Mary’s Voice

Well my name is René, I'm another one of the pastors here at Twin Lakes Church. Sit down, stop being friendly. I love this church so much. We have a real treat for you today. We got a special guest speaker, but before that I just want to tell you we've been in this series called the Seven Verses Jesus Loved. As you heard Elizabeth talk about a little bit earlier, and next week we're going to be talking about "Love Your Neighbor." A verse Jesus loved from Leviticus chapter 19. Yes, Jesus loved a verse from Leviticus, and it's the most famous verse he quoted probably. We'll be talking more about that next weekend, but this weekend we have a special guest speaker.

We had a really cool couple of things happen in the last couple of days. On Thursday night at the Hotel Paradox in Santa Cruz, a lot of the community leaders gathered around. I mean I'm talking about mayors and city council members and congressmen's reps and all this kind of thing, and they gave an award to you, to Twin Lakes Church, and it was an award for being the organization over the last 10 years that's given more to combat hunger in our community than any other organization in our county during that time, including last year's holiday food and fund raise. So let's just give God the glory for that. God is so good, and I love that because talk about "Love Your Neighbor." I mean Jesus told us that by this all men will know that my father has sent me by your love for one another, and when you love like that it's a witness to the saving power of God through Jesus Christ. That's what we pray that our church is known for.

Another cool thing that just happened yesterday was our TLC Bible conference. We had professors from places trained in places like Columbia and Cambridge and Oxford and Princeton all here presenting. It was sort of our super smart people believe in Jesus today, and so super fun, and I just want to thank our entire volunteer team and our coordinator, my wife Lori Schlepfer, for doing a great job with this. Let's give it up. It was beautiful. And we're blessed today because we have a special guest speaker who was one of our presenters at the Bible conference, Dr. Amy Orr Ewing, the author of many wonderful best-selling books, a professor, a speaker all over the world, trained at Oxford with an amazing PhD there, also has spoken to staffers in the West Wing of the White House, also congressional reps and staffers up on Capitol Hill, also the UK Parliament has spoken in 40 countries around the world, and at long last in fulfillment of a career dream she can add to that list Aptos California.

So we're excited about that, and I asked Amy to come and speak about a book that she wrote called Mary's Voice. This is about Mary the Mother of Jesus because so often you know Mary's relegated to Christmas. It's like that's the law in the United States. You can only talk about Mary at Christmas, but Mary has a lot to say about to us for the rest of the year, and especially you might have been hearing that it's Women's Empowerment Month. Women's Empowerment didn't start with universities. Women's Empowerment started with God, and it was spoken through Mary, so let's give a big hand to Dr. Amy Orr Ewing.

Thank you so much. Thank you so much for your extraordinary welcome, both to René and Laurie and the whole church. You know, it strikes me that as a Christian, if you go anywhere in the world and you show up on a Sunday morning and worship with God's people, you're part of the family, and you've made me feel like that, so thank you so much. And it has also been lovely to see that yellow ball in the sky, which we hardly ever see where I live.

So this morning we're going to be thinking about and looking at the life of Mary and asking the question, what does it mean, what does it look like to be a person who is anointed by God? And my prayer is that the Lord will speak to us, both as individuals but as His people gathered here today. But before we kind of get into the text, we're going to be looking at Luke's gospel in chapter one in particular. Before we get into the text, I'd love to share with you a little bit about how the living God broke into the story of my family's life.

Because we meet Mary in Luke chapter one just as a normal teenage girl having this extraordinary heavenly encounter with the angel Gabriel. And in my family, I wasn't born into a Christian family. My grandparents were atheists living in Germany during the Second World War. My dad was born during an air raid, my grandmother is a heroic woman, imagine that, giving birth as the bombs are falling. And then after the war where they lived was occupied by the Soviets. My grandfather was a scientist and they were moving the elite scientists to Siberia. My grandfather thought I don't think I want to live in Siberia, it doesn't sound good, and made arrangements for the family to be able to get to the UK.

So one day in 1948, my grandparents, my father and my aunt, landed at RAF Northolt, which is about 20 minutes from where I now live. And they landed with only the clothes they were standing up in having escaped from where they lived. They rebuilt their lives, but my grandfather was such a committed atheist that he forbade the mention of the word God in the household and a Bible wasn't allowed to cross the threshold of the home. That's the context my dad grew up in. My mum had a more kind of traditional British upbringing, she went to boarding school where they had to go to extremely boring church, twice a week at least, and she described it as a vaccination against the Christian faith. You know, you give someone a bit of the poison and they're sort of immune for life.

