Sermon: The Lord is With You

The Lord is With You
Romans 16:25-27, Luke 1:26-38
By the Rev. Ryon L Price
Lowe’s Grove Baptist Church
Fourth Sunday Advent
December 18, 2005

My grandfather, Bill Price, passed away two years ago this past week. The thing I regret most is that he died right before I could get home for Christmas - a time he loved to celebrate. Every year we would reenact the same drama. After finishing our Christmas breakfast and washing it down with a handful of chocolate covered cherries – Bill would say, “Well kids, I don’t know about ya’ll but I think its about time to bust them presents.” After which we would all gather around the tree and commence to bustin’. And then, along about the time he was bustin’ his first package, with a twinkle in his eye, he would say, “Yep, it’s like I always say, ‘it’s better to receive than to give.’”
In seven days most of us will enter into that grand drama of bustin’ those packages. It is a drama written in the genre of mystery. Like a treasure buried deep inside the cloak of an enchanted forest, there the package is, hidden beneath the tree, waiting to be discovered. We enter into that forest, and we take the present – the great mystery before us – and raise it up, inspecting its size and shape. We weigh it in the palm of our hands and tilt it, delicately, to see if it shakes or rattles or rolls; or, perhaps even, barks. Eh, kids?
And then, when the time is right and all the rituals have been sufficiently performed, we move in like vultures and bust that package wide open. And amidst the swift and furious strokes from our hands, which much to our surprise have suddenly morphed into sickles, the mystery is finally unraveled before our very eyes…Socks and underwear.

When the bible uses the word mystery, mysterion, it does not mean some dark secret which will never be revealed. When we encounter a mystery in scripture it is never who shot JFK or what happened to Amelia Earhart or what’s in the meat at Lowe’s Grove Middle School. Mystery instead describes something which was once hidden, but is now divulged to God’s people. In the gospels, mystery, is always used in reference to a teaching hidden to the masses, but revealed by Jesus to his followers,

To you has been given the secret of the Kingdom of God, but for those outside, everything comes in parables, so they will be always looking but never perceiving, and always hearing and never understanding.


For Paul, Christ himself is that great mystery – the treasure once hidden, by now revealed in the person of Jesus Christ. Today’s epistle reading makes this clear:

Now to the one who is able to strengthen you according to my gospel and the proclamation of Jesus Christ, according to the revelation of the mystery, which was kept secret for long ages, but is now revealed and through the prophetic writings is made know to all the nations

Christ is the great acting out of God’s mystery – the unfolding of the human drama God began in the garden and has now consummated in the person of Jesus Christ. In Christ we have the great unraveling of God’s mystery before us. In Christ we have God’s gift unwrapped, busted wide open, through the power which raised Jesus Christ his son from the dead.


In Luke we find this gift hidden away in the most unlikely of places. God sends his angel Gabriel to a young peasant girl from the sticks. “Greetings favored one. The Lord is with you.” This is, of course, no ordinary salutation. This is a prophetic announcement. The Lord, the Lord of Lords, is indeed literally with this young girl, growing and gaining human form inside her womb.
Incredulous, Mary rushes off to see her cousin Elizabeth who just so happens to be pregnant with a son whom we will all later come to know as John the Baptizer. As Mary enters Elizabeth’s house and greets the family, little John recognizes Mary and Jesus, and leaps with excitement from inside his mother’s womb. Immediately Elizabeth is filled with the Holy Spirit and recognizes the child Mary is carrying is indeed the Christ-child, the anointed one.

This beautiful tale reminds me of a story Henri Nouwen tells a of a former student who, after some years, came back to visit Nouwen in his study (Henri Nouwen Ministry and Spirituality, Continuum: New York, 1998, pp.202-203). The man said, “I have no problems this time, no questions to ask you…I simply want to celebrate some time with you.” After the two men got past the nervousness and suspicion, which so often precludes us from entering into genuinely intimate friendships, they were able to sit for a while in silence and soak up the goodness of what it means to dwell in the presence of a brother. Finally, from the silence Nouwen’s visitor said, “When I look at you it is as if I am in the presence of Christ.” And without rebuff or protest, Nouwen wisely answered, “It is the Christ in you who recognizes the Christ in me.”
Think about it a moment. It is the Christ in you who recognizes the Christ in me.
Lowe’s Grove, it is the Christ living inside you that recognized the Christ in me. It is the Christ in you that discovered and unraveled the great Mystery, which is Christ in me. It is the Christ in you that caused my spirit to leap from inside me.

And so I come today with one word to describe the past two years with you. That word is grace. It is a word that well portrays the story the virgin birth, and it is a word which characterizes the plan God has for this community. Grace, according to Thomas Merton, is the unlocking of our “potency waiting to be developed” (Thomas Merton The New Man Farrar, Straus & Giroux, New York: 1961, p.44). It is the awakening of the likeness of God which has been imprinted upon us. Grace is the freedom to say yes, as Mary said yes, to the God who desires to be born in our lives. And it is here that the story of Mary can well serve us as a parable for the place and calling of our church.
I confess, for us who have grown up hearing this story the shock of this pronouncement can sometimes be lost. This was a young girl, a peasant of modest means – her face would not be too different from some of the indigenous girls we ship packages to every year for OperationChristmasChild. Not the one the world would choose to bear salvation.
Yet God upsets the expectations of the world. What the world says is without value, a mere commodity, to be used, exploited, and then left behind, as so many young poor girls are in this world, God says is precious. What the world says will never make a difference, ends up making all the difference in the world. And this is why we, as the people of God, will always find our own story in the story of Mary and we will always stand up on behalf of the poor, and the marginalized, and the oppressed. Because God, in the words of poet Scott Cairns, has found a virgin and has asked her to be his mother. (From the poem, “The Translation of Raimundo Luz: My Imitation” in The Christian Century, Feb 27, 2002). Mary, small in stature and demure and as unsuspecting as any of us could ever be is in this hour called to be the bearer of the divine.

Can you see your own story in the story of Mary? Not rich, not famous, not one the world would expect much out of. Yet, by grace, pregnant with the greatest gift the world has ever known. The Lord is indeed with you. The Mystery that is Christ Jesus has been conceived inside you and is waiting to be born. The Christ in you wants you to say yes. Let this little child come in.
I do not believe you have even begun to realize the potency, the very pregnancy, of the Christ which is in you. We look around and we still see the trappings of a little country church. Yet there is a spark of the divine in you for sure. It was the Christ in you that recognized the Christ in me. And we remember Christ’s words - the Kingdom of God is like a tiny mustard seed which will one day blossom into a great tree. It takes only a little yeast to leaven the whole loaf. The mystery is just waiting to be unraveled. The Lord is with you.
In the name of the Father and the Son and the Holy Spirit, Amen.


And Mary said,
"My soul magnifies the Lord,
and my spirit rejoices in God my Savior,
for he has looked on the humble estate of his servant.
For behold, from now on all generations will call me blessed;