Advent Conspiracy: Give More

Scripture Readings

WWTW- ??

The Best Give Ever Given

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zJFr80qpnlg

We have talked a bunch in this Advent Conspiracy about gifts.

John Reid recieved the best Christmas gift ever.

You can try all you want, I promise, you’re never going to get or give a better gift than this.

And fair warning, if you are an easy cryer, get some tissues at the ready.

John’s 16 year old son tragically passed away in a car accident.

His son was an organ donor, and as luck would have it was able to save another man’s life with a heart transplant.

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So far in this series we’ve been looking at practices to avoid; things we should not do.

We shouldn’t give in to the distractions of the season.

We shouldn’t let our money go wild on it’s own.

We shouldn’t spend ourselves into financial slavery.

And let’s be real, just saying what we shouldn’t do isn’t all that helpful.

So for the next two weeks, we’re going to look at what we should be doing this Advent season.

We want to give more.

We want to give more gifts like that, if only to be gifts that inspire and awe us.

And ironically, it starts with my least favorite Christmas Carol.

Mary Knew

The Christmas Carol

I have to be careful here, because talking favorite/least favorite Christmas Carols is about as divisive as Penguins/Flyers.

But Mary Did You Know can be summarized in one word:

Yes.

I actually think that for a teenage girl (Mary would have probably been in the 12-14 year old range at this point), Mary might be the most enlightened person in the Christmas Narrative, if not the whole Bible.

She knows exactly what’s going on.

She knows exactly what her role in this is.

She knows what God is doing through her.

And she’s awed and honored and excited about it.

There were a few actions that she notes in this song that are worth peeking in on:

Magnify the Lord

I have needed glasses almost my whole life.

My eyes have a hard time seeing far away.

As I get older they have a hard time seeing up close too, which is pretty much everything…

So I have to wear glasses or contacts.

I need a lens that bends and distorts and focuses things so that they are magnified, so that I can see.

Mary makes such a unique claim at the beginning of this song.

Her soul magnifies the Lord.

Somehow, the way her soul is behaving within her, it allows her to focus, to amplify, to bend the world around her, so that God shows up bigger.

God is using her to bring this child into the world, and because God is using her well, Mary’s soul is making God bigger.

Mary knows that God is at work in her life in this miraculous incarnation in the Christmas story.

God does great things

Not only is God using Mary to be magnified, Mary can start listing great things that God has done for her.

This on the surface seems odd.

At this point in the story, Mary is an unwed teenage mother.

She comes from a family that, some context clues later will tell us, is in poverty.

She’s visiting her cousin, and some folks have posited that it’s what happens when there’s a scandalous pregnancy, you go and you hide.

The deck seems rather well stacked against Mary at this point in the story.

And yet, she’s counting blessings.

She’s thinking about all the things that God has done to get her to this point in the story.

She’s thinking about God who’s always been on the side of the oppressed.

She’s thinking about God who’s liberated God’s people more than a few times.

She’s looking at her elderly cousin, who herself happens to be pregnant.

She’s thinking about all the great things that God has done.

Mary knows that God is acting in her life, and acting for good.

Mercy for all

Mercy is not a totally foreign concept at this point in the Jewish understanding of God.

But it is a bit of an outlier, and something that’s at least a little surprising to see show up so early in the Jesus’ story.

In the Jewish line of thinking, it’s an eye for an eye and a tooth for a tooth.

In their line of thinking, it was if you did something wrong, you had better make a sacrifice or say the right collection of prayers, because God could get mad at you and wipe you off the earth.

Mercy…from God…that’s a new idea.

It’s hard enough to imagine we humans forgiving each other when we make mistakes.

But to imagine that God offers us mercy? That God would offer us forgiveness? That God would hold back on his wrath?

That’s new.

Mary knew that God was about forgiveness and grace and mercy, and that in fact she had a role to play in that mercy.

But then, she even takes it one step further.

Fill the Hungry with Good Things

This isn’t all about spiritual things.

There is a tendency to think about etherial or invisible aspects of our relationship with God.

But Mary wants to bring this back to the realm of flesh and blood.

God has put actual food in the actual bellies of hungry people.

God has shown the rich that perhaps all that wealth won’t add up to much in the end.

God knows that there are people who go without because there are people who have too much.

And God wants to bring balance to that equation.

God wants that no one would know hunger.

God wants that no one would go without.

God especially wouldn’t want children to starve, in spite of the fact that they often bare a disproportionate brunt of that injustice.

And so Mary knew that this child within her wasn’t just about meeting people’s spiritual needs.

He would meet their physical needs himself by feeding 5000 in a sitting,

And he would inspire a church to come into the world to carry on that work long after he left it.

And so with all that Mary knew, I wonder if it could impact our Christmas coming up?

I wonder if we could have a different kind of Christmas?

A “Mary Knew” Christmas

Gifts that Magnify the Lord

I think that’s why I like the gift in the video that started our service together.

It magnifies the kinds of things that God is about.

It magnifies love.

It magnifies connection.

It magnifies the gift of life.

