Fourth Sunday of Advent
December 22nd, A+D
2024
Our Redeemer and Our Savior’s Lutheran Churches
Custer
and Hill City, South Dakota
Inside
Out? Or Outside In?
Luke 1:39 - 56
Audio of the Gospel and Sermon available HERE.
Mary’s Song, the Magnificat, again? Some of you have heard and sung the Magnificat so much this December, it’s invading your dreams. Which in my opinion, is just fine. Others of you, not able to join us on Tuesdays or Wednesdays for our Midweek Advent Services, don’t know what I’m talking about. A delightful version of Mary’s Song,
different from the one we just sang, comes right after the sermon in our order
of Evening Prayer, which we used for our Midweek Advent services. Next year you should definitely check it out. Along with singing Mary’s Song, the second
week we also heard today’s Gospel reading.
Lots of Mary and lots of her song, as we considered confessing sins,
confessing praise, and confessing the faith, all through the lens of the Mother
of our Lord. Today, Mary’s Song is again
before our eyes, in our ears, in our mouths, and, Lord willing, in our
hearts. And that’s great.
We will not be digging into the various ways
Mary shows us how to confess this morning.
Rather, we will take a step back, and think about faithful Mary, and
about ourselves, as Baptized Believers in Christ. How does this all work? What can we discern, from Mary’s experience,
about this whole “being a Christian” thing? Mary can help us answer the question: Is this
faith and life in Christ an “inside-out” thing, or is it “outside-in”?
Mary’s story conjures up so many questions
for us. She went through so much, we
naturally wonder about her soul, her emotions, about her interior life. Mary, did you know? What must she have been thinking? How did she bear up under the pressure? Great, she believes the Word proclaimed to
her by the angel Gabriel. But, who else
would believe her story? What would
Joseph say, and do, when she told him she was pregnant by the power of the Holy
Spirit? Could she even muster the nerve
to tell him?
The Lord took care of this last potential
disaster, by sending an angel to speak to Joseph, in a dream, explaining the
situation, and calling Joseph to the role of protector and adoptive father to
Mary’s Son. This was hardly the last
crisis Mary would face, but at least she would have Joseph by her side. He’s really great. In Spain, they don’t celebrate fathers on a
random Sunday in June. Rather their
celebration of dads happens on St. Joseph’s Day, January 19th. I really like that; Joseph is a great example
for any father to emulate.
Do you feel like there are any parallels
between Mary and Joseph’s difficulties and your life? I’m sure you don’t put yourself on their
level in your mind, but still, does it seem like God sometimes is asking too
much of you? You want to be a good
parent, but your spouse is absent, or one of your children has a disability
that makes everything hard. You commit
to caring for your own aging parents, but their problems are too much for you,
and they don’t make caring for them very easy.
You want to be a good boss, but you know some of your employees are
stealing from you, in time, effort, or in actual materials. You want to be a good employee, but your boss
is distracted and is ruining the business.
Cancer comes for you, or worse, for a loved one. How can we bear up? Can Mary teach us anything?
How did Mary manage to face all the problems
she had without folding? How was she
able to speak such wonderful truths? We
all love a hero, or a heroine, and Mary certainly fits the bill. Somehow, we feel more hopeful about ourselves
when we can hear about the great deeds of others, read their biographies, or
even better, their autobiographies. We
love to get a peek into their hearts and minds, and see how they managed to
stay the course and do great things. And
that’s good. In this vein, Chapter 11 of
the Letter to the Hebrews details the great deeds of faith done by Abel, Enoch,
Abraham, Sarah, Moses, and many others.
Studying the lives of the saints is
wise. But care is called for, for by our
nature, we assume that life, even Christian life, works “inside out.” Everybody
loves a self-sufficient neighbor. That’s
fine, to a point, in this life. But, from
Adam we inherited the false idea that even in relation to God we are in some
measure autonomous, self-ruling people. Our
default assumption is that the key to doing well, to being a good person and
pleasing God, is internal fortitude and commitment. “So, let’s
go, let’s muster the gumption and just do it, like King David, or Solomon, or
Joseph and Mary.”
It’s easy to think that there is something
truly unique and special within Mary’s nature, that by her innate
wisdom, commitment, holiness, or bravery, she found the strength to face and
defeat all her challenges. She seems to
be so strong on the inside, that must be what allowed her to do
great things on the outside. Mary
accepted, Mary praised, Mary bore, Mary endured, Mary suffered, Mary showed us
the way: Inside-Out, right? So, be
strong, be brave, commit to holiness, and you can do great things,
right?
