entitled The Real Mary: Why Evangelical Christians Can Embrace the Mother of Jesus. In the book (which is very good), he argues that Mary is not only a woman of faith, but a woman of justice, of wonder, of sorrow, of faithfulness and a woman to remember.

This Advent season we are going to be spending some time looking at Mary during worship. We are not going to be spending time looking at the controversies that surround her and I’m definitely not going to encourage anyone to pray to her. Instead we are going to look at her faith, her sense of justice and her sense of wonder and see what we can learn from them. We can learn to have a faith like Mary’s, one which faces great peril to do what God has asked. We can learn from Mary’s sense of justice, she saw God as a God who could overturn sin in the world and bring justice to the poor and the weak. And we can learn to ponder the ways God works in our life with the wonder that Mary had. In Luke there is a common refrain in the stories we hear about Jesus’ birth and childhood: Mary pondered these things in her heart. We can learn to do the same.

So I encourage you to come on a journey with me this Advent season. I encourage you to come back 2000 years with me as we look at the life of a young woman who answered God’s call to a life of faithfulness. We will see that it was a difficult path that Mary took. We will see that when she said “yes” to God, she gave up a lot in her life. She would eventually see her son die a horrible death at too young an age. But Mary’s faith is what allowed God to send his Son into the world and for this we are very grateful. So, let us follow the path that Mary trod. Let us learn from her, not because she is better than us, but because she is one of us, one of us who allowed God to truly work in her life. And let us hope to do the same in our lives.