Good morning. Last week, as Dan took us into the Advent sermon series, he began by sharing with us from the first of two great stories that are recorded in the first chapter of Luke. It’s the story of Zechariah and Elizabeth.

Remember, Zechariah is an old man; his wife is old. They haven’t been able to have any children. But once when Zechariah is performing his duties, he’s encountered by the angel Gabriel who tells him that his wife will indeed get pregnant. And she does. And she gives birth to a child. And then they name that child John, according to the angel’s instructions.

And the story of Zechariah ends with his prophecy in which he speaks to the role that John is going to play as one who is going to turn the hearts and minds of his people back to God and thereby prepare a way for the coming Messiah. And that’s really the first great story in that Advent chapter of Luke.

There’s a second story that Luke very skillfully interweaves with the first. The protagonist in the second story is about as far away from Zechariah as you can imagine. Zechariah is an old man with some position of prestige in his community. The second story is about a young girl; probably 12 to 15 years old; probably a peasant girl with little or no status or significance in her community at all. Of course the second story is the story of Mary. And that’s the story I want to share with you this morning.

It turns out that this is the third year in a row that I had the privilege of sharing during the Advent season from Mary’s story. And so as I was thinking about what I would say from the text this morning, I went back to look at what I had said in the last couple of years.

Two years ago, if I’m remembering correctly, the thrust of the sermon was to try to take us as a congregation down into the real earthy, nitty-gritty literal details of the story and to try and help us imagine what it would have felt like to have been, let’s say, a 14-year- old-girl who encounters an angel, who then finds herself pregnant without ever having had sex, who then finds her pregnancy beginning to show in a community where to be pregnant outside of wedlock would be scandalous...and just what this must have been like for Mary. And then in that context, to elevate her humility and her willingness to be God’s servant. So that was two years ago.

Then last year we used the text from Mary’s song, The Magnificat. I just read the first couple of verses of that today. But in that song, there are clear indications that when Jesus comes and is born, it’s going to have a significant impact on the social and political structures of the day.

All through the gospel of Luke it’s very clear that Jesus does not come just to make his people feel good, just to make it possible that their sins can be forgiven. But more than that, Jesus comes as part of his mission to turn upside-down the political and economic structures of the day...of that first century day and the 21st century day. And so last year we talked about some of the significant political and economic, and upside aspects, of Jesus’ coming.

So I was trying to think what we should talk about this Sunday from this same, very familiar text. And it seemed to me that God was inviting us to look at the story this morning through a very different window and to kind of look at it now as a metaphor for spiritual growth...to think of Mary’s pregnancy as a metaphor for spiritual formation.

Now I want to say quickly that because I want to talk this morning symbolically and metaphorically I’m not in any sense wanting to back away from the earthy, literal truth that we talked about a couple of years ago, or from the grand, political and economic implications of Jesus’ birth which we talked about last year. But this Sunday it seems to me that we’re looking at Mary’s pregnancy as a metaphor for growth.

Now that may not seem initially obvious as to why it would fit. But think of it in these terms: Mary is carrying Jesus in her womb. And for 9 months she is nurturing this child who is being formed in her. And in an obviously different way, but still in a way that has some resonance, you and I are also pregnant. That is, God is forming in each of us the life of Christ. And so we can look, I think, to some extent about how God deals with Mary’s pregnancy and see what He has to say about our own.

There are some hints of this sort of foreshadowing role in the texts themselves. If you remember, Mary gets this, “These things will happen to you.” And then she says, “How can it be? I’m a virgin.” And the response that she gets from Gabriel is that the Holy Spirit will come upon her.

Now that Greek word, “come upon you,” is the same word that Jesus uses in Acts when he is talking to his disciples about the formation of the church. Just before he ascends into heaven he says, “You are to go to Jerusalem and you are to wait until the Holy Spirit will come upon you.

And so the same Holy Spirit that comes upon Mary and inaugurates the life of Christ also comes upon the disciples and inaugurates the life of the Church. And comes upon you and me and inaugurates the growth of the life of Jesus within us. And so that’s what I want us to think about this morning. I want to think about how Mary’s pregnancy helps us think about our own spiritual growth, or what we sometimes call spiritual formation.

Now, as I began to ask that question of the text, I ended up with 6 observations that I’d like to share with you this morning. I know that many of you are used to hearing me preach and that I tend to gravitate toward the 3-point sermon structure. But you can kind of consider this morning a 2-fer…you get 2-fer-the-price-of-one…which means that if you make it all the way to the end of this sermon you can sleep in some Sunday morning coming up. Not really!

