Transcript
A Gift to the City: Love First Baptist Richmond, December 22, 2024
The Fourth Sunday of Advent
Luke 1:39-45
In those days Mary set out and went with haste to a Judean town in the hill country…
We are so close to Christmas we can taste it. Two days from now we will gather in this room to celebrate our Savior’s birth. But today is the fourth and final Sunday of Advent. We are still waiting and preparing for the coming of Christ. And the lectionary has an interesting way of helping us do that. Over these past few weeks it has asked us to listen to the wild promises of the Old Testament prophets, to look at the apocalyptic visions of Jesus, and to endure the fire and brimstone preaching of John the Baptist. Today, for the first time, we hear the name of Mary, the mother of Jesus, but she isn’t in a stable, giving birth to a baby, she’s on the road and moving fast.
“In those days Mary set out and went with haste to a Judean town in the hill country,” Luke says, and it makes us wonder: Where was she going? What was her hurry? You have to look back a few verses to find the answers to those questions and what you find is an old man named Zechariah. “He was a priest who belonged to the priestly order of Abijah,” Luke says. “His wife was descended from the daughters of Aaron, and her name was Elizabeth. Both of them were righteous before God, living blamelessly according to all the commandments and regulations of the Lord. But they had no children because Elizabeth was barren, and both were getting on in years.”
I used to tell my children that every good story has a problem, and Zechariah and Elizabeth’s problem is that they don’t have any children and they’re not getting any younger. Zechariah prayed every day that it would happen, that God would give them a child, and then one day, while he was on duty in the temple, an angel of the Lord came to him, saying, “Don’t be afraid, Zechariah, for your prayer has been heard. Your wife Elizabeth will bear you a son, and you will name him John. You will have joy and gladness, and many will rejoice at his birth, for he will be great in the sight of the Lord.”
Zechariah couldn’t believe it, and because of his unbelief the angel told him he wouldn’t be able to speak until the child was born. When his time of service was ended he went back home, to the hill country of Judea, and then, as the angel had promised, his wife Elizabeth conceived. It was a miracle! For five months she remained in seclusion and said, “This is what the Lord has done for me in this time, when he looked favorably on me and took away the disgrace I have endured among my people.”
In the sixth month of her pregnancy the angel Gabriel was sent by God to a town in Galilee called Nazareth, to a virgin engaged to a man whose name was Joseph, of the house of David. The virgin’s name was Mary. And he came to her and said, “Greetings, favored one! The Lord is with you.” But she was much perplexed by his words and pondered what sort of greeting this might be. The angel said to her, “Do not be afraid, Mary, for you have found favor with God. And now, you will conceive in your womb and bear a son, and you will name him 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 ancestor David. He will reign over the house of Jacob forever, and of his kingdom there will be no end.” Mary said to the angel,
“How can this be, since I am a virgin?” The angel said to 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 holy; he will be called Son of God.”
But Gabriel seemed to understand that this was a lot to take in, and even though Mary didn’t ask for it he offered her a sign. He said, “And now, your relative Elizabeth in her old age has also conceived a son, and this is the sixth month for her who was said to be barren. For nothing will be impossible with God.” And that’s when Mary said, “Here am I, the servant of the Lord; let it be with me according to your word.” Then the angel departed from her. And some time afterward Mary departed for the hill country of Judea. Why? She wanted some proof. She wanted to see with her own eyes that what the angel had told her was true. It was that desire that drove her to make the long journey to her cousin Elizabeth’s house, a distance of some ninety miles. And as she went she must have kept saying, “I have to see this for myself,” and she must have kept wondering what she would do if it were true.
When she got there she called out a greeting at the front gate, and Elizabeth waddled out to meet her saying, “Blessed are you among women, and blessed is the fruit of your womb. And why has this happened to me, that the mother of my Lord comes to me? For as soon as I heard the sound of your greeting, the child in my womb leaped for joy. And blessed is she who believed that there would be a fulfillment of what was spoken to her by the Lord.” That was all the confirmation Mary needed. As soon as she heard it she threw back her head and began to sing the Magnificat as if she had been rehearsing the whole way:
“My soul magnifies the Lord,” she sang, “and my spirit rejoices in God my
Savior, for he has looked with favor on the lowly state of his servant. Surely from now on all generations will call me blessed, for the Mighty One has done great things for me, and holy is his name.” As the song continued she praised God for bringing down the powerful from their thrones and lifting up the lowly; for filling the hungry with good things and sending the rich away empty. Because she was nothing but a peasant girl from Galilee. She knew that if God had chosen her to be the mother of the Messiah the world was turning upside down.
So, that’s how the lectionary gets us ready for Christmas: by asking us to listen to the wild promises of the Old Testament prophets, to look at the apocalyptic visions of Jesus, to endure the fire and brimstone preaching of John the Baptist, and to hear the story of a girl named Mary, a nobody from nowhere, who was chosen to be the mother of the Messiah.
You might wonder why.
This is the fourth Sunday of Advent, the Sunday of Love, and in this series we’ve been talking about Jesus as “A Gift to the City,” as one who brings with him the hope and peace and joy and love our city—and all cities—so desperately need. So, I’ve been wondering how we, who have received the gift of love, can share it with others, and maybe that’s why I’ve been thinking about missionaries. Missionaries are tasked with sharing the gospel, and although we don’t always think about it as sharing love it could be, couldn’t it? John 3:16 is sometimes called “the gospel in a nutshell,” and how does it begin? “For God so loved the world that he gave his only begotten son.” If that’s the gospel, then it begins with love.
