What Child is This? A sermon based on Luke 1: 46-55 preached on December 17, 2023

There’s a lot about the season of Christmas that I love. I love Christmas cookies. I love Christmas music. I love Christmas socks and Christmas parties. Last week was the church staff Christmas party. It was hosted by Paul and Janice Phillips, and Joe Jordan, who joined the church staff a few months ago, dressed in a velure track suit, green and red, with a sequined reindeer on the back. I loved it. I love Christmas, but it’s not quite Christmas yet. December 25th is still days away, and here at First Presbyterian Church, we’re in the season of Advent. Advent is a time of preparation for what’s coming, marked by this Advent wreath. Today on that wreath, we lit the Candle of Joy, and so today we anticipate the coming of joy, for with Jesus comes joy. Think with me about joy. How would it be different if we lit the candle of contentment, cheerfulness, or happiness? To me, there’s a difference between joy and happiness. Something about joy seems more resilient, whereas happiness comes and goes. For example, I remember one night where I felt joy although I didn’t have much to be happy about. Let me tell you what I mean. I was on my way to my bachelor party in Charleston, South Carolina. Some college friends had put it together a couple weeks before our wedding. The day of the party, I had to work, so I couldn’t get on the road to Charleston from Atlanta until after my shift at the lawn maintenance company I was working for. Late at night, I was on a lonesome stretch of the interstate between Columbia and Charleston. Along the road, I noticed my car having a little trouble shifting gears, but I had a party to get to, so I pressed on without stopping. Well, at some point along that dark, solitary road I regretted that. Out in the middle of nowhere, I was stepping on the gas while the car was slowing down. Coming to a stop on the shoulder of the road, I cut the engine, then tried to get going again to no avail. The car wouldn’t go into gear. The transmission was shot. Not knowing what else to do in that age before cell phones, I started walking in the cowboy boots that I always wore. Even though I’d never been on a horse at that time, I wore cowboy boots everywhere. Walking down the interstate, a few cars zoomed passed, but it was so late there wasn’t much traffic. I walked two miles, and my feet hurt so badly that I stopped to wrap them in my undershirt. I made it seven miles before I found a pay phone, called a tow truck company, who agreed to pick up the car, only when I asked if they could pick up me, then the car, the woman on the other end said, “It’s a tow truck, not a taxi cab,” so I walked another mile or so to a cheap hotel and decided to try to find a way out of this situation after a good night’s sleep. I didn’t go to bed that night happy, and I’ve rarely worn cowboy boots since. My feet were bleeding. I didn’t really know where I was. I had missed my bachelor party, but I went to bed that night with joy in my heart because regardless of whether or not I made it to my bachelor party, I was getting married to Sara. There’s a difference between happiness and joy. Happiness comes and goes. I feel happy when everything is going my way. When it’s not, happiness evaporates. Therefore, I say, Mary didn’t sing because she was happy, for little if anything in her life was going her way. We’re a well-established, educated church, and so we use a lot of theological words to describe the situation Mary found herself in as our second Scripture lesson takes place. To describe the unique circumstance, we call it the virgin birth. Maybe some here have heard of the immaculate conception (a term which refers to Mary’s birth). This morning, let’s overlook the words the theologians use and use real words to describe her situation, for regardless of how it came to be, Mary was an unwed teenage mother. How do unwed teenage mothers feel? How do people react to unwed teenage mothers? Did Mary plan on being an unwed teenage mother? No, and so I say, while there may have been little cause for her happiness, in her song is joy. My soul magnifies the Lord, and my spirit rejoices in God my Savior, she sang. For he has looked with favor on the lowly state of his servant. Surely, from now on, generations will call me blessed. She sings with joy, which is so much more than happiness, because joy is the gift that God often provides when all the things that we thought would make us happy have fallen away. In the greatest Christmas movies, joy is what rises from the ashes when the plans go up in flames. Think about Home Alone. In the movie Home Alone, Kevin wishes his family to disappear. That next morning, through a series of unusual events, his family flies to Paris and leaves him asleep in the attic. At