One of the most beautiful of the modern Christmas songs was written by a man who is best known, perhaps, as a comedian. His name is Mark Lowry. Lowry is also a musician of some note. He performed for many years with the Gaither Vocal band. In 1984 he was asked to pen some words for his local church choir and he wrote a poem that began like this, “Mary, did you know that your baby boy would one day walk on water? Mary, did you know that your baby boy would save our sons and daughters?”
A few years later guitarist Buddy Greene added a perfectly matching tune and a wonderful song was born. “Mary, did you know that your baby boy has walked where angels trod? Mary, did you know when you kiss your little baby, you kiss the face of God!” Each of the little couplets touches the heart in a wonderful way. “Mary, did you know that your baby boy is Lord of all creation? Mary, did you know that your baby boy will one day rule the nations?” (1) The song’s been around now for nearly two decades. Listen for it on the radio. The most popular version is sung by Kenny Rogers and Wynonna Judd. Mary, did you know . . . ?
How could Mary know what was happening to her when the angel Gabriel came to her long ago? Only Luke tells this story. The Gospel of Luke is often called the Gospel of womanhood because Luke has so many positive stories about women. In fact, there are eight positive stories about women in Luke’s gospel. Later in Luke’s Gospel you will discover stories about Mary and Martha, Mary Magdalene, and the woman who anointed Jesus’ body for burial. In the book of Acts, also written by Luke, we hear another positive story about a business woman, Lydia, the maker of purple.
Luke tells the story of Jesus’ birth from Mary’s point of view. The angel Gabriel is the messenger of God. He has already announced to an elderly gentleman named Zechariah that his wife, Elizabeth, would have a son, despite her old age. Elizabeth and Mary are cousins. Then Gabriel visits Mary. Following Gabriel’s visit to her, you may remember, Mary visits Elizabeth and the baby in Elizabeth’s womb jumps when they meet. You won’t find these kinds of details in the other Gospels. (2)
Luke begins today’s story by telling us that in the sixth month, 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.” Then Luke adds these words, “Mary was greatly troubled at his words and wondered what kind of greeting this might be.” “Greetings, you who are highly favored! The Lord is with you.”
What does it mean to be favored by God? This is an important question. Evidently it doesn’t mean that your life is going to be a bed of roses.
Listen as Luke continues, “But the angel said to her, ‘Do not be afraid, Mary, you have found favor with God. You will be with child and give birth to a son, and you are to give him the name Jesus. He will be great and will be called the Son of the Most High. The Lord God will give him the throne of his father David, and he will reign over the house of Jacob forever; his kingdom will never end.’
“‘How will this be,’ Mary asked the angel, ‘since I am a virgin?’”
This is interesting. Mary is not married. She’s still a virgin. And she’s going to have a baby. Is this something she should get excited about? Zechariah and Elizabeth had been married for many years. For most of those years they had been praying for a child. The birth of their son John in their old age was literally an answer to prayer. I doubt that the same thing can be said for Mary. She was a teenager and she was about to become an unwed mother. Whoopee! Mary and Joseph lived within a strict community regulated by religious laws and customs. Mary could have been stoned for being pregnant and unmarried. And imagine Joseph’s hurt. She’s supposed to be happy about this? God has an interesting way of showing His favor.
Years ago a psychologist named Thomas Holmes developed a scale for measuring stress. He assigned numerical values to events that cause stress such as the loss of job, moving to a new city, a new relationship. Dr. Holmes even included Christmas on his stress list. He decided that just a normal Christmas was worth a hefty 14 stress points. Some of you understand. You’re up to 15 or 20 stress points right now.
A writer by the name of Bridget Kuhns took Dr. Holmes’ scale and applied it to Mary. Holmes calculated that any pregnancy earns 40 points: an unwanted pregnancy, add 20 more. A change in living conditions Mary stayed three months with Elizabeth earns 25 more. Marriage to Joseph: 50 points. A change in financial status: 38 points.
Surely there must have been words between them when she discovered that he had not made reservations at the inn: score 35 points for an argument with a spouse.
