Open Your Heart’s Door…

Is There Anybody There?

A Sermon “Starter” for the 1^st Sunday in Advent, Year B
December 1, 2002

 Preaching Text: Luke 1:26-38 (Non Lectionary)

Lectionary Texts: Psalm 80, Isaiah 64:1-9

1 Corinthians 1:3-9, Mark 13:24-37

Rev. Justin K. Fisher

fishhook@iquest.net

 

Preacher's Note: During Advent this year, our preaching themes will be developed from "A Season of Wonder: Opening the Door to Christmas and Beyond", a seasonal Advent celebration from Mainstay Church Resources, Wheaton, IL. (www.helpingpastors.com)  I have found their resources to be excellent guides for holiday and holy day preaching.

 

What follows are my sermon reflections for Advent 1.  Material for this sermon came, in large part, from “Recognizing The Scrawl On The Christmas Card”, the main sermon from the “A Season of Wonder” materials for Advent 1.  –Jake Fisher

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At Advent we should try the key to our heart’s door.  It may have gathered rust.  If so, this is the time to oil it, in order that the heart’s door may open more easily when the Lord Jesus wants to enter at Christmas time.”  (-a New Guinea native Christian)

 

Thanksgiving is over!  For all practical purposes, only the “carcass” of the holiday remains!  We feasted well, gave thanks to God, fellowshipped with family and friends, watched more football games on TV than we care to admit, joined the masses at the mall, and even managed to string some lights on the house and tree.  A few of us even hit the “Alka Seltzer” tablets and the Mylanta bottle.  And now it’s on to Christmas…!  Advent is here!

 

For all our rushing about this time of year, Advent is really a season that calls us to wait.  And we don’t wait well.  During these four weeks before Christmas, Advent invites us to wait patiently, think soberly, pray diligently for the coming of the Christ Child.  It is a time of preparation, not just the preparing for the material: the wrapping and decorating of packages and trees, but also preparing for the spiritual: the interior re-arrangement of our hearts, making room for the King of Kings to be welcomed with joy.

 

We begin by opening the door of our hearts to God’s plans.  I don’t know about you, but when we had three teenagers in the parsonage, Teresa and I observed that the two of us opened the door for them far more often than they opened the door for us.  Now I’m not talking manners here, although I wouldn’t complain if they did open the car door for their aging parents now and again.  I’m talking about opening the back door to the parsonage, the one we came into and out of all the time.  And I’m not talking about their opening it for us.  I’m talking about our opening it for them; or, more precisely, for all of their friends.  Confused?

 

So were we.  We couldn’t understand why three healthy, talented, and very able teenagers couldn’t or wouldn’t open the door when the doorbell rang.  Sure, we knew they were busy talking on the ‘phone or watching a sitcom on TV that they’d already seen a hundred times before.  We knew they had the radio in their rooms turned up on “high”, and that one of them was using the curling iron, and another was counting his money.  We knew that it was unlikely that any two of them were doing their homework.  We know all this, but we also knew something else.

 

Whoever was at the door had come calling on one of them, not us.  We were just the messengers…  Just once I’d like to hear the doorbell, fling open the door and see the representative for Publishers Clearing House standing there with a check in his hand for me.  That would change my life and, very probably, the three of “them” would be sorry they didn’t get there first.  If I have to answer the door, let it be “Somebody” for me!

 

Long ago, “Somebody” did knock on the door of Mary’s home, and it wasn’t the rep from Publishers Clearing House.  It was the angel Gabriel and his knock sent shock waves through Mary’s teenage heart (not to mention all of history).  The messenger from heaven didn’t have a million-dollar check in hand.  But he did hand her a script – a script for a play in which she unknowingly had been cast in a leading role.  Caught totally unaware by what Gabriel declared as fact, Mary opened the door of her heart to hear his message.  Listen to these verses:

 

In the sixth month, God sent the angel Gabriel to Nazareth, a town in Galilee; to visit a virgin who was engaged to a man named Joseph.  The virgin’s name was Mary.  The angel went to her and –(knocking on her door)- said, “Greetings, you who are highly favored!  The Lord is with you.”

 

Mary was greatly troubled at his words and wondered what kind of greeting this might be.  But the angel said to her, “Do not be afraid, Mary, you have found favor with God.  You will be with child and give birth to a son, and you are to give him the name Jesus.  He will be great and will be called the Son of the Most High…”

 

“I am the Lord’s servant,” Mary answered.  “May it be to me as you have said.”  Then the angel left her.  (Luke 1:26-38)

 

We know this story so well that we tend to gloss over what a disruptive event this was for young Mary.  Her world was no longer the predictable one it had been the day before.  It wasn’t the dawn of a new millennium, but the unknown factors loomed just as large as the ones we face.

 

True, the world in which she lived was a difficult one.  Israel was an oppressed nation.  Roman domination was the cause of constant stress and fear.  All the same, it was a rather secure world, except for the changing nameplates on the desk of the emperor in Rome.  And people’s private worlds were largely their private concern.  But this was not to be for Mary.  God’s plans for her had just preempted whatever control she had grown accustomed to.  She could have panicked.  Right?  She could have thought the worst and painted a doomsday scenario.  I think I would have.  But she didn’t.  She willingly opened the door to God’s plans and in the process stepped into a season of wonder.

 

Here’s the bottom line of what I want to say this morning on this first Advent Sunday.  Are you listening?  Here goes: Christmas is a “season of wonder”, but only for those of us who have waited patiently, thought soberly, considered wisely, prayed fervently for the coming of the Christ Child.  It can be a season of wonder if we are willing to open our heart’s door to God’s plans.  For when God deposits special plans at our doorstep, we’d best open the door and participate in his purposes instead of panicking at the possibilities.  That’s what Mary did.

