The Rev. Frank Logue
King of Peace Episcopal Church
Kingsland, Georgia
December 21, 2003

Ordinary+Obedience=Extraordinary
Luke 1:39-56

When I left for seminary in the fall of 1997, Victoria, Griffin and I were living in a big old house in Rome, Georgia. Not a fine old home, but a big old house. We had spent four years rebuilding the 125-year-old home and had filled it with a nice, if eclectic, collection of hand-me-own furniture from our families. One of the necessities of moving from that house to an apartment a third its size was to pare down our possessions. We sold or gave away a third of what we owned. We stored a third and took a third of our stuff with us to seminary.  

I was graduated on May 18, 2000 and we arrived here in Camden County the next day to set up house. We made a quick dash to Rome, with a side trip to my parents’ house in Toccoa, to pick up the rest of our scattered possessions. At once we began unpacking and setting up our new home in Sugarmill. It was fun to get out the third of our stuff that we had stored away for a few years. Being surrounded by our old furniture, photographs and our other possessions made me feel at home. There is something about familiar things, even in an unfamiliar setting, that makes the new place seem more comfortable. 

This feeling of being surrounded by the old in the midst of the new is exactly what Luke was striving for in writing his Gospel. Luke wrote for readers familiar with what we now call the Old Testament. They knew and appreciated the stories of Adam and Eve, Noah, Abraham, Isaac, Jacob and his sons, Moses, King David, the prophets and other great people of Israel’s past.  

Reciting passages from the Old Testament was not unlike flipping back through the pages of a family photo album. The good times and the bad all there, all somehow comforting, familiar. Luke wanted his Gospel to feel like that. Even if the story of Jesus was new, it had been a part of God’s plan from the world from creation, and Luke wanted it to feel familiar. Luke crafted the new words in a recognizable pattern, placing comfortable, familiar symbols in a new setting.  

Unlike, Mark who jumps right in with John the Baptist at the Jordan River, or Matthew starting out with Jesus genealogy and then going straight to his birth, or even John who begins with a prologue that takes a more theological look at who Jesus is, Luke was in no hurry to get his story underway. Creating a familiar setting was all important, because for Luke it was vital to understand that Jesus’ birth, life, ministry, death, and resurrection was in continuity with the stories from the Hebrew scriptures. Yes, God was doing a new thing, but God is not unpredictable and this new story is a part of the old story. 

Luke begins his Gospel in the very well-known setting of the Temple in Jerusalem. Every Jew in the world would know of the Temple, many thousands would have visited it. Even though, by the time Luke wrote his Gospel, the Romans had destroyed the Temple in the Jewish War. In fact, Luke’s Gospel was probably written within a few years after 70 A.D. when that war ended.  

So the setting of the Temple, was familiar, even nostalgic, especially for those who knew its tragic fate. The Gospel opens there with an elderly couple who have prayed for years for a child. The angel Gabriel announces to Zechariah that he and his wife Elizabeth’s prayers are answered and they are to have a son. This story line was familiar from Abraham and Sarah and their own late in life Son Isaac. It was also familiar from the Old Testament story of the Prophet Samuel’s mother Hanna, