Mystery, Miracles, and the Unexpected

Luke 1:26-38 – December 24, 2023, Christmas Eve Sermon

Last year, right around this time, I heard the most amazing story. It was posted to Facebook by a friend’s wife, Christie. This happened to her about 14 years ago, and she gave me permission to share it. Christie is a psychotherapist and this is her story.

Christie’s Christmas Eve Story

“It was Christmas Eve, the year my father passed away, my first Christmas without him. I had been grieving since early March and I wasn’t able to see an end to the sadness. I was worried about myself at that point. At 5 o’clock I was still at work but had been given the word earlier that everyone was leaving. I wasn’t ready for Christmas Eve dinner at my Mom’s and didn’t know what to expect this time without him.

I needed to see an apartment and the realtor was available, so I let my mother know I would get to her house later, around 8pm. I arrived at the address to see the apartment in a town near my Mom’s, and waited for the realtor to show me the place. It began to snow lightly, and the radio in the car was set to the classical music station. My father’s favorite hymn was playing – (Bach’s) ‘Sheep May Safely Graze.’ The tears began and words from an unknown place kept repeating in my mind. ‘This is a terrible darkness. I am in a terrible darkness.’

I waited awhile. The realtor didn’t show. Arriving at my Mom’s I began to help with the dinner prep and tried to get into the spirit of the season, talking with my sister and her husband and with Mom. It was 8:30, and we were almost ready to sit down for dinner. But there was an unexpected knock at the door. I told my sister to open the door and to invite whomever it was to join us. There was some hesitation on her part as my parents’ home was in the woods and down a private lane, and no one was expected to visit – or were they?

My sister opened the door and in walked two gentlemen, impeccably dressed, and who appeared by manner of clothing and hair, to be Jewish. They entered the room, and everything became quiet. They asked if they could pray with us. We had no objection. They prayed In Hebrew, and I didn’t know what they were saying. When they finished, we thanked them. One of the gentlemen turned toward me and I felt a presence I could not explain.

I was not frightened, nor was I confused. He told me, ‘We have a message for you’….. Both time and I, stood still. He said to me with great love in his eyes, ‘In a terrible darkness there will be a great Light.’ As quickly as they had arrived, the men were gone. I opened the door to say, ‘Wait! I don’t know who you are!’ But there was no one there and there were no footprints in the fallen snow. We didn’t eat dinner until much later. Our tears and the LOVE that filled the room was our nourishment. It was holy ground in that house.

My father didn’t leave us after all. He wanted us to know we would be alright….this is my story, and although this happened years ago, it remains in my mind as vivid as if it were tonight and its message is still as powerful as it was on that Christmas Eve.”

In a terrible darkness, there will be a great light.

Isn’t that what our biblical Christmas story is all about?

I’ve called today’s sermon “Mystery, Miracles, and the Unexpected.” The words “mystery” and “mystic” have the same roots, and they have to do with what is secret, or hidden, or difficult to understand. This is also the meaning of the word “mysterious.” If we say nothing else about Christie’s story, we’d at least say that it is mysterious.

In our last Advent Wednesday service, I shared a reading in which Father Richard Rohr said that the word mystic “simply means one who has moved from mere belief systems or belonging systems to actual inner experience.” Or I might add, actual direct experience of God.

Who in our Christmas nativity story had a direct experience of God or of God’s sacred realm? We know that angels appeared to Mary, to Joseph, and to the shepherds in the field. We also know that Joseph and the wise men all had dreams in which they got messages from God. All these sacred encounters pointed to the same truth: that God was coming into the world in the form of a baby, joining divinity and humanity in the person Jesus of Nazareth. This too is mysterious.

A Miracle and a “Yes”

But it’s also a miraculous story. We are told that Mary was a virgin and conceived by the power of the Holy Spirit. We might also remember that the circumstances around the conception of John the Baptist were also unusual. Mary’s aunt Elizabeth, who was John’s mother, was well past child-bearing years, and so her getting pregnant was also unusual, if not miraculous. But here, we might also notice that for this miracle of Jesus’ conception to happen, Mary had to say yes.

This tells us that the incarnation of God requires human willingness and participation. In Mary, we see that God works through those who are willing to participate in what God is doing, and who are open to what may seem impossible to the rest of the world. I’m thinking here too of when the angels told Abraham that Sarah would have a child even in her advanced age and barrenness. What did Sarah do? She laughed! That idea seemed ludicrous to her, but she was still willing. Mary too may have laughed a bit. Luke tells us that Mary was “perplexed” or “troubled” by this idea, and since what follows that is the angel telling her not to be afraid, we can probably assume that she had mixed emotions initially.

Mary may have been perplexed and afraid, and yet she was still willing to be part of God’s plan for her life and her people. Believe me, I was a little bit perplexed and afraid when I was asked to serve as the interim pastor of Redeemer. Even so, I was also open to this new path. I always say that because Mary was willing to let God be God in her life, she helped birth divinity in the world. I believe that each one of us can similarly open ourselves to the Spirit of God moving through our lives. Even when we are perplexed, confused, or afraid. The incarnation of God in the world requires human participation and willingness to bring forth God’s dreams for the world.

Involves the Unexpected

Even beyond the idea of a virgin birth, our Christmas story includes a lot of unexpected elements. It’s filled with strange and mystical events.

Here we have a story about a young woman in the middle of nowhere told she’ll conceive by the Holy Spirit, and we have angels visiting shepherds and sending them to this backwater Bethlehem. Then we have shamans or astronomer-astrologers following a moving star to a stable or cave in the middle of nowhere, to lowly Judea, to find this holy child that threatened King Herod so much that he tried to kill Jesus.

With our modern, scientific mindset, it’s very hard for many people to believe stories like our Christmas story. And I don’t blame them one bit. I’ve had plenty of periods in my own life when I’ve questioned a good bit of what I learned about the Christian faith. It may also be difficult for some of us to believe Christie’s story of strangers knocking on the door and then giving her a message involving the very words she’d been thinking earlier. Here we have two stories that are filled with mystery, miracles, and the unexpected. What do we do with such stories? Can we allow their power and meaning to help us to know for ourselves that God is in our midst? That God is in our lives?

It seems to me that we have a choice. We can let this radical Christmas story of God’s coming into the world remain at the literal level of something that happened a very long time ago when everything about the world seemed so different. If we do that, it won’t have much effect on us. Or we can choose to let this Christmas story – and Christie’s story – move us, to take us into their deepest levels where we meet God’s mystery of incarnation in our own lives today.

If we can’t encounter God in our own lives, if the Spirit can’t enter us to create divine expression in the world, if the sacred can’t take us out of our fields and daily grind where we may be surrounded by sheep dung to encounter mystery, if God doesn’t today guide us to where Christ can be born anew in our own lives, if God can’t be born again and again in our hearts, then this story is powerless to do anything for us today.

Oh, but these stories do have power. They have power when we let their symbols come alive in us now, in this moment. This is what mystery, miracles, and the unexpected are meant to do for us, they’re meant to show us how God comes into the world and into our lives over and over again. This is what I believe God is looking to do in my life, in each one of your lives, and in this Redeemer community. God wants to bring God’s great light into our terrible darknesses. God wants to come alive in us and bring us to new life.