 

And what can we expect?  During this season of wonder, when we open the door of our heart to God’s plans, we may be surprised to realize that his plans begin with a reminder of his love.  That was the first part of the angel Gabriel’s message to Mary.  “God highly favors you, Mary!  He is with you!  He is on your side!  He loves you!”  Or as the poet Eugene Peterson puts it, “You’re beautiful inside and out.”

 

And that is a message some of us dearly need to hear from God today, that we, like Mary, “are beautiful inside and out.”  You know, while the Thanksgiving holiday is pictured in the media as a “Kodak” moment of family unity, in reality it’s one of the toughest on families.  Maybe it’s because we have “hyped” it too much, or maybe it’s because we have too much time on our hands, or maybe it’s because a lot of pent up anger comes spilling out across the dinner table, or maybe … I don’t know all the “maybes”.  I do know that after Thanksgiving, some of us are deeply depressed.  Our hearts are closed.  Some of us, pastor included at times, need to be reminded that we are “beautiful inside and out”.  And that’s what Gabriel tells Mary.  And that’s what God tells us.

 

Truth be told, some of us sitting here are watching Thanksgiving leave at last but dreading Christmas’ coming already.  Perhaps it’s because Christmas seems to celebrate the idyllic childhood and family life we never had.  Painful memories tend to sneak out the “uncaulked” corners of our minds more now than at any other time of the year.  Some of us are entering December feeling alone, defeated, afraid and unloved.  Now is the time to open our heart’s door just a crack and listed for God to say, “Greetings, dear child.  I highly prize you.  I am with you.” 

 

As we open the door of our heart to God’s plans this Advent, we may expect to see something else.  We may be reminded again that His agenda always points to others.   By now, you may have received your first Christmas cards.  Members of our Charity Circle hope you will bring your unstamped cards to their “post office” for delivery to parish members during December.  However and whenever you get Christmas cards, you will note that they are always signed (well, almost always…) Each year we get one or two left unsigned and one year we got a card signed “Love, Hazel”.  We appreciated her note and greeting, but, for the love of us, couldn’t recall ever having met a “Hazel” in our parsonage days (before moving to Trinity, of course, and meeting “Hazel Rasor”).  Never mind.  We don’t send Christmas greetings to ourselves, only to “others”.  When Luke wrote down the story of how Jesus’ birth came to be, he included some “other” words of Gabriel to Mary:

 

“You will become pregnant and give birth to a son, and you will name him Jesus.  He will be great and will be called the Son of the Most High God.  The Lord God will make him a king, as his ancestor David was, and he will be the king of the descendants of Jacob forever; his kingdom will never end!” (Luke 1:30-33)

 

Gabriel includes the “others” in his private message to Mary.  She doesn’t get to keep Jesus all to herself.  He is to be a King the world has never seen before and will never see again.  The “others” include the rich and poor, the powerful and powerless, the mighty and the lowly, the colorful and the colorless.  It is not Good News until it is shared with “others”.  It is said that William Booth, the founder of the Salvation Army, wanted to send a Christmas telegram to all of his “soldiers” one Christmas.  Pressed for money, each telegram consisted of only one word.  Can you guess it?  It read simply, “others”.

 

When we open our hearts door to God’s plans just a crack this Advent Sunday, we will discover “others” standing there, waiting, perhaps to get into our lives, or out of some mess in theirs, or just wanting not to be alone.  Who are the others in your life?  Yes, like Teresa and me, you can count your kids as part of the “others”, but there are others… How about the ones you don’t especially like?  And the ones that you’d rather not have to face, and the faces of those you thought you’d forgotten, or at least forgiven?  What about them?  When Mary said “yes” to Gabriel, she said “yes” to God’s plans.  What kind of plans could God possibly have for the “others” we don’t want to consider this Christmas?  If you join me in opening our hearts just a little, we may be introduced to some life-changing meetings this holy season.

 

Ever seen a Where’s Waldo book?  This year marks the fifteenth anniversary of the very first Where’s Waldo book rolling off the press.  Waldo books are not books you read.  There are no words in Waldo books.  They are to be searched.  Waldo books are picture books.  If you know what I’m talking about, you know that each page has a complicated, busy scene of people and buildings and parks and who-knows-what-else that all blend together because of the similar color scheme.  But somewhere on every page is a little man with black glasses and a red-and-white striped stocking cap.  His name is Waldo.  Your job, should you choose to accept it, is to find Waldo on every page.

 

I rarely, if ever, find Waldo, but my children never failed to find him.  The reason?  They were determined to find him and were willing to search for him and not give up.  I did not have the “heart”, nor energy, nor time to spend looking.

 

Back to Advent we go, this time of waiting and watching.  You and I both know that this time of the year tends to resemble the pages of a Where’s Waldo book.  It’s busy and blurred and everything runs together.  When we try to find God at Christmastime, it’s like trying to find Waldo.  “There’s no way,” we say, but we know that isn’t really true.  There is a way.  This season of wonder unfolding before us requires of us hearts that are willing to crack just a little from the “coldness” we are holding within.  This season of wonder requires that we exercise a little more courage like Mary who put her life in God’s hands.  This season of wonder requires that we listen to the angels’ messages around us that we are loved “inside and out”.  This season of wonder invites us to reach out to the “others” around us.  And in so doing, I’m quite convinced that the Christ Child will appear before us, not by magic, but by grace and blessing.

 

When the doorbell of your heart rings, trust me, there’s “Somebody” there for you.  Open up!