"Do not be afraid!" Luke 1

Here is this morning's sermon, from the 2nd Sunday of advent, my last of three sermons at Nirayama with the Nelsons. It's been a wonderful time to explore so much of both Japan and my faith. Thanks for having me, maybe I'll be back!

Luke 1: 26-38 Advent: the annunciation. “Do not be afraid.”

The Birth of Jesus Foretold

²⁶ In the sixth month of Elizabeth’s pregnancy, God sent the angel Gabriel to Nazareth, a town in Galilee, ²⁷ to a virgin pledged to be married to a man named Joseph, a descendant of David. The virgin’s name was Mary. ²⁸ The angel went to her and said, “Greetings, you who are highly favored! The Lord is with you.”

²⁹ Mary was greatly troubled at his words and wondered what kind of greeting this might be.³⁰ But the angel said to her, “Do not be afraid, Mary; you have found favor with God. ³¹ You will conceive and give birth to a son, and you are to call him Jesus. ³² He will be great and will be called the Son of the Most High. The Lord God will give him the throne of his father David, ³³ and he will reign over Jacob’s descendants forever; his kingdom will never end.”

³⁴ “How will this be,” Mary asked the angel, “since I am a virgin?”

³⁵ The angel answered, “The Holy Spirit will come on you, and the power of the Most High will overshadow you. So the holy one to be born will be called the Son of God. ³⁶ Even Elizabeth your relative is going to have a child in her old age, and she who was said to be unable to conceive is in her sixth month. ³⁷ For no word from God will ever fail.”

³⁸ “I am the Lord’s servant,” Mary answered. “May your word to me be fulfilled.” Then the angel left her.

Last week we looked at God’s invitation to the world, hundreds of years before the birth of Christ, in Isaiah. This week, that invitation is on the brink of coming true! Miracles are already afoot. Strange things are happening as God begins to break into his world. He knows what’s coming, he knows what’s needed, so he in sending John the Baptist on ahead of Jesus in every sense. At the news of Jesus’ coming, John begins to leap in Elizabeth’s womb! How wonderful it would be to be so in tune with God that we sensed and rejoiced in His presence from before we are even born!

Here we see God’s personal invitation to Mary to play a pivotal role in His redemption of mankind. The creator of the universe, maker of planets and galaxies, is going to do some very special creating right inside her! How awesome is that; an angel, a being we might even struggle to believe in, appeared to her. It must have blown her mind! In fact, we know it did. We read here that Mary was greatly troubled. For me, this dispels the myth we often have about angels, that they are just like you and me, but nicer, wearing a sheet and with wings. The few descriptions we have about angles in the bible are often pretty bizarre and frightening. They seem to have extra arms and legs, many wings, several sets of eyes or be made of metal or jewels or burning fiery wheel.

The first words the angel says to her are “The Lord is with you,” and indeed he was, more than with anyone else ever! He moved within her actual body to produce His son!

You can only imagine Mary’s reaction. There she was, getting on with her day, doing the laundry, tending the garden, daydreaming about the gorgeous carpenter she’s going to marry, when all of a sudden this thing appears and tells her God is with her. Well, I don’t know about you, but I’d be scared!

So what does the angel say to her?

That’s right. He says, “Do not be afraid.”

I think the real reason she doesn’t need to be afraid is the angel is about to tell her the name of the child. Knowing that in advance would surely save a lot of arguing!

That’s such a common thing for angels to say to people when they meet, or for God himself to say. What a gracious Lord; He is the master of the universe, but he takes time to reassure us. He longs for us to be in relationship with Him, not cowering and afraid.

Now, as far as I can tell from my research, there are 119 times in the bible when people are told “Do not be afraid,” or words to that effect, by God or one of his angels. Can you name any?

Some examples I could remember off the top of my head are:

·      Hagar in Genesis, just after Sarah kicks her out of camp with her son

·      Abraham and Isaac are both reassured by God

·      The shepherds, by the angel at their part in the Christmas story

·      Zechariah, when an angel comes to tell him that Elizabeth will bear him a son

·      Jesus’ disciples heard it a bunch of times; they were always getting scared!