That strength, wisdom, and good works come
from the inside and then flow out is an all too common understanding of the
Christian life. Many will acknowledge Jesus
has given us the example. He has even
removed the biggest roadblocks. But,
they say, to make your salvation sure, you need to walk the walk. Be loving.
Choose Christ. There’s always
something. So, let’s get after it, they
exhort. Get serious and be a good man, a
good woman. Be a Christian.
It’s easy to think this way. Easy, but wrong. Christian faith and life are not “inside to
outside” propositions. It’s easy to see
that “Inside-Out” is mistaken if we stop thinking about who Mary was and what
she did in our mind’s eye, and instead turn to look closely at God’s
Word. If we actually take the time to
listen to what Mary said and what Mary did, we will discover a different
reality.
Did Mary go looking for the great faith
project of her life? No. She was a normal, faithful, unknown Jewish
girl in Nazareth, looking forward to her marriage to Joseph. God
sent the angel Gabriel to go find her, to go tell her what the
Lord had in store for her. God’s message
came to Mary, from the outside. Her
acceptance and faith are praiseworthy – Behold the maidservant of the Lord,
let it be unto me according to your word.
But these wonderful words came after Gabriel appeared to
her, out of thin air.
After
Gabriel called her highly favored, and calmed her fears. After he told her she would bear a son,
Jesus, the Son of the Most High. After
the angel declared her son would rule on the throne of David, forever. Mary’s great confession of faith came after
Gabriel answered her biology question, explaining that she would conceive by
the power of God the Holy Spirit, a miracle, worked by God, for whom nothing is
impossible.
Nothing will be impossible with God. What truths from Israel’s history came to Mary’s
mind when she heard those words? Maybe
Abraham believing that God could raise Isaac from the dead, and so he was ready
to obey the Lord’s command and sacrifice his and Sarah’s only son, the son of
promise. Or the people of Israel,
trapped between the Red Sea and Pharaoh’s army, thinking escape was
impossible. Or perhaps Mary thought of Jericho’s
mighty walls. Could they really be
tumbled, just by God’s people walking in circles, shouting and blowing shofars? Yes! For nothing is impossible with God.
Mary’s ears, heart and mind had been filled
with all the stories of God’s people receiving impossible blessings from His
mighty hand. So, when the angel put the
promise of the greatest miracle yet into her ears, Outside-In, Mary was ready
to believe.
That
Mary understood God’s Outside-In way is clear from her song. Reminded by Elizabeth of what God had done
for her, putting His Son in her womb and giving her faith to believe it, Mary
bursts forth in song: "My soul
magnifies the Lord, and my spirit rejoices in God my Savior, (He saves me). For he has looked on the humble estate of
his servant, … the Mighty One has done great things for me. God has done great things for me, Outside–In. He remembers His mercy, and shows strength
with His arm. He scatters the proud, and
lifts up the humble and lowly. God feeds
the hungry with good things, and fulfills the promises He made to Abraham our
father. Outside-In.
There is great comfort in Mary’s pregnancy, even
though it was, from her perspective, an unplanned crisis. The comfort of Mary’s pregnancy was precisely
that God was coming from the outside, from heavenly glory, to enter into His creation,
in order to redeem that creation. Rending
the heavens and coming down, God’s Son took on human flesh from Mary and became
our Brother: this was the ultimate Outside-In maneuver of God. And Mary rejoiced to receive it.
If we fall into the error of thinking that
being a Christian is an Inside-Out affair, we are setting ourselves up for angst
and doubt and possibly despair. First,
because this is not how God has ordered things.
And second, if we honestly take stock of our resources, our strength,
our commitment, our ability to choose the right and faithfully overcome life’s struggles,
we will know that we are weak and unstable, confused and so prone to mistakes,
to failure, to sin.
Outside-In.
Salvation and holy living must come to us, they are necessarily “extra
nos,” from outside us. For the intention
of the heart of man is evil from his youth, (Genesis 8:21). As Jesus said, out of the heart
come evil thoughts, murder, adultery, sexual immorality, theft, false
witness, slander. (Matthew 15:19)
Salvation must be Outside-In, for you
were dead in your trespasses and sins. Spiritual corpses, that is what the Bible
teaches us we were, from our very beginning.
