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The Annunciation of Our Lord to the Virgin Mary March 25, 2020

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The Annunciation of Our Lord to the Virgin Mary March 25, 2020 The Annunciation of Our Lord to the Virgin Mary March 25, 2020 Welcome and Announcements Hymn – LSB 518, By All Your Saints in Warfare (v. 1, 22, 3) 22 We sing with joy of Mary, Whose heart with awe was stirred When, youthful and astonished, She heard the angel’s word. Yet she her voice upraises To magnify God’s name, As once for our salvation Your mother she became. Opening Verses Office Hymn – LSB 356, The Angel Gabriel From Heaven Came Old Testament Reading – Isaiah 7:10-14 Again the Lord spoke to Ahaz: “Ask a sign of the Lord your God; let it be deep as Sheol or high as heaven.” But Ahaz said, “I will not ask, and I will not put the Lord to the test.” And he said, “Hear then, O house of David! Is it too little for you to weary men, that you weary my God also? Therefore the Lord himself will give you a sign. Behold, the virgin shall conceive and bear a son, and shall call his name Immanuel. P: O Lord, have mercy on us. C: Thanks be to God. Epistle Reading – Hebrews 10:4-10 For it is impossible for the blood of bulls and goats to take away sins. Consequently, when Christ came into the world, he said, “Sacrifices and offerings you have not desired, but a body have you prepared for me; in burnt offerings and sin offerings you have taken no pleasure. Then I said, ‘Behold, I have come to do your will, O God, as it is written of me in the scroll of the book.’” When he said above, “You have neither desired nor taken pleasure in sacrifices and offerings and burnt offerings and sin offerings” (these are offered according to the law), then he added, “Behold, I have come to do your will.” He does away with the first in order to establish the second. And by that will we have been sanctified through the offering of the body of Jesus Christ once for all. P: O Lord, have mercy on us. C: Thanks be to God. Gospel Reading – Luke 1:26-38 In the sixth month the angel Gabriel was sent from God to a city of Galilee named Nazareth, to a virgin betrothed to a man whose name was Joseph, of the house of David. And the virgin's name was Mary. And he came to her and said, “Greetings, O favored one, the Lord is with you!” But she was greatly troubled at the saying, and tried to discern what sort of greeting this might be. And the angel said to her, “Do not be afraid, Mary, for you have found favor with God. And behold, you will conceive in your womb and bear a son, and you shall call his name Jesus. He will be great and will be called the Son of the Most High. And the Lord God will give to him the throne of his father David, and he will reign over the house of Jacob forever, and of his kingdom there will be no end.” And Mary said to the angel, “How will this be, since I am a virgin?” And the angel answered her, “The Holy Spirit will come upon you, and the power of the Most High will overshadow you; therefore the child to be born will be called holy—the Son of God. And behold, your relative Elizabeth in her old age has also conceived a son, and this is the sixth month with her who was called barren. For nothing will be impossible with God.” And Mary said, “Behold, I am the servant of the Lord; let it be to me according to your word.” And the angel departed from her. P: O Lord, have mercy on us. C: Thanks be to God. Responsory (Lent) Sermon Tonight, we get to hear about and talk about someone who is often ignored and minimized in Protestant churches – Mary, the Mother of Jesus. Because today, March the 25th, is the date of the Annunciation in the church’s calendar, the observance of the visit of the angel Gabriel to Mary announcing to her what God would do to save the world with His Son Jesus, and the role she would play in that. We don’t often talk about Mary as Protestants because of the direction that Roman Catholic theology has gone over the centuries – we certainly do not accept a lot of what they say about her, which has no Scriptural basis. She is not the “Queen of heaven,” she is not an especially powerful intercessor with God to whom we should pray for an extra chance of being heard. We do not believe that she has appeared to people in visions or apparitions and told them to pray rosaries and stuff like that. But by the same token, Protestants have often gone too far the other direction and acted like she’s no one special at all. If we are going to be faithful to Scripture, we can’t do that – she does play a unique role in the history of salvation, and the angel himself tells her that she is favored, that she has found favor with God. She appears several other times throughout the Gospels and notably she is one of the few faithful who remain at the foot of the cross during that ordeal. She responds to Gabriel in faith, “Behold, I am the servant of the Lord; let it be to me according to your word.” In other words, “I believe and trust God; let His will be done,” even if that will lead to the shame of being perceived (in everyone else’s eyes) as an unwed mother, even if it led to the unimaginable burden of raising and caring for God incarnate, seeing him opposed and suffering and dying. She responds with remarkable faith, and in that she can certainly be a role model. That’s the Lutheran attitude towards saints: we don’t pray to them or anything like that, but it’s good to remember their lives for the good example they can give us for living in faith, and we celebrate what God did for them in His grace and what He gives to us through them. In that, Mary should indeed be one of the most prominent: for the example she provides of a faithful response, and in giving thanks to God for the salvation He brought into the world through her. Traditionally this moment of the Annunciation was reckoned as the beginning of the Incarnation – not Christmas and the birth of Jesus, but this visit as the moment of his conception. Notice the date, March 25 – this is exactly nine months before Christmas, December 25. In fact, it’s unclear from the early Church which of these dates came first! It is possible that the Annunciation was first, and the date for Christmas was simply calculated as nine months later. This also has dramatic implications for some hot-button issues today. The Christian Church is and has always been intensely pro-life – when the God we worship once occupied a woman’s womb as an unborn child, as a fetus, how can possibly be otherwise? When the first person to recognize his presence and rejoice at it was his cousin John the Baptist, also still in utrero, how can we be otherwise? This event marks a whole new beginning, the first moment in the new Creation. The victory is complete with the Resurrection and the defeat of the grave, but this is a moment that the world is changed forever, the moment the Creator enters into His Creation. For centuries, March the 25th was marked as the beginning of the new year for that reason. For those of you who are like me and love the Lord of the Rings, the date of when the Ring is destroyed and the great enemy Sauron is defeated is also March the 25th, which becomes the beginning of the new year in Middle Earth – this is no coincidence, because Tolkien was intensely and devoutly Catholic. The entrance of the Savior into the world is the beginning of the reign of grace. I want to share a devotion partly borrowed from a Lutheran theologian named Johann Gerhard, who lived in the late 1500s and early 1600s. An angel came to a woman long ago. She had faith unspoiled by sin, for this was the first woman, Eve. But the angel that came to her spoke to her a word of death. She listened and believed it, and so sin and death came into her and into the entire human race. We, her children, received the seed of death from the dark angel’s word. We were conceived and born in sin, doomed to the grave because Eve put her faith in a lying word of Satan. He lured her away from God’s truth, away from His Word. The lying serpent offered misleading promises – “You shall not surely die. You shall be as God.” Eve trusted these, and brought the curse upon the earth. But in the fullness of time, an angel of light came to Mary in Nazareth. She was not unspoiled by sin, for she also was a daughter of Eve. Yet she received the gift of faith, faith that clung to the Word of God. The angel of light came to her; Gabriel spoke to her words of truth from the Lord, not lies and deceptions. He gave the promise of the Child to be born.
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