So my parents, they met in Vancouver, my dad became an academic, he taught at Oregon State University, he was at the LSE in London, and then he got the dream job in Sydney, Australia, at the University of New South Wales. So they moved to Australia and rather like what you have here, beautiful beach, incredible weather, just gorgeous lifestyle. My dad had a job, he loved a wonderful house, fantastic wife, two quite outstanding children were born, they loved their life, right? So my dad is in his mid-30s and everything is going so well but there's one question and when this question occurs to him, he feels unsettled by the question and the question is this, when I get to 65 and I retire and I look back on my life, will this be enough? That question worried him.

Now my father had one Christian friend who was a colleague and this man invited my dad to come at lunchtime at the University to hear someone speaking about the person of Jesus and specifically about the resurrection of Christ. My dad went along to this quite pretty skeptical and the overwhelming feeling he had when he was there is the guy is making a category mistake. Now a category mistake is when you put two things together that don't belong together. He said the guy was talking about Jesus, God and all of that and he thought that's in a category called religion and that category belongs with superstition, family tradition, wish fulfillment, you kind of desire a father figure in the sky and you project God out of your imagination.

He thought that that's one category and then there's the other category called truth reality evidence and Jesus belongs in the God religion, truth superstition category, not the truth reality or evidence category surely. So he was slightly kind of disturbed, I guess, unsettled by hearing that message. Then a few weeks later he was at home and he was marking some papers in his study and my sister and I were asleep, my mum was asleep and he had an extraordinary experience, a vision where his whole life flashed before him and he would later describe it as an experience of conviction of sin, that would be the theological category but as he saw his life flash before him he saw the reaction on the face of Jesus to how he had sought, spoken, decided and lived and he understood in that moment that he was being offered forgiveness.

So towards the end of the vision he saw Christ on the cross and he found himself compelled to respond so he knelt just there in his study at home. No violin music, no smoke machine, no atmospherics, just Christ crucified and he looked at Jesus on the cross and he said give me the words I don't know how to pray and these are the words that came Lord I believe help my unbelief and he got up off the floor a Christian. He was quite surprised a few weeks later after he bought a Bible in a shop for himself to read those words in Mark's Gospels said by someone else to Jesus. He went upstairs and told my mum Jane the most fantastic things happened I've become a Christian and my mum was less than pleased. That is another story.

That's how God came onto the horizon of my family's life. A living God not a God we were predisposed to believe in, not an inherited set of religious indoctrination, a living God who intervenes in the real world and meets real people. Now today in the scriptures we're looking at Luke's Gospel in chapter 1 and we're meeting somebody who's a young woman, an ordinary woman, a teenage girl called Mary but if I say to you Mary the mother of Jesus I wonder what the visual image is that pops into your mind. For many of us in the West culturally we've been conditioned visually when we hear about Mary to think about kind of pre-renaissance art, pictures of Mary where you know she's a woman in a blue dress and she perhaps has a sort of otherworldly faint smile looking into the middle distance. She might be hovering off the ground. She's probably got a fat cherubic baby on her hip but she's an otherworldly a remote figure for us.

She's not in our gritty world she's stuck perpetually in a short period of time in a woman's life, the time after giving birth and having a baby, a kind of static figure. Now I don't know about you guys here in California but in the UK every school at Christmas does a kind of reenactment of the Nativity and this includes the state schools, the secular schools and so every child grows up playing a different role in the Nativity. Now I have three sons so I was really excited that they're at college and high school now but I was really excited when they were younger to discover that one of them, my youngest son, got the prized role of Joseph one year. I couldn't have been more excited. The next year I waited for the email from the school to tell me what role he was going to have and I was slightly disconcerted when I received the email saying this year he'd been downgraded to the role of a pig.

My husband had to restrain me from emailing the school in horror and outrage trying to point out that it's highly unlikely there would have in fact been a pig at a Jewish birth of a child but I managed to not be that parent. But years earlier when I had played Mary once in my school career for the entire long production, maybe two hour long production, I hadn't uttered a word. That's how we imagine Mary, a mute figure, a figure in history, a figure in art, not someone who relates in any way to us. But in the Gospel of Luke we encounter Mary being described as a woman who exercises choice, who questions things, who reflects, who responds, who speaks up and who demonstrates great faith. Mary is someone who is anointed by God to do something extraordinary.

