Rob Morgan:Mary

Mary A Pocket Paper
from
The Donelson Fellowship
______________Robert J. Morgan
December 7, 1997 ----

And Mary said: My soul glorifies the Lord and my spirit rejoices in God my Savior, for he has been mindful of the humble state of his servant. From now on all generations will call me blessed, for the Mighty One has done great things for me-holy is his name. His mercy extends to those who fear him, from generation to generation. He has performed mighty deeds with his arm; he has scattered those who are proud in their inmost thoughts. He has brought down rulers from their thrones but has lifted up the humble. He has filled the hungry with good things but has sent the rich away empty. He has helped his servant Israel, remembering to be merciful to Abraham and his descendants forever, even as he said to our fathers.

-Luke 1:46-55

One day when I was a child my father returned from a trip. We had all missed him badly, and we met him at the car with hugs and handsakes-and the all-important question What did you bring us? He pulled from his pocket a small plastic egg containing a rubbery, gummy glob called Silly Putty.

I soon learned how to do a thousand things with Silly Putty, but nothing was more fun than pressing it flat onto the funny papers and lifting off the image. The putty was sticky enough to pull some of the colored ink off the newsprint, and suddenly Dagwood and Dick Tracy and Popeye became, literally, putty in my hands. I could stretch them until they were tall and thin. I could squeeze them until they were fat and squat. I could twist them around until they were distorted beyond recognition.

And that, I think, is just what we have done with Christmas. We have transferred onto our hearts and habits and society a superficial image of Christmas, and then we have stretched and twisted it beyond recognition. We've taken the beautiful story of God becoming man, and distorted it into six weeks of overeating, overdrinking, and overspending.

Today I would like to suggest that we've done the same thing to the second most important figure in the Christmas story-Mary, the virgin mother of Jesus Christ. The Bible gives us some information about Mary, limited information actually, for the Gospel writers did not want to shift the spotlight very far from Christ himself. But through the encircling centuries, we have taken the Bible's limited data about Mary and embellished it. She has become almost a god unto herself in some branches of Christendom.

It evolved in this way. About AD 320, a term came into use to describe Mary, a Greek term spelled and pronounced Theotokos. Mary, the preachers said, was Theokokos. The term literally meant Mother of God. In AD 431, that term was formally approved by the church Council at Ephesus, and some theologians and church leaders even began to argue that Mary was exalted in heaven above other Christians. She had, after all, given the world the Savior. She was, in fact, Queen of Heaven.

Preachers such as Irenaeus compared Mary to Eve, saying that while Eve is the mother of all sin, Mary, being the mother of the Savior, is, in some sense, the mother of salvation. As such, some of the Roman theologians further claimed, she must have been herself sinless (or immaculate) from the moment of her conception. Thus they began talking about the Immaculate Conception of Mary. This theory was hotly debated in the Middle Ages, and it was opposed by some of the greatest thinkers in the church such as Thomas Aquinas. But gradually it became an accepted doctrine in the Roman Catholic Church and was declared an official truth or dogma in 1854 by Pope Pius.

But it doesn't stop there. Some of the Roman theologians further speculated that Mary must have remained a virgin all her life, thus they began talking about her perpetual virginity.

And that's not all. Mary became so revered and adored that it was assumed that she was taken bodily up to heaven at the moment of her death. Her body was never touched by decay. At the moment of death, it is said, her body was whisked upward to heaven by her adoring son Jesus. This is the Roman Catholic doctrine of the Assumption of Mary.

Millions of Christians around the world have thus been taught to pray to her, to worship her, and to adore her.

As if all that were not enough distortion, a growing movement in the Roman Catholic Church now wants Pope John Paul to proclaim Mary as Co-Redeemer with Jesus Christ. A large box was recently shipped from to the Vatican with over 40,000 signatures from around the world asking the pope to exercise the power of papal infallibility to declare that Mary participates in the redemption achieved by her son, that all graces that flow from the suffering and death of Jesus Christ are granted only through Mary's intercession with her son, and that all prayers and petitions from us must flow through Mary, who brings them to the attention of Jesus.

This drive has been joined by some of the Roman church's leading theologians and bishops, and Mother Teresa herself, before her death, added her voice to the chorus asking that Mary be declared Co-Redeemer with Christ.

Pope John Paul II seems to be receptive. He firmly believes that it was the Virgin Mary as she suddenly appeared at Fatima who saved his life from the gunman's bullet in 1981 on the Feast Day of Our Lady of Fatima. He rarely preaches a sermon or issues an encyclical without praising the Virgin Mary. And there is widespread belief that he will declare her as Co-Redeemer with Christ of the human race in the year 2000 as part of the church's millennial celebration.