·      Paul heard it at least 3 times in the book of Act, encouraging him to keep on speaking out

It can definitely be scary to meet God, to accept Him as Lord, to give up control. If were to take the disciples, the first few Christians, as an example of how life as a Christian will turn out, we would not necessarily be encouraged. By and large, men and women of God in the bible had difficult lives and often suffered violent untimely deaths. Life as a Christian is certainly better than the alternative, but nowhere in the Bible will you get the sense that it’s any easier.

Still, hopefully none of us are facing a stoning or crucifixion ant time soon. None-the-less, life can be scary. What makes us afraid?

People can ridicule us for our faith. It can sometimes be hard even to tell others that we are Christians, but we must, it’s one of the rules. Paul tells us in Romans 10⁹ That if you confess with your mouth, "Jesus is Lord," and believe in your heart that God raised him from the dead, you will be saved. We just have to do it. How will people be saved if they don’t know about Jesus? Talking about your faith can be hard, but we just don’t have an option. We must pray for wisdom about when, how and with whom to share it, but we must also pray for boldness to be able to share it when the spirit prompts us.  One thing my bible study group in Switzerland has taken to lately is praying to have to chance to pray with or for someone. It’s surprising how often God puts such a wonderful opportunity in your path, and people who don’t want to hear about God can be suddenly open to being prayed for. I think that speaks to the God shaped hole we each have inside us.

There can, of course, be trials and difficulties in life that don’t come from our faith, in fact, probably the majority. Easily one of the hardest questions the church has to address is “Why is there suffering in the world?” There are thousands of books written on that topic alone. I have often been involved in alpha courses, and time and again I hear this is the major question non Christians have, and all too often the problem that has driven Christians away from their faith. Now, it’s a complicated topic, and we absolutely don’t have time to unpack it today, but here what I hold on to. God never promises us that life will be trouble free with Him. When Jesus tells us to “Pick up our cross and follow him” (Luke 9²³) we see that the opposite is more likely to be true. What he does promise, what he demonstrated that first Christmas when he came down from heaven to get right in amongst us, was that he would be in it with us. There is no pain we can go through that he can’t empathise with, because he’s felt the worst of it. From His birth in a lowly stable, to being abandoned by his friends and suffering an agonising lonely death on a cross, there is no pain we can feel that out humble servant-God hasn’t felt too. His Holy Spirit is the great comforter, the great source of strength. When we face trials in life, whatever they are; at work, at home, His spirit can lift us up and help us to do what needs to be done.

Christians all over the world and throughout time testify to the power of God’s support, to the strength, peace and joy that the Holy Spirit can bring in the harshest adversity. Paul tells us in Phillipians 4^4-7 “Rejoice in the Lord, do not be anxious. The peace of God will guard your hearts and minds.” It’s a promise! When you give yourself to Jesus, when you pick up your cross and follow Him, He will live in you and bring peace.

Lets look at a few examples:

St Paul comes to mind as the obvious example. In Phillipians 1²¹ we read “To live is Christ, to die is gain.” Here is man so full of the Holy Spirit he has lost his fear of death! Paul’s concern was to keep working for God right up to the end. Even when he knew his execution was approaching, he wrote his 2nd letter to Timothy, showing us  that his first concern was still to be passing on his wisdom and advice to his pupil. This has incredible desire to spend his whole life for God has really touched me lately, I only hope I can approach that level of devotion and faith. I know that Paul was so free of fear because he was so close to God. How wonderful that would be.

Perhaps you’ve heard of Shahbaz Bhatti , the Pakistani minister for minority affairs.

In February 2011, in an interview with the Christian Post, Mr Bhatti said he had received threats.