First is this:
Spiritual formation, spiritual growth, is all God’s work. It’s God that does it.

Think about Mary and how she gets pregnant. She really has no part in this. We’re told that the Holy Spirit comes upon her. The power of the Most High overshadows her. And she’s pregnant.

Let me say, and I’m not sure that in every age we would have had to make this point, but in this age I think it’s important to say. The Greek there for the “overshadowing” or “coming upon” has not even the slightest hint of a sexual encounter. This is not God having sex with Mary, and as sometimes people have suggested, almost God raping Mary. There’s no hint of that in this text. This is Mary enveloped in the presence of God and somehow, mysteriously, a life is formed in her womb.

But it’s all God’s work. There’s nothing that Mary has to say. In fact, when Gabriel comes to both Zechariah and Mary and tells them what is going to happen, both of them respond more-or-less the same way. In their own versions they more or less say, “How can this be?” Zechariah goes on to say, “How can this be, because I’m old? My wife is old. We’re past childbearing age.” Mary says, “How can this be? I’m a virgin. I’m young. I haven’t ever had sex. How can this be?”

But notice that in each case their response looks at their capacity to produce what God has said will happen. “I can’t do it. I’m too old.” “I can’t do it. I’m a virgin.” And in each case, the response of Gabriel – although in different words and in different ways - is in effect, “It’s not yours to do. God will do it.” Spiritual formation is the work of God.

I have this image that I have lived with for a long time. And it’s so long now that I can’t remember where it started. I’d like to tell you it started in a dream because that would be cool, but I can’t remember that for sure.

But the image is this: That I’m standing on one side of a chasm and I’m looking across to the other side of the chasm. And over there I see me. Only I see me as God would see me to be; as I would want.

• I’m pure
• I’m gentle.
• I’m not self-obsessed.
• I’m able to give to others generously.
• I’m quieter.
• I’m all these things that I long to be that I think God longs me to be.

And then I can also see me on this side of the chasm where I am. And there I see me as I am with all my warts and blemishes, and hints of arrogance, and inability to be sensitive to other people, and missing what God is doing, and craving and desperately manipulating people to give me their attention. And I say, “Ah! I want to get over there. I want to move from where I am to that place over there.”

And in my image I run up and down this side of the crevice, looking for some way that I can climb across…that I can walk across…that I can get across. And I never find it. There’s no way for me to get across to the other side. Because the image reminds me again and again, it’s not my work to do. Spiritual formation and spiritual growth is the work of God.

Second observation:
Even though it’s all God’s work to do, we do have a limited role in this process. And it is, basically, to receive and to nurture.

Think about Mary. I said Mary had nothing to do with her pregnancy but it’s not quite so. She finishes this whole conversation with Gabriel and the last thing she says to him is, “Okay. I am the Lord’s servant. Let it be to me as you have said.” “Okay.” She in a sense opens her womb. She receives the grace that God intends to give her.

I’ve wondered at times, kind of mused, what it would have been like – what would have happened if at the end of this conversation Mary had said, “You know, I don’t think so. This doesn’t seem like such a good deal to me.” I’m confident that God would not have forced himself on her. In sort of human terms there must have been some “Plan B.” But it didn’t happen. Mary says, “I receive what it is that you want to give me.” And that’s what you and I are called to do. As God inaugurates new work in us our role is simply to say, “Let it be unto me as you have said.”

Now the other thing that Mary does in addition to receive, or course, is to nurture this child. She carries the baby for 9 months as a pregnant woman and she’s nurturing the growth that is going on within her.

In a very sort of male way, I picture what it means to nurture a child as a pregnant woman. My mental picture coming into this was of a woman perhaps 7 months pregnant...a woman sitting comfortably (that should be your first clue that I didn’t get it)…sitting there in a quiet place, with beautiful soft light in that sort of beatific look that pregnant women can get, rubbing her stomach and humming to her child.

I shared this picture to Marge and she said, “Let me give you another picture of nurture. Remember the 8 out of 9 months that I was running to the bathroom and shoving saltine crackers in my face?” And it made me think, “You know that’s right.” Nurture is sometimes a gentle activity and sometimes a function of just hanging in there when it’s kind of hard. This whole conversation comes from one who once had the sensitivity to say in the presence of his wife to a third party, “Oh, you know the birth of our child wasn’t that hard.”

So Mary nurtures this growth that’s going on in her. And you and I are invited to nurture the growth that God is doing in us as well. What does it look like? What does it mean? Well, It could look like different things for different people.