Now I remember exactly where I was when I was first actually really struck by Mary's voice, her words. Slight trigger warning here, I'm going to mention abuse but I'm not going to go into any detail about it. So I had been supporting somebody who was giving evidence in the criminal trial of her childhood sexual abuser and this had been a powerful man and years later the Crown Prosecution Service in Britain had taken the case and he was being tried for his crimes. I was in the public gallery of the court and it was utterly horrifying experience, of course far more for those involved. About halfway through the week I just really needed to be alone and to pray and so this being at one of Britain's big cities where we have these old churches called cathedrals that are just open, I went to the cathedral and just sat there trying to pray for this situation.

And as happens in these cathedrals every evening there's a service called Evensong and I wasn't there for the service but it was fine it was going on and I'd been given a sheet I was just praying and then the choir got up to sing a beautiful piece of choral music and as they sang I just looked down at the sheet as they sang some words from Mary's Magnificat that we're going to read out in a moment and they sang this line in the Old English "he hath brought down the rulers from their thrones and he will exalt them of low degree." Mary's words spoken in prophetic hope about who Jesus is, what he's come into this world to do spoke directly to me in that moment in that situation.

Let's read together from Luke's gospel chapter 1 verse 46 "and Mary said my soul glorifies or magnifies 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 and he's 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 remembered his servant Israel remembering to be merciful to Abraham and his descendants forever just as he promised our ancestors."

Now a brief word on the use of tense here you'll notice that Mary is speaking after the angel Gabriel has told her she's gonna have Jesus but she's using the past tense. Now in biblical prophecy sometimes this happens a prophetic word is given by God to a prophet who proclaims that word and the past tense is used and that speaks into the nature of prophetic hope so powerful is the Word of God so so confident are we that the Word of God will come to pass that the past tense is being used.

So what does Mary's anointing look like we're gonna consider together firstly that Mary is the fulfiller of biblical prophecy there's a profound connection with scripture here you see Mary was a Jewish woman she would have been steeped in the scriptures from childhood and she may have known the words of the prophet Isaiah in chapter 7 and verse 14 where Isaiah writes this he says "therefore the Lord himself will give you a sign the virgin will conceive and give birth to a son and will call him Emmanuel." In other words it had been prophesied in long ago in the history of Mary's people that one day a person would be born in history who would be God with us that's what Emmanuel means someone is going to be born who will be God in flesh God in history Emmanuel but out of all of the hundreds of millions of births that are gonna happen there's only gonna be one that will be Emmanuel God with us and so there'll be a sign as to which is the one Emmanuel God with us and the sign is that this will be born of a virgin.

She may have known that she almost certainly would have known the word spoken in Genesis chapter 3 verse 15 to her foremother Eve who had been promised in the scriptures that her seed the seed of the woman would have absolute authority and power to bruise crush defeat destroy the serpent the power of evil in this world I will put enmity between you and the woman your seed and her seed he shall bruise your head you shall bruise his heel in other words God speaks right at the beginning of time right during the fall just as the fall of man is happening promising that redemption and deliverance are gonna come into the world through the seed of the woman.

Now this is striking because in ancient cultures the seeds the generational family line was passed through the male line so this is a striking idea a woman's seed but it speaks profoundly of who our God is and who he calls and that he has arranged things so that a woman is going to play a unique role in the salvation of the world evil is going to be crushed and utterly defeated through a woman's seed a woman's body is going to play a part in showing who Jesus is that he really is Emmanuel God with us and so when we come to the New Testament and we read this scripture from Luke's gospel this woman this teenage woman is chosen by God to fulfill this prophecy and so her voice her perspective her eyewitness account of what occurs is recorded for us and this makes the New Testament unlike any document of the era you see the categories of the world are being turned upside down it is no mistake that a woman gets to be a part of all of this.