And what do corpses do? Nothing,
except decay. You were dead in your
trespasses and sins, but…
But, God came. God came from
outside you and made you alive, together with Christ Jesus… By grace you have been saved, through
faith. And this is not of yourselves, it
is the gift of God. Outside-In. (Ephesians
2:1 - 10)
This is what Divine Liturgy or Divine
Service is all about. God coming to
bless, Outside-In, is the essence of Divine Service. Please understand, Divine Service is not
first nor even essentially a particular form of a Sunday worship service. No, Divine Service happens whenever and
wherever God through His Word comes from outside this broken world to rescue
and serve us dying sinners.
Divine service is Gabriel being sent to Mary
with heavenly greetings, and impossibly good news. Divine Service is the Captain of the Lord’s
armies meeting Joshua, to strengthen him right before he led Israel across the
Jordan and into the Promised Land. Divine
service is Jesus engaging in heavenly conversation with the sinful Samaritan
woman at the well, and the Canaanite mother.
Divine service is the mother and father, reading Bible stories to their
children, and doing their best to answer their questions. And yes, divine service is God gathering us
here, and coming to join us, to take our sins from us, and give us in exchange
His forgiveness and righteousness and holiness and joy, all delivered to us
through His Word.
The various services we follow, the settings
of the “Divine Service” liturgies in our hymnals (and on our screen) are
so-called because they have been honed by the Church over 2,000 years to keep
the direction straight. We love them not
because they are old, or new. We love
them because they reliably help us hear and see, believe and receive God’s
Outside-In blessings, which make all things new.
As He did for Mary, the Lord also does for
you. God loves to come and serve every
humble sinner who needs relief and restoration, forgiveness and new life.
Salvation is Outside-In. It has to be.
But that’s not the end of it. When
God has come from the outside to deliver His gifts, then watch out. Outside-In is the necessary start, and Outside-In
is also the necessary ongoing power-source for faith and life. But Outside-In is not the end of the
story. Outside-In leads to
Inside-Out.
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whispers of adultery, marry Joseph, raise Jesus, and stay the course? Yes, no doubt. I don’t know if, nine-months pregnant, she rode a donkey from Nazareth to Bethlehem, or maybe she walked. But either way. Flee to Egypt to protect the Child from King Herod? Bear the pain of watching her Son suffer and die? By God’s grace, Mary did all these things.
How was the Apostle Paul able to face all
his doubters, the Christians he had once persecuted? Not to speak of his enemies, the Pharisees
who hated him most of all for converting to Christianity. How did he do it? As Paul said, I can do all things, through
Him who strengthens me. And again, “Christ
in you, the hope of glory.” And again, “work out your own salvation with
fear and trembling, 13 for it is God who works
in you, both to will and to work for his good pleasure.” (Philippians 4:13 and 2:12-13, Colossians 1:27)
Outside-In leads to Inside-Out.
Outside–In leads to Inside-Out. Truly good works won’t rise up from within
you, not unless there is Someone Stronger working in you. Good works begin in admitting that, apart
from Jesus, you can’t do anything to please God. Abide me, and Me in you, says Jesus, and
you will bear much fruit. (John 15:1-5)
The Eleven disciples, taught
about the Vine and the Branches on the night Jesus was betrayed, went on to
found the Church, which grew from just 120 souls at Pentecost to take over the
Roman Empire in the 4th Century.
And the secret of their success isn’t a
secret: Be still, and know that I am
God. Stop doubting, and believe. Hear His Word, repent of your sins, and
receive His forgiveness. Take and
eat, take and drink, Christ entering into you by His true Body and
Blood. Receive the implanted Word,
which is able to save your souls, making you wise unto salvation, and also,
wise for holy living. The Holy Spirit
will give you a desire, strength and knowledge to fulfill your daily callings
the way the Lord would have you do. (Psalm 46:10, John 20:28, Matthew 26:26-27, James 1:21)
God’s Outside-In salvation will result in
Inside-Out Christian living. It won’t be
all smooth sailing. The more you receive
Christ and His gifts, the more prepared you are to love and live as He desires,
the more Satan will hate you, and seek to trip you up. And you will struggle against your own
flesh. You may not feel like you are
making progress.
But do not fear. Jesus is not finished with His Outside-In
work, for you. What a comfort to know, whether
our Christian walk went pretty good today, or was a complete disaster, Christ
is always ready to Outside-In you again.
Jesus is always coming from the outside, to bless you on the inside with
His grace and mercy, His forgiveness, peace and strength.
And so, our souls also magnify the Lord, for
He is doing great things for us,
in
the Name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Spirit, Amen.
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