It magnifies all the attributes of our loving God, doesn’t it?

And so two thoughts come from that:

1) Be willing to look for a magnified God in places you wouldn’t expect.

God isn’t only magnified in Church.

God isn’t only magnified in worship services.

God isn’t only magnified with a Christian adjective.

Heck, “Christian” wasn’t even a thing when Mary wrote her song!

Instead, we carry open eyes to see where God could be magnified in our lives.

But…not just to notice…

2) In your gift giving this year, could you magnify the Lord?

Could your gifts bring focus and clarity to God’s work in the world?

Could your gifts be the lens through which others come to know the love of God?

Could your gifts spread God by spreading love?

And again, this doesn’t mean that your gifts all have to be from the Christian bookstore.

We can magnify God by magnifying the things that God loves:

Mercy.

Love.

Forgiveness.

Generosity.

Gifts that remember God’s great things

Part of what makes Mary’s story so wonderful is that she recognizes that God is acting in the world.

A whole bunch of folks approach God as if God is sitting back, kind of leaving us up to our own devices to see how it all works out.

But that’s not true!

God is alive and well, and active in our lives and in our world.

So I wonder what kind of memories come to mind for you and your loved ones when you think of how God’s acted in your lives?

Do you have that friend?

The one that on paper there’s no earthly way you two should be friends?

And yet somehow, as if by the invisible hand of God, you find yourselves to be the best of friends?

What does it look like to celebrate God’s action with them?

Or maybe your family has had one of those years?

Maybe you’ve lost someone close, and yet you’ve found a peace that passes understanding.

Maybe you’ve faced unbearable financial adversity, and yet somehow you’ve always seemed to make ends meet.

Maybe you’re sitting at the end of this year thinking “How did we survive that?” and you don’t have a logical answer.

What does it look like to gift each other with memories of God’s work in your lives?

Or maybe the gift is for you!

Maybe you yourself have found yourself in the darker pits of doubt, and you have a story of God pulling you out.

Maybe you have experienced deep pain, or betrayal, or heartbreak that God has been working on your to heal.

Maybe you just have a sense this season, you know that God is working in your life.

What does it look like to memorialize that this season?

These first two categories are a bit squishy, I know.

The next to get a little bit more specific, but not any easier that’s for sure!

Gifts that extend mercy

It seems odd, or maybe not, that we keep circling back to forgiveness around here, doesn’t it?

But that’s because we’re broken people, each and every one of us.

And we’ll do things that we know we shouldn’t, and people will do things to us that they know they shouldn’t.

The rest of the world wants to hang that over people’s heads.

Not us.

We’re about mercy.

So who do you need to let go?

Who do you need to offer mercy too, if only in your own heart?

Who do you need to release from their wrongs, to give the gift of forgiveness?

Who fits in that category even and especially if you don’t think they deserve it?

Or even more so, what if it’s you?

What if this Christmas the best thing you could do is remember that God has offered you mercy, so maybe it’s time you offered it to yourself?

Maybe it’s time to stop beating yourself up?

Maybe it’s time to move forward?

None of this diminishes or denies the pain that’s involved.

But it does recognize two things:

1) Mercy is about us and our own hearts, not the other person.

2) Mercy is central, central, central to our Christian faith in Christ.

Maybe it ought to be central in our Christmas season, and the ways we interact with each other through it?

Gifts that fill the hungry with good things

Look, there are a lot of hungry people in the world.

We might think about far off places like Africa or Haiti when we think about it.

And for sure, there are hungry people there.

And we’ve got a mission team that is collecting money right this very second to send to them to address the problems of food insecurity in our world.

Shameless plug.

But there are lots of hungry people around here too.

Once again, true, you can write a check to our MOST holiday offering, and I hope you will.

But I hope too that you might be met with an opportunity to give in person.

Have I mentioned how much I dislike my commute?

It’s not awful, but it’s long.

As luck would have it, I pass at least two or three folks experiencing homelessness along the way.

And because she’s awesome, Sarah has started putting together these little kits to keep in the front seat of the car, so we can hand them right out to folks when we drive past.

Water

Peanut butter crackers.

Socks

There is something so life-giving about handing something like this straight to a person.

It’s thoughtful, it shows intentionality.

It shows that they matter.

It shows that our religion is not just spiritual and internal, but has a physical component too.

God desires that the hungry be filled with good things.

And God’s asking us to do that.

Gift of the heart

Look, maybe the video at the beginning of the sermon set the bar a little high.

Maybe we’re not actually going to give any one a beating heart this Christmas.

But I wonder, I wonder if we could give more gifts of the heart?

I wonder if our gifts could bind up the brokenhearted as Isaiah said?

I wonder if our gifts could magnify the work of the Lord, which is to bring good news to the oppressed in our midst?

I wonder if our gifts could show what God is doing in our midst, how God is alive and well and active in our lives?

I wonder if we could offer our hearts to those who need mercy, either from us or from God?

I wonder if we could fill the hearts of the hungry with love by filling their stomachs with good things?

Mary knew what was up.

And so do we.

May we give more from our heart this Christmas season.