So if you'll hear this morning thinking little old me who am I I have no importance no significance to the creator of the universe my life doesn't really matter as we read the scriptures this morning here that that is not God's verdict on you God could use and choose an ordinary girl like Mary. Secondly we see that Mary understood reality and was prepared to pay a cost now my work in public Christianity means that I'm most often with people and audiences who don't have faith and whose perception of people who do have faith is that people who have faith kind of exists in a weird bubble of unreality they're floating up in the heavenlies there and so heavenly minded they're no earthly good and we probably all know some Christians like that who just constantly have extraordinary visions and float around and having wonderful times with Jesus who make us all feel a little bit inadequate.

But Mary wasn't a person like that Mary was a person who lived in reality as you and I know it to be true consider for a moment what life was like for a young woman in an insignificant district of an occupied country living under the control of the most powerful Empire the world has ever known think about the experience of women living under occupation of powerful armies. I could tell you of my grandmother who knew what that was like I remember as a sixteen-year-old a conversation with her just to throw away line as often happens with older people they share something really profound you know just in quite an offhand way unexpectedly and I had just put some mascara on I didn't wear makeup very often and my grandmother complimented me she loved aesthetics but in a throwaway line she said it reminds me that when we lived back there under the Soviets when they came and occupied she said all the women in our town none of us wore makeup in fact quite the opposite they were in their 20s and 30s she said every one of us used to put flour on our faces and in our hair in the hope that we would not be noticed and not be raped.

Contemplate the experience of a woman in a time when a woman's voice meant very little indeed in a Greek a Roman court a woman's testimony did not have equal validity with a man's testimony in the rabbinic literature of the first century we see that that women were denigrated and spoken of with disdain that was Mary's context so in Luke's gospel chapter 1 verse 28 to 32 when Mary receives this extraordinary visit from an angelic visitor the text is clear she's a young person she's a virgin she's betrothed to Joseph but she's never slept with a man and the angel Gabriel comes to her and he says to her Mary you are highly favored think of her context I wonder if she felt highly favored what a contrast with her situation on a natural level Mary is poor young insignificant female she is the citizen of an occupied people if you think about the power discourses of our day if you think about intersectionality and identity politics by every measure Mary would come out as someone oppressed yet God's verdict calls her favored.

I wonder people of God have we bought in to the verdict of our culture that to be favored we must somehow have met the metric of success of our day we must somehow to experience the favor and blessing of God we must measure it by the American dream or its British equivalent I want to ask you today how do you understand the blessing and favor of God do you live under the verdict of what this world says about you or do you live in the truth of the scriptures that the favor and love and blessing of God are on God's people in this world including when we suffer including when life is hard Mary you are highly favored says the angel the opposite of what the world would say then the angel says in even better news you're now also going to be pregnant she's now going to be unmarried and pregnant she will miraculously have a child who will be the son of the Most High who will reign on David's throne inheriting the Davidic promises of the Old Testament whose kingdom will never end who will be an eternal and glorious Messiah.

The heart of the incarnation is captured in these words to a teenage girl that we can read today two thousand years later because she told them to Luke and he wrote them down the wonder of the incarnation that the eternal God will be born in history is encapsulated here in the scriptures but Luke reflects and records that Mary was quite worried when she heard this she was troubled and afraid and then she asked the question she says how can this be since I'm a virgin in other words she understood the basics of human reproduction she asked and articulated a question if you have questions and concerns it is not a lack of faith to express them to the living God the Christian faith is a safe place for our questions but Mary's question reveals that she understands the cost of what is being asked of her and her reply entails both her consent and also her outstanding faith.

Her fear is natural and it is acknowledged but she says words that echo through the pages of Scripture to us today I am the Lord's servant may your word to me be fulfilled what outstanding faith accompanied by preparedness to pay a cost thirdly Mary used her voice as a witness we see these three little words and Mary said in Luke 146 Luke has been careful to include Mary's detailed account of her experiences and observations in his gospel and he also goes on to include the perceptions and stories of other women to centering women's voices unlike any other historical documents of the era and then out of Mary and Mary said flow these beautiful words words of defiant praise and an extraordinary description of who our God is and the meaning of his incarnation in Jesus coming the words of the Magnificat form the longest speech of any woman in the New Testament and they form the basis alongside the sermon on the Mount of Christian ethical teaching.