• It might mean, for example, that you have gotten out of the habit of reading Scripture regularly and you need to get back and let Scripture roll over you.
• It may mean that you need to let go of control of something you’re trying to make happen in a certain way.
• It may mean that you need to create some space in your life – maybe 2 or 3 days when you just sit and let all the frenetic-ness of the day settle down
• It may mean that you need to just hang into some tough place because God is meeting you there and working on you in the very toughness of the moment
• It may mean that you need to get yourself connected to some other Christians in a HG or a small group of some sort so that they can know what God is doing in you, so they can come underneath, they can undergird that with their care. They can help you nurture that.

I don’t know what it means for any one of us, but I do think that our call in spiritual formation is to receive and to nurture.

Third observation:
Spiritual formation inevitably involves waiting. There’s always a period of gestation.

It was true for Zechariah. He gets this promise and then at least for 9 months he is struck mute and potentially deaf. He’s in a kind of zone of silence and an opportunity for this long period to reflect on what God is doing in and around him.

Mary has 9 months of carrying this child that has been promised and she has all of this time to reflect on it. In fact, I think pregnancy is about the best image in Scripture for what it means to wait. You just can’t hurry it along. It just comes when it’s ready to come. And you carry it in the interim.

Now the problem is that most of us don’t like to wait at all. I don’t like to wait at all. I’m one of these people that will get on an elevator and push for the 4th floor and if the doors don’t immediately close, hit that closed button.

I have a computer at work that doesn’t love me any more. It takes about 10-15 minutes to go through the start up routine each morning to get going. (And everybody and their brother has tried to fix it, and it’s just the way it is.) And so I have learned to live with this. And I have learned that if I can just wait – if I can just go and do something else for those 10-15 minutes - it will be nice to me the rest of the day. But I sit there sometimes staring at my computer screen, knowing it’s not time yet, but just can’t wait. And knowing what’s going to happen, I still try to open a document or try to open an email before its time, which then has the function of virtually freezing my computer and forcing me – generally – to reload the thing. But I can’t wait.

I have the world’s nicest commute. I live in Ballard and I work at SPU. It’s about 7 minutes. At least it used to be 7 minutes. Now that they’re fixing the Fremont bridge and they have all these condos going in in Ballard, if I leave work between 5 and 6 pm, I have as many as 20 cars ahead of me in line to get onto the Ballard bridge and it adds probably 3 or 4 minutes to my commute! And I find myself in that line very impatient, irritated that I should have to wait to get on my bridge. And particularly irritated if any of these cars coming up the right lane, who are supposed to go downtown, try to cut in at the last minute to go over. So I pull my bumper right up against their bumper and say, “no...” I hate to wait.

I work with a lot of businesses in my job and one of the very recurring refrains I’m hearing now from business owners is that they’re not sure what to do with the new batch of employees that are coming out of college. They say it’s not that these employees have unreasonable demands or expectations in terms of financial rewards…this isn’t a greedy bunch per-se. But it is a group that cannot think long-term. They cannot think of a 5 or 10 year career path. Delayed gratification just doesn’t compute. They need to have whatever it is that’s going to make their job satisfying, and they need to have it right now. They can’t wait. They’re one click away from whatever they want and that’s the way they expect work to be. It’s difficult to build business models around that picture.

The problem with all of this hurry up, can’t wait is that very rarely does God’s spiritual formation work come in a microwavable package. It’s more often like a crock pot. You throw the things in, you turn on the heating coils, and you wait.

Fourth Observation:
Spiritual formation is undergirded with God’s promises.

God says to Mary, “You’re going to have a child. You’ll name him Jesus. And this child will do all of these things. And that promise, then, undergirds the process of formation that’s going on in her. All the time that this baby is being knit together in her womb, all that time there is this promise underneath it. And it allows for her to wait with hope.

Waiting then, in spiritual formation, is not an empty waiting. It’s waiting with a hope, an assurance, that there are these promises that will come to fruition. And it changes the way you wait.

And Mary had promises. And you and I have promises, too.

• You and I have been promised that our sins will be forgiven.
• You and I had promises that the character of God, the image of God, that you and I are created to be will be brought to wholeness.
• You and I have been told that He who has begun a good work in us will see it through to completion.

We have those promises. And so while we wait, we can wait with hope.

Fifth observation:
Spiritual formation requires that we be attentive to little signs or little miracles that God would bring to us along the way.

