Year B Advent IV 2 Samuel 7:1-11, 16 Canticle 15 Luke 1: 26-38

Now when the king was settled in his house, and the LORD had given him rest from all his enemies around him, the king said to the prophet Nathan, "See now, I am living in a house of cedar, but the ark of God stays in a tent." Nathan said to the king, "Go, do all that you have in mind; for the LORD is with you."

Houses are important – to people. They provide shelter, and warmth, comfort and, in the case of the very wealthy or even a king, they provide status. In David’s day, to live in a house of cedar was roughly equivalent to living in the penthouse in a huge building you own outright on the main street of a world famous metropolis. A house of cedar is Beacon Hill, a marble palace, luxury and wealth and class. David is king, and he has settled into what he feels is his due, the best possible dwelling, one only a king, in his time, could afford.

To God, a house has an entirely different meaning. Unimpressed by cedar or marble, by penthouses or townhouses, by worldly wealth and status, God has a few things to say to David through His prophet, Nathan.

I have been moving about in a tent and a tabernacle. Wherever I have moved about among all the people of Israel, did I ever speak a word with any of the tribal leaders of Israel, whom I commanded to shepherd my people Israel, saying, "Why have you not built me a house of cedar?"

And then God gets to what is really important:

The LORD declares to you that the LORD will make you a house. Your house and your kingdom shall be made sure forever before me; your throne shall be established forever.

And we today still hear of and know about this “house” of which God is speaking, because right at the start of the Christian portion of the Bible Matthew begins: This is the genealogy of Jesus the Messiah the son of David... What follows is the long list of begats, which were terribly important to the early Jewish Christians, because the Messiah was to come from the “house and lineage of David”.

But there was another reason, other than the elapsed time between King David’s death and Jesus’ birth, why Matthew went to so much trouble tracing Jesus’ lineage back to the King. Matthew wanted to be sure the connection was made, because God, Who didn’t care about cedar houses, also didn’t choose to enter into time, to be born among us, as anyone the Jews of Jesus’ day would recognize as a king, let alone, as the Messiah.

Instead, God choose a young girl named Mary, a peasant girl, at the dawn of what we now call the first century, in Nazareth. You remember Nazareth: “Can anything good come out of Nazareth?” It was perhaps the equivalent of the worst slums of our age, a place from which no one expected much of anything, let alone a king.

And Mary is a poor peasant, a nobody who has just become accustomed to the idea of her engagement to a carpenter. Steady income and honest work, carpentry. And her marriage to Joseph probably represented a great improvement in her social status.

Then along comes Gabriel, who greets her with these astonishing words: “Greetings, O favored one! Our God is with you.”

Gabriel is appearing as a man, with whom she is forbidden to speak. Women were not ordinarily allowed to have casual conversations with strangers. And this angel is not just any old low-ranking angel. The bearer of the greeting is the Archangel Gabriel.

And he doesn’t demand what a male traveler might, he doesn’t ask for a drink from the well, or the washing of his feet, or even directions to the nearest inn. He really came to speak with her, with Mary. And he greets her not as a slave, or a woman, or even as an equal – but as the favored one of God, the God who is unimpressed by worldly wealth and human standards. Our God comes to Mary.

For His Incarnation God has chosen for His human mother a peasant girl of no worldly account at all.

But Mary was much perplexed by his words and pondered what sort of greeting this might be.

It’s obvious she has a great deal of inner composure. She is faced with a being who does not follow the social rules and customs of her people, a being who greets her as one favoured by God. Yet, she doesn’t run away, but stands her ground in the face of the inexplicable. We all know what comes next, and somehow this peasant girl is able to accept the gift of the Holy Spirit, to become the Mother of God.

Then we have the lovely song attributed to her, which we call the Magnificat.

My soul proclaims the greatness of the Lord, my spirit rejoices in God my Savior; * for he has regarded the lowliness of his handmaiden.

As she sings the Good News of the Incarnation, Mary has no sense of herself as anything but what she is, God’s lowly servant. In her song, we begin to hear what the Kingdom of God is like; it is a world turned upside down.

Mary prophetically sings of God’s Kingdom as if it is an accomplished fact, rather than a coming reality breaking into the here and now. The song uses an amazing number of past-tense verbs. Of course, everything is already accomplished for Mary. God has already looked with favor on His lowly servant Mary. The almighty already has done great things for her.

But as Mary continues to praise God for what God is doing in becoming human, she moves beyond what God has done for her, broadening to include the whole world. Even then, she sings of things to come as if they were accomplished facts. Mary, taking a page from her unborn Son’s ministry, proclaims that the Kingdom of God is at hand.

Listen to these words of Mary’s song and ask yourself if the changes in the way the world works have even yet occurred more than 2,000 years later:

He has cast down the mighty from their thrones, and has lifted up the lowly.

He has filled the hungry with good things, and the rich he has sent away empty.

There are few kings in the world today, but the seats of power still belong to the mighty. The lowly rarely, if ever, get lifted up. The hungry often continue to go hungry, while those who have, seem to get more. Yet, Mary speaks of lifting up the lowly and filling the hungry with good things in the past tense.

It is impossible to see Mary’s song as merely naïve. No Jew living in Roman-occupied Israel could think the lowly were being lifted up. Instead, Mary has come to see that what God is doing through her is a sign that all of God’s promises are as good as fulfilled. God is faithful, and the old way of doing things is as good as gone, now that God is becoming human through her child Jesus. God’s kingdom is breaking into our world in a new and marvelous way that makes it clear that the lowly are as good as lifted up and the hungry are as good as filled with good things.

Mary knows that the birth of the Messiah to her, a lowly Jewish peasant, is an important sign of what God’s Kingdom looks like. It is in the Incarnation that we get our clearest picture of the age to come. God became flesh, not in the person of Julius Caesar or a great Egyptian Pharaoh. God became flesh in the person of Jesus of Nazareth, the son of peasant woman in an occupied land.

Mary goes on to sing that this is not some new thing God is doing, but it is in fulfillment of all that God has promised Israel. The God of Israel is now acting in human history in such a way that it will not just break the Kingdom of God into this age for the Jews, but for all humanity.

Because God came down, we have had glimpses of a different world. Through the life of Jesus, and sometimes through His followers, great saints through the ages, we have seen how wonderful the world of the Gospel can be. No one is too lowly, too weak, or too undesirable for God. There are no outcasts in God’s kingdom. God does not look to the outward signs of status and success, but rather God looks at the content of our heart.

Our calling in this world is to love those God loves. Every time we reach out to others to share God’s love, we bring the age to come to life here and now. When we live our faith, reaching out to the lost and left out, we proclaim the Good News in both word and deed. When we side against the oppressor and speak up for the voiceless, we make the Kingdom proclaimed by Mary real in this world.

All we need to do to be the people Mary’s Son Jesus calls us to be, is to surrender to His will. To say to Him, as Mary said to the angel, Here am I, the servant of the Lord; let it be with me according to your word.

Let us pray; (This prayer is attributed to St. Francis of Assisi):

Lord, make us instruments of your peace. Where there is hatred, let us sow love; where there is injury, pardon; where there is discord, union; where there is doubt, faith; where there is despair, hope; where there is darkness, light; where there is sadness, joy. Grant that we may not so much seek to be consoled as to console; to be understood as to understand; to be loved as to love. For it is in giving that we receive; it is in pardoning that we are pardoned; and it is in dying that we are born to eternal life. Amen.