The teenage Mary from nowhere is filled with the Holy Spirit and she begins to pour forth praise and prophecy empowered and inspired by the living God her anointing is evidenced in her witness and Mary said and I want to ask you today could the same be said of you what are you doing with your words with your mouth with your witness a few years ago I had the opportunity to speak in it in an Asian country on a Sunday morning not a Muslim country and it was a church outreach that was really focused on people working in the financial district of that city and they'd asked me to kind of preach a gospel message on the text who do people say I am who do you say I am a real kind of come to Jesus message which which I love to do so I was fired up and ready to go when the pastor came to me about one minute before the service began and said listen we might have a visiting dignitary today in church if he comes don't change your message so I said okay well who is it he said don't worry about who it is just don't change your message so I said well I am worried now so please tell me who it is so he said well he's the grand demand of this country and the leader of one of the world's largest mosques but don't worry and don't change your message so sure enough during one of the first songs in came a white man a man with white robes and his entourage and everything and sat on the front row so it was clear that he had in fact come.

So I preached my message and afterwards I kind of went up to him and made a terrible faux pas I put my hand out in greeting to him and he visibly flinched and recoiled and I said oh I'm so sorry so sorry of course yeah he said don't worry Hillary Clinton did the same thing last week so I felt terrible so trying to save the situation I said sir can I ask you why are you in church today he said a few months ago my wife was diagnosed with terminal cancer he said the Christians in the city where I live heard about our plight and they made contact with us and they asked us can we pray for her in the name of Jesus and these are people who are persecuted for their faith he said we were so desperate that we said yes and they came and prayed for her and Jesus healed her and we know it was Jesus praise God he said I didn't really know what to make of it and a few months later I was on a plane and then he said a man from this church came and sat in the seat next to me and he nodded at the man the man joined us now the backstory of this man is that he worked in a finance in the financial business world I think he worked for a big bank and traveled a lot and as part of his witness as a follower of Jesus he'd made a commitment that he was gonna share his face with people he met as he traveled for work and as he got on the plane and he saw who is he was sitting next to he said to the Holy Spirit not today Lord I've got nothing and he sat down and he felt stirred and convicted so he tried to share something of his face and then he was like that's it I've got nothing left you've had it all so next time you're traveling to a conference he said to this grandi mom I will pay to reroute your ticket through my city on a Sunday morning so you can come to church you can hear more about Jesus you can meet people who can answer more of your questions he said that's why I'm here today that would not and could not have happened without the witness of ordinary everyday Christians in his city of a man just going about his corporate job but living as a witness.

I want to ask you this morning would you like to experience the anointing of God are you willing to start using your tongue your mouth to bear witness to him to see wonders in the world praise God there's someone who does want to brilliant finally and very very briefly Mary read the power discourses of this world and she persistently and defiantly believed that Jesus was the hope of humanity we're living in days where there's a generational movement called identity politics where people are interested and obsessed with power dynamics and layers of oppression you could call it Marxism you could call it critical theory but it's kind of infected a generation who perceive ourselves or see things in categories of a victimhood Mary was completely unlike that even though she could lay claim to every level of intersectional social injustice she had them all but because she knew the Lord she was able to defiantly prophesy hope in a hopeless context she was able to defy the powers of oppression and evil he will bring down rulers from their thrones and exalt them of low degree in her magnificat she speaks of a God who is powerful a king who is powerful and good.

Perhaps any of us in this room this morning who've ever been on the end of the misuse of power who've ever experienced domestic abuse or who've been bullied at work or we've grown up in a family where there's a dominator who can never be contradicted and we've spent our life walking on eggshells around them any of us who've been on the receiving end of a misuse of power will thrill at the hope in Mary's words about who Jesus is and what he's come into this world to do and any of us who want to see his kingdom come here on earth as it is in heaven will thrill at the thought of the Lord Jesus who was born in history and did fulfill Mary's prophetic hope Mary defiantly believed that Jesus is the hope of humanity.

Why don't we stand I'd love to pray for us that's what anointing looks like seeing prophecy in God's Word fulfilled understanding reality being prepared to pay a cost using our voices as witnesses in the cultural moment God's called us to and reading the power discourses of our day not coming under them but defiantly defying them with the hope of Jesus Christ so Lord we pray for ourselves your people and with Mary we say our souls magnify and glorify your name right now and we pray for ourselves today that you would come upon us by the power of your Holy Spirit that you would empower us to be your people in this moment in your world that you would unlock some voices in this room to bear witness to you in these days that you would help us to be those who follow you and are prepared to pay a cost and that you would fill us with hope so that we might defy the powers of darkness in this world in Jesus name we pray Amen.