It seems to me that God knows that we’re not particularly good at holding on to hope. We get the promises. We hope for them. They sound great. But as time drags on they seem more remote, they seem further away, and we want- we need- some refreshment. And so God in his graciousness, as part of the spiritual growth process, brings to us little reminders that he is present in the process.

He does this for Mary. Mary is getting all this news about she’s going to have this child and it’s going to all these things, and she’s befuddled. And so Gabriel says to her, “Here’s a sign. You know Elizabeth who nobody thought could get pregnant? She’s 6 months pregnant.” And when she goes to visit Elizabeth, Elizabeth prophesies. A prophesy comes out of Elizabeth to the effect of, “Look, I am blessed. The mother of my Lord has come to see me.”

And so these are little tiny reminders that Mary gets to enable her to continue to stay in hope as the formation process continues. And you and are also are regularly visited with little reminders from God.

• It might be just a comment that someone who doesn’t even know you makes…a comment that suddenly fits something that you’ve been struggling with.
• It might be two or three appointments on your calendar that sort of miraculously get cancelled and something else slides in that was just what you needed.
• It might be as simple as walking into a space that you go into all the time, but this time sensing that something is alive, something is present in that place… that God is there.

My problem with this is that I don’t take enough time to stop and look for the signs that God is putting all around me. I’m just too fast. I don’t pause. I’m trying actually, mechanically, to teach myself to pause. When I walk out the front door in the morning, instead of racing down to the car, to just stop for a moment and scan my neighborhood and see if I see any hints, any glimmer, of the presence of God.

One of the things that I think we can do for each other is that we can help in the spiritual formation process by helping us stay attentive. God gives Mary Elizabeth to help her. And we can help each other.

• You can remind me of times when God has been faithful to promises He’s made me in the past.
• You can remind me of how great it will be when these promises in the future are really fulfilled.
• And you can point to me and you can say, “Jeff, I see this that’s happening in you even though you can’t see it.”

We can help each other be attentive to the work that God is doing because paying attention is a part of the spiritual formation process.

Sixth observation:
Spiritual formation finds joy in the process.

Mary sings this great, joyous song – The Magnificat: “My soul rejoices in God my Savior.” And she sings that while she’s still pregnant. She has not had her child. She’s not seen what this child is going to do. She sings it in anticipation. She doesn’t say, “Someday, I will rejoice when all these things happen.” She says, “Now, today, I rejoice in anticipation of the promises being fulfilled.” And that’s Advent joy.

The best picture I have for this goes back to my childhood, around Christmas. There are some of those Christmases when you get to Christmas day, and you open up a package, and as you rip it open you realize that you have got the very gift that you most wanted to have. Your parents didn’t buy you a cheaper knock-off. They bought you the real one. You turn it over and it’s everything you wanted and there’s just this great joy of, “Yes, I got it!” And that’s Christmas joy.

We do get periodic moments of Christmas joy along the way, but I am looking forward to that great end-time when God has everything the way he wants it in the world; when His shalom is everywhere; when we are made the way God wants us and fully all put right. And then, I think, we will say with great joy at Christmas, Yes!” And that will be Christmas joy. But that’s not today. Today, we’re in Advent.

And Advent joy is maybe more like the boy who comes and looks under the Christmas tree 4 days before Christmas.

He sees a package with his name there.

He looks at the shape of the package and he feels the package.

He thinks maybe that package is the very gift that he wants to get.

He hopes it’s the very gift he wants to get. It could be the package he wants to get.

And he gets very excited and very joyous in the moment in anticipation of what is to come.

That’s anticipatory joy. That’s Advent joy. And that’s the joy of spiritual formation. Spiritual formation finds joy in the process.

Well, it’s about a little more than 2 weeks before Christmas, and Mary is very pregnant. And so are we. God is doing incredible works in our lives. He is forming up the life of Christ within us.

And so we are invited this morning to remember that it’s all His work. He’s doing it. That all we need to do is say, “Yes. Let it be to me as You have said.”, and then to nurture this growth within us. We need to wait because it always takes time. And as we wait, we wait with hope, undergirded by the promises that God has given us. And we wait with little signs that God gives us along the way. We wait, paying attention to where God is working around us. And we wait with joy. We wait with joy because it is Advent. And Advent is a pregnant season. We wait in pregnancy.

In some ways our whole lives are Advent-ish. We are pregnant waiting for the fulfillment of the promises of God. And it is my prayer for me, and for all of us, that when God starts new works in our lives each one of us will say as Mary said, “Let it be to me as You have said.”