And then the birth‑‑39 points: 16 for a change in sleeping habits; 15 for a change in eating habits. Not to mention all those uninvited guests: shepherds and angels coming and going and wise men from the East.
Psychologist Thomas Holmes says that people get sick when they reach 200 points on his stress scale. Ms. Kuhns calculates that Mary’s ordeal earned her a record 424 points. (3) This, of course, does not even include the flight to Egypt. Or even more importantly, the experience of watching her beloved son die as a common criminal on a cross. Is this what it means to be favored of God? Evidently being favored of God does not protect you from life’s bumps and bruises.
This is an important truth. It is so easy for us to say when things are going our way, “The Lord sure is blessing us.” That sounds so pious, doesn’t it? We are blessed. We may be in for a big surprise. It may be that one day we will be the ones who will hear the Lord say, “I was hungry, and you gave me nothing to eat, I was thirsty and you gave me nothing to drink . . .” (Matthew 25:31‑46) Maybe the reason things seem to be going our way is that we are living only for ourselves. It’s easy to have a merry Christmas with lots of fine presents under the tree when we insulate ourselves from the world’s problems. Rather than blessing us, God may actually despise our opulent self-indulgence.
Conversely, if we are going through a difficult time in our life right now when we feel like we can barely hold on, God may be very close to us. The angel Gabriel, in saying that Mary was blessed by God, was not saying that God would make her way easy. What he was saying was that Mary would be used of God, and in the long run of life, this is what being blessed means. How about you? Can you say that right now you are being used by God for a purpose? Be careful whom you call favored by God.
Gabriel told Mary that she was favored by God and that she would bear a son. And Mary asked a sensible question: “How will this be,” Mary asked the angel, “since I am a virgin?” Good question.
Here is how the angel answered, “The Holy Spirit will come upon 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 barren is in her sixth month. For nothing is impossible with God.”
Underline that last sentence: Nothing is impossible with God. I have often wondered, is it anymore difficult to believe that God gave Mary a virgin birth than it is to believe that Abraham and Sarah and Zechariah and Elizabeth bore children at an advanced age? Certainly Mary in her shame could have lied about the visit of an angel, but there was no way that Elizabeth, who was far beyond child bearing years could make up a story about her pregnancy. It was a miracle! If Elizabeth were much younger than Zechariah, there could be another explanation, but that was not the case. It was a miracle. And Jesus’ birth was a miracle. If scientists were to announce tomorrow that a virgin birth had been created in the laboratory, not a one of us would dispute it. Science can do such amazing things nowadays. But we want to deny the God who created science the ability to manipulate the laws of the universe and to give a baby a unique birth. That’s absurd. Jesus’ birth was a miracle. Underline it again. Nothing is impossible with God.
Remember that the next time you are in a hard place. Nothing is impossible with God. Now there are many theologians and Bible scholars who have real difficulty with the notion of a virgin birth. For one thing, Isaiah didn’t really prophesy that a virgin will conceive and bear a son. A better translation is simply that a “young woman” will conceive and bear a son. That’s all right. It really doesn’t matter to most of us how God sent Christ into the world, only that He did.
New Testament scholar Fred Craddock tells of being in Bethlehem and hearing a Jewish man explain the Christmas story. They were standing in Shepherd’s Field, a field where the shepherds might have heard the angels’ song. On a clear night if you stand down there and look toward the city, explained the Jewish man, there is a bright star, and it looks like it’s standing right over the houses. And that, he said, is what happened at Christmas. Of course, Craddock’s new friend was confusing the shepherd’s story with that of the wise men, but Craddock didn’t try to correct him. The Jewish man went on to explain that this is how people got confused and thought there was a star over the house where Jesus was. When he finished, Craddock said, “Well that’s one way to look at it.”
Then the Jewish man said something very interesting. He said, “I know that’s just one way to look at it. When I was in school,” he continued, “the rabbi explained everything in the Bible two different ways. When he would come to a miracle, he would explain it two different ways, and his reason was this: If something happens and you can’t explain it another way, then God didn’t do it.” (4)
Think about that for a moment. If you can’t explain it a second way, God didn’t do it. God always gives us a second way to look at anything that happens. God never overpowers us with certainty. Everything we know about God is seen “through a glass darkly.” That is what faith is. It is never certainty. It’s faith. There can always be another explanation. This is so we can still be free to say yes to God or to say no. If you have difficulty with the idea of miracles, then God does not hold that against you. Many fine Christians don’t believe in the virgin birth. All we’re saying today is, when it comes to God, be careful what you say is impossible.