Now, those of us who just read and believe the Bible, and take it as the Word of God, pure and simple, find all this preposterous. The Bible says not one word about any of this, and in fact, the Bible does not give us extensive information about Mary at all. The Bible choose to focus on the Lord Jesus Christ.

What, then, do we know of Mary? Most of our information about her comes from Luke's Gospel. In fact, Luke's opening words are very significant: Many have undertaken to draw up an account of the things that have been fulfilled among us, just as they were handed down to us by those who from the first were eyewitnesses and servants of the word. Therefore, since I myself have carefully investigated everything from the beginning, it seemed good also to me to write an orderly account for you, most excellent Theophilus, so that you may know the certainty of the things you have been taught.

Luke is saying, "I have carefully researched the details of the life of Jesus Christ for this biography, and I have interviewed those who were, from the beginning, actual eyewitness and participants." That almost certainly included Mary. I believe Mary herself to have been one of Luke's primary source for the information about the birth of Christ that he recorded in chapters 1 and 2 of his Gospel. I think he passed on a great deal of it for us verbatim. And therefore I believe that when we read of the birth of Christ in Luke 1 and 2, we may well be hearing the voice of Mary herself, as though she were sitting with us around a table, telling us about the events of that never-to-be-forgotten night.

Sexually Pure

What do we know from Luke 1 and 2 about Mary? First, we know that she kept herself sexually pure. Luke mentions Mary the first time in verse 26-27 with these words: In the sixth month, God sent the angel Gabriel to Nazareth, a town in Galilee, to a virgin pledged to be married to a man named Joseph, a descendant of David. The virgin's name was Mary.

Twice in verse 27 she is called a virgin. Why? Why is that important? For two reasons. First, it is important theologically. The Old Testament prophet Isaiah predicted that the Messiah would enter the world as a baby born of a virgin. Jesus Christ is both human and divine, both God and Man. In one personality, he contains two natures. He was conceived by the Holy Spirit and born of a woman. He is thus the God-Man.

But here's something we don't often think about. The virginity of Mary is not only important theologically, it is important morally. In our age of universal immorality-when premarital sex is common as water, when television and movies glamorize sleeping with our dating partner, when teenage pregnancy is rampant and AIDS and venereal disease are epidemic-it is important to remember that when God wanted to find a woman of character to raise the Messiah, he choose someone who had kept herself sexually pure. Mary and Joseph were both young and strong and attracted to each other. They were betrothed, almost as good as married. They could have rationalized premarital sex very easily in their minds. They could have yielded to temptation. They had plenty of opportunity-every couple does. They could have slipped off (with no one knowing it) to indulge in delicious moments of passion and pleasure. But God would have known. He was watching. The Bible says that the eyes of the Lord are in every place, seeing the evil and the good. And the Bible repeatedly warns us against all kinds of sexual sin, including premarital and extra-marital sex. And thus Mary had determined to keep herself pure.

And so it was that the angel Gabriel announced to Mary that she, though a virgin, would bear the Christ-child. Mary's response is in verse 34: How will this be since I am a virgin? The angel then spoke these remarkable words, perhaps the most startling and remarkable words in all the Bible: The Holy Spirit will come upon you, and the power of the Most High will overshadow you. So the only one to be born will be called the Son of God. Even Elizabeth your relative is going to have a child in her old age, and she who was said to be barren is in her sixth month. For nothing is impossible with God.

The Lord's Servant

Mary's response to this tells us something else about her. In verse 38 she simply replies: I am the Lord's servant. May it be to me as you have said.

Suppose you were filling out a survey of some sort or an application, or taking a personality text. Suppose you came to a question asking you to describe yourself. It said, Describe yourself by completing this sentence: "I am ___________." How would you finish that sentence? I am a 4.0 student. I am six-foot-three. I am an American. I am an athlete. I am Chinese. I am worthless. I am thirty years old. Would you instinctively write down Mary's answer to the same question. She simply said, "I am the Lord's servant."

Faith

But let's read on. The angel told Mary that her relative Elizabeth, an aged woman, perhaps an aunt or a great aunt, was also now expecting a child. So here we have two women, relatives, both servants and lovers of God, who, by nature, could not medically, physically, possibly have children. One was a virgin, the other well past the child-bearing years. But both of them suddenly become pregnant in the same year. Both are recipients of a supernatural pregnancy. One woman would give birth to John and the other to Jesus. What could be more natural than their wanting to spend time together. And so we read: At that time Mary got ready and hurried to a town in the hill country of Judea, where she entered Zechariah's home and greeted Elizabeth.