first, this chain of events that leads to him being home alone leads to exactly what Kevin dreamed of. Home alone, he eats what he wants, and he watches what he wants on TV. Being home alone is an exciting adventure until the pleasure of being home alone wears off because two thieves try to break into his house. So it is with many of our plans. Happiness is fleeting. Pleasure can wear off. Joy is different. Kevin feels joy when his mother walks through the door and she holds him tight. In the same way, think about How the Grinch Stole Christmas. No one hopes to have her tree stolen by a tiny-hearted man covered in green fur, but when the Whos down in Whoville find that everything is gone on Christmas morning, what do they do? They sing. Why? Were they happy? Who would be happy to have his presents stolen? Nobody, yet joy is something that can’t be stolen. Joy endures through hardship. Joy is what the characters in all our favorite movies find in the end, after everything has gone wrong. So it is in National Lampoon’s Christmas Vacation. The turkey is dry, one lady wraps up her cat as a present, Snot the dog gags on a bone from under the table, and Cousin Eddie empties the you-know-what in the storm drain, for despite all our hard work, it appears as though all we’re going to get some years is a subscription to Jelly-of-the-Month Club or worse because everything keeps going wrong. Some would say that everything in Mary’s life had gone wrong. Did she plan to be a single mother? No, and as you look at all your plans that don’t turn out the way you’d hoped, look to Mary. From her comes the reminder that what rises from the ashes when our plans go up in flames are the promises of God. By her song, you can tell that Mary knows. From her shattered plans, the promise of God arises. Mary knows, and so she sings, while oftentimes we forget. My friends, the last time I preached from this Scripture lesson in the Gospel of Luke, Mary’s Magnificat, we call it, it was the year 2020. That’s the way these readings go. They come back around on a three-year cycle, so the last time I preached on this passage was three years ago, December of 2020. I preached the sermon I wrote that year to an empty Great Hall not long before Christmas Eve. I remember how weird it felt. I remember how wrong it felt. We wanted so badly to do something for Christmas Eve, so knowing that we couldn’t gather a crowd in here, we planned a candlelight service for out under the portico. Do you remember that? Maybe you don’t because it never happened. The forecast that Christmas Eve was for the temperature to drop below freezing, and then the meteorologists were predicting rain. I wanted to push through with the plan. Many wanted to push through with the plan, but with a global pandemic, plus freezing temperatures, rain was the final straw. What I wanted to happen, what I planned for, was hitting roadblock after roadblock. It ended up being my only Christmas Eve off in years, only I didn’t enjoy it. I couldn’t enjoy it because my plans were going up in flames. If only I’d had the faith of Mary, who knew that as her plans were going up in flames, the promise of God was arising. I can see that now. Now we know what livestream can do. Back then, we barely knew what livestream even was. Today, this service streams to retirement communities around Marietta, the Cobb County Jail, and into homes in different states. It even goes all the way to Australia. Now, I can see that having a candlelight service out in the freezing cold is nothing compared to reaching the people we are reaching. Now I know how much bigger God’s plans were than ours. I was pushing for an outside service in the freezing rain because I was resisting that which I couldn’t understand. Anyone else ever like that? Or is it just me? It can be hard to recognize God’s plan when God’s plan demands that we abandon our plan, but Mary did it. Mary could see it. That’s what we call faith. I heard an interview with late-night TV host Steven Colbert the other day. He was being interviewed by journalist Anderson Cooper, who, you may know, has a podcast about grief. As the two men talked about loved ones they’ve lost, Colbert quoted J.R.R. Tolkien, who once wrote, “What punishments of God are not gifts?” That may be the most important question of all. Always, God is at work, but can you see His plans? Can you accept God’s plans, or are you holding too tightly to your own? To quote my favorite TV show, Ted Lasso, so much of moving on is believing that what we thought happened to us, in fact, happened for us. Unto us, a Son is given. Unto us, a Child is born. His birth changes everything. His birth turns our world upside down. That doesn’t have to make you happy, but may it bring you joy, for but His birth changes everything that we would be saved. Halleluiah. Amen.