Be careful whom you call blessed. Be careful what you say is impossible. And finally, be thankful that this young woman said yes to God. You see, Mary was free to say no to God just as we are. God never forces Himself on anyone. But when the angel Gabriel gave Mary the news that she would bear God’s son, here is how Mary replied. “I am the Lord’s servant,” Mary answered. “May it be to me as you have said.” Mary became the mother of the Savior because she was obedient to God.
Obedience is not a fashionable word in our modern world, is it? An older gentleman was commenting to his wife that couples don’t use the word “obey” in marriage ceremonies anymore.
“Too bad, isn’t it?” he added, “It used to lend a little humor to the occasion.”
Obedience isn’t in fashion in a do-your-own-thing society. Yet obedience is an important part of the Christian life. There are some things that people would never force themselves to do except in obedience to God.
Chuck Colson was in Raleigh, North Carolina on Christmas Eve 1985. He was there to speak in several nearby prisons. He turned on CNN to catch the late news. On the screen was Mother Teresa. She had her arms around two emaciated young men. They were in the last stages of AIDS and had been released from prison to enter a home established by Mother Teresa’s order.
When a reporter demanded to know “why we should care about criminals with AIDS,” Mother Teresa explained that these young men had been created in God’s image and deserved to know of God’s love.
Colson saw all this taking place and wondered, “How could she do it? Embrace those men who were dying of that deadly virus?” Colson knew he could never have that kind of courage.
The next morning Colson preached to several hundred women prisoners. As he was getting ready to leave, the warden asked if he would visit Bessie Shipp, an AIDS patient in an isolation cell. “It’s Christmas,” explained the warden, “and nobody has visited her.”
Now, in Colson’s defense, in 1985 we didn’t have as much information about how AIDS spreads as we do today. So we can understand why he began to make excuses. But then, in his mind’s eye, Chuck Colson saw the love-filled face of Mother Teresa and he heard her words: These boys deserve to know of God’s love . . . And so, Colson found himself saying to the warden, “Well, all right, take me to Bessie Shipp.”
When they arrived at the isolation cell Colson discovered a petite young woman bundled up in a bathrobe, reading a Bible. They chatted for a few moments, and since there wasn’t much time, he got to the point. “Bessie, do you know Jesus?” he asked.
“No,” she said. “I try to. I read this book. I want to know Him, but I haven’t been able to find Him.” And Colson took one of Bessie’s hands while the chaplain took the other, and together they led Bessie in prayer. When they finished, she looked at them with tears flowing down her cheeks. It was a life‑changing moment, says Colson, for Bessie and for him. Three weeks later Bessie Shipp, a new person in Christ Jesus, went to be with God. Colson says he shudders when he thinks how close he had come to avoiding that visit. God, working through Mother Teresa’s example, took away what he calls “the unholy fear that had gripped me.” (5)
Chuck Colson’s life had been blessed immeasurably by his obedience to God. That’s the message of Mary’s encounter with the angel Gabriel. Mary did you know? Mary couldn’t have known where this encounter would lead her. But today, two thousand years later, we know that truly she was favored by God. Be careful whom you called blessed. Be careful what you call impossible. And finally, be thankful that this Jewish teenager was obedient to God. That’s the key to having a life that is truly blessed.
1. Composed by Mark Lowry and Buddy Greene © 1991 Word Music/Rufus Music/ascap.
2. Ed Markquart, http://www.sermonsfromseattle.com/series_b_the_virgin_maryGA.htm.
3. David Beckett, D.Min., http://home.gci.net/~stjohn1/sermons/2001/dec23.01.htm.
4. Craddock Stories (St. Louis, MO: Chalice Press, 2001).
5. Charles Colson, Being The Body (Nashville, TN: W Publishing Group, 2003, pp. 336-338).