Somehow, apparently without even being told, Elizabeth knew the whole story. It had been revealed to her, and she was so excited that she shouted out her greetings as soon as Mary stepped through the door: In a loud voice she exclaimed: "Blessed are you among women, and blessed is the child you will bear! But why am I so favored, that the mother of my Lord should come to me? As soon as the sound of your greeting reached my ears, the baby in my womb leaped for joy. Blessed is she who has believed that what the Lord has said to her will be accomplished.

This tells us something else about Mary-she was a woman of faith. I would like to compare with you three quotations from the New Testament. Mary certainly didn't understand everything that was happening, but here, in Luke 1:45, Elizabeth described Mary as "...she who has believed that what the Lord said to her will be accomplished."

Compare that with these words, spoken by Paul aboard his sinking ship in the Mediterranean, in Acts 27:25: "I have faith in God that it will happen just as he old me."

And a third passage about Abraham in Romans 4:21: "He was fully persuaded that God has the power to do what he had promised."

What is faith? It is believing that what the Lord has said will be accomplished. It is believing that it will happen just as God has said. It is being fully persuaded that God has the power to do what he has promised. And it should work during times of trial and perplexity, such as Mary was undoubtedly facing. How do you respond to uncertain situations? To things you can not understand at the moment?

I read just this week about a young man in college who became engulfed in anxiety about his finances. He and his parents split the tuition costs, and he worked evenings and during vacations. He was a careful spender, but he still wondered how he could meet all his obligations. One day at the beginning of his senior year, he was balancing his checkbook when a tidal wave of anxiety overwhelmed him. His hands felt trembly, and his breathing became short. He prayed aloud, "Lord, where will this extra money come from? How can I pay these bills."

He glanced down at his check register and noticed his meager, remaining balance-$6.33. Those figures seemed familiar to him. Six-Thirty-Three. Immediately his mind went to a verse he had memorized, Matthew 6:33-Seek first his kingdom and his righteousness; and all these things will be added to you."

He decided to trust the Lord and lean heavily on that verse, and during the course of the year the Lord met his needs in a series of wonderful and unexpected ways.

We don't always understand the circumstances we find ourselves, but then, neither did Mary. But she believed what the Lord had said to her would be accomplished. She believed that it would happen just as the Lord had told her. She was fully persuaded that God had the power to do what he had promised. She was a woman of purity, of servanthood, of faith, and finally, she was a woman of worship. She sang and prayed and praised the Lord.

Praise

That brings us to our Scripture reading today, to Mary's great hymn-The Magnificat. It is recorded in Luke 1:46-55, and it is called the Magnificat because that is its title in the Vulgate, the Latin version, of the New Testament. In the King James Version, this prayer begins, "My soul doth magnify the Lord and my spirit hath rejoiced in God my Savior." I want to finish today by directing your attention to those two verbs in verse 46: magnify and rejoice. The NIV says: My soul glorifies the Lord and my spirit rejoices..." But I like the KJV, "My soul doth magnify the Lord.

What happens when you magnify something? The other night we had a beautiful full moon, and from our deck it just seemed as clear and close as the globe on the light post. I found our binoculars and steadied them against the railing, and I magnified the moon. I focused on it and made it larger in my eyes and studied it until I was overwhelmed with the white plains and mountains, the craters and jagged edges of the moon.

My Soul Doth Magnify The Lord

What happens when we magnify the Lord? Just that. The same thing exactly. We focus on him and make him larger in our eyes and study him until we are overwhelmed with his brightness, his love, his grace, his care, his power. And when we do that, the next verb comes into play-we rejoice in God our Savior. As you focus on Christ and make him larger in your eyes and study him until you are overwhelmed with his grace and greatness and goodness, it brings a joy into your heart that levels every mountain and fills every valley. Isaiah 9 said that Christ shines a light into those walking through the shadowlands of this world. O magnify, of magnify the Lord with me and let us exalt his name forever.

When the great evangelist D. L. Moody died, one of his associates wrote a little booklet entitled, "Why God used D. L. Moody." If I could borrow that idea today, I would like to tell you why the Lord chose and used Mary. What kind of person, after all, does God use? He uses people like this. Young people. Teenagers. People of all ages. People who are devoted to purity. He uses people willing to say, "I am the Lord's servant." People who trust him even with that which they do not understand. And people who say, "My soul doth magnify the Lord and my spirit hath rejoiced in God my Savior."

And he uses people like you and me, just as he used Mary-to bring hope and salvation to all the world. That's the glory of Christmas. My soul doth magnify the Lord... for unto us was born that day in the city of David, a Savior who is Christ the Lord.