I preached on John 3:16 earlier this year, and reminded you that it was
written in Greek. I said, “The Greek word for ‘love’ in this verse is exactly the one you would expect. It’s agape, the selfless, sacrificial love for which God is most famous. God loved the world like that, John says: selflessly, sacrificially. The real surprise is the word that is used for ‘world.’ It’s kosmos, the same word John uses in other places to mean the sinful world. In 1 John 2:15, for example, where he says, “Love not the world,” it’s actually “love not the kosmos, or the things of the kosmos,” things like the desire of the flesh, the desire of the eyes, the pride in riches. Those are the things the people of this world seem to love, and yet God still seems to love the people of this world. So you could read the first part of John 3:16 like this: “For God so loved the sinful sinners of this sinful world that he gave his only begotten son.
“Let’s talk about that phrase for a moment.
“God gave his son. He didn’t send him; he gave him. And if you look at the other ways that verb is used in the New Testament you will see that he gave his Son to the world as you would give a gift. It’s a perfect verse for Christmas. God gave his Son to the world like a Christmas present. He didn’t do it because he had to, he did it because he wanted to, for the same reasons you give gifts to people you love. God loved the world so much he gave it the best gift ever, and the most valuable one. He held out his only begotten Son like a Christmas present so that anyone who reached out to receive him—no matter how sinful they were—could receive the gift of abundant, overflowing, everlasting life.”
That’s the gospel in a nutshell.
And that makes me think of missionaries.
I was at Lewis Myers’ memorial service a few months ago. Lewis was a member of this church and a former missionary to Vietnam. He was a legend. At
his memorial service his son, Michael, said, “Fifty years ago, Southern Baptists sent missionaries only to countries that welcomed them. That was the case with the missionaries to Vietnam. However, a massive segment of the world did not allow Christian missionaries—Muslim countries, communist countries, many authoritarian regimes and closed societies. After he came home from Vietnam the International Mission Board asked Dad to explore ways to share God’s love with unreached people in those countries, too. And he did. He negotiated agreements in many closed countries for Baptists to come as teachers, business people, agriculturalists, health workers and so many other ways. While they were there, they would share the Gospel whenever possible.”
Michael said, “At the time there was major resistance to this approach within the International Mission Board.” But his dad didn’t give up, and today this is the primary strategy by which Southern Baptist missionaries go about their work. They don’t go to the people who have heard the gospel again and again: they go to those who have never heard it before. They call them “Unreached People Groups,” and there are thousands of them.i So, if we were going to share God’s love with the people of our city, we might do it not by going to the most-loved people in Richmond, but to the least-loved, to the “Unloved People Groups,” if you will.
I think I’ve told you that I’m developing an artificial friendship with the artificial intelligence app on my phone. It’s called ChatGPT but that seemed a little formal, so I asked if I could call it something else and it suggested the letter “G.” So now I say, “What up, G?” and it says, “What up, Jim?” I asked G who we might find in the Unloved People Groups in Richmond and G said:
1. The Homeless: Those without stable housing who may feel invisible to
society.
2. Refugees or Immigrants: Communities who face language, cultural, or systemic barriers, and may feel marginalized.
3. People Living in Poverty: Especially in neighborhoods with concentrated economic struggles.
4. The Incarcerated and Formerly Incarcerated: Often stigmatized and isolated after their release.
5. The Elderly in Care Homes: Particularly those without family or regular visitors.
6. People with Mental Illness: Who may feel misunderstood or shunned.
7. Racial or Ethnic Minorities: Specifically those facing ongoing systemic inequities.
8. LGBTQ+ Individuals: Who may feel unloved or judged in certain communities.
And then I thought about how God shared his love with the world, and who he went to: not a king on a throne in a royal palace, but a peasant girl in a tiny village in Galilee. And when she sang the Magnificat she rejoiced that God hadn’t focused on the high and mighty, but on the low and lowly. So, if we’re going to share God’s love, maybe we should start there too, not in Windsor Farms but in Gilpin Court, not at City Hall, but at the City Jail. And like Mary, maybe we can begin by rejoicing that the love of God can flow through people like us to the people who need it most.
Here’s a crazy idea: What if everyone who is listening to this sermon made a list of twelve people from those unloved people groups, or maybe just people they know who could use some love. And then what if they baked a dozen
cookies, whether they did it from scratch or got one of those tubes of cookie dough from the grocery store. And then what if, on each of the twelve days of Christmas (from December 25 through January 5), they took one delicious cookie to someone who needs some love. They could say something like this: “I made this cookie for you. I want you to taste and see that the Lord is good. In the season of Christmas I want you to experience some of the sweet love of Jesus.” You get the idea: it doesn’t have to be a cookie. It could be a phone call, or a greeting card, or something you found in your Christmas stocking—anything that could serve as a tangible expression of love.
Imagine if everyone who is listening to this sermon actually did that for one person each day during the Twelve Days of Christmas. It could touch hundreds of thousands of lives in Richmond and beyond—it could bring heaven to earth. And doesn’t it almost make sense that it would come that way, one small act of love at a time, the way snowflakes fall on a city and transform it overnight from something tired, and gray, and dreary into something beautiful and new?
—Jim Somerville © 2024