"I received a call from the Taliban commander and he said, 'If you will bring any changes in the blasphemy law and speak on this issue, then you will be killed'," Mr Bhatti told the newspaper. He believed passionately in standing up for the rights of Christians in a strongly Islamic country, even in the face of death threats.  In a video recorded before his death, he said "I believe in Jesus Christ who has given his own life for us, and I am ready to die for a cause. I'm living for my community ... and I will die to defend their rights."

He was shot by a gunman, along with his bodyguards on the 2^nd March last year. He left behind that moving video and an incredible legacy of a fearless faith in God and preparedness to continue living for Christ, no matter what.

Then there’s Rosa Parks. Many people know the story of the seamstress who helped ignite the civil-rights movement in America in the 1950s. The publicity following her arrest was in many senses the spark that lit the flame of freedom for black Americans. Many people don't know that Rosa Parks was a devout Christian, and that it was her faith that gave her the strength to do what she did that day in 1955.

Parks says she never planned to be arrested for breaking a racist law. On December 1, 1955, Parks was sitting on a bus in the front row of the section reserved for blacks. But when a white man got on, there were no more seats in the white section, so the bus driver told Parks to move back.

Parks was convinced that to do so would be wrong-and she refused to get up. "Since I have always been a strong believer in God," she says, "I knew that He was with me, and only He could get me through that next step."

Rosa Parks says her belief in God developed early in life. "Every day before supper and before we went to services on Sundays, my grandmother would read the Bible to me, and my grandfather would pray. We even had devotions before going to pick cotton in the fields. Prayer and the Bible," she recalls, "became a part of my everyday thoughts and beliefs. I learned to put my trust in God and to seek Him as my strength."

She was an ordinary lady, a regular Christian. Not an apostle, a missionary, a pastor, a government minister. She was just like you or me, and she was confronted with a situation where she knew she had to do the right thing, despite her fears. You read just now it in her own words: “I knew that He was with me, and only He could get me through that next step." Her bravery and faith that day changed the world! Never discount the power that stepping out in faith against your fear can have!

Finally, I suppose we could look at someone closer to home: me, coming here. To me, this trip seemed like an adventure, an exciting journey that God had called me on with Him. Some of my friends and family expressed amazement that I could go off, so seemingly fearlessly. I suppose it could be frightening, traveling halfway round the world to somewhere you can’t even read the words. I can only think that, knowing I was doing it with and for Him, that I just wasn’t afraid. I often find, when I do things for God that ordinarily might frighten me, they don’t!

In the last few days, there was some fear and trepidation for me in going up North, away from the safety of the Nelson family, to Iwate province. It's a very poor and rural area of Japan, famously devastated by the Tsunami in 2011. The real test came when we were visiting Kamaishi, a town that had lost many of it’s buildings and some of its residents in the Tsunami. We were in a church that was still under repair when the earthquake and tsunami warnings went off on everyone’s phone and in sirens all over the town. Heading off on an official tsunami evacuation past missing and damaged buildings was interesting, to say the least. The potential impact was clearly visible all around us. You could see the impact a similar event had had. Oddly, sat in the evacuation area in the hospital, surrounded by Christians, no-one was afraid  There was a real sense of joy and peace.  I wasn’t happy, I really didn’t want to die and I honestly thought there was only a slight chance but none-the-less a real one, but somehow, I wasn’t worried. We all had peace. I believe that it was the presence of God’s Holy Spirit in us that gave us that joy. I discovered on Friday that perhaps I am closer to that perspective of St Paul, than I had thought.

I hope these illustrations have served to show that, when God is with you, you do not need to be afraid. The Bible tells us that “we are more than conquerors” (Romans 8³⁷) and “if our God is with is, who can stand against us” (Romans 8³¹).

Pray for his Holy Spirit to enter you and lift you up, to comfort you and strengthen you. Tell God about your fears, pray them through with a friend. 

Finally, remember, as we celebrate advent, as we prepare for Christmas, that it isn’t just about a baby in a manger, but the creator of the universe coming down here, to the earth where you and I are, to share our lives, our joys and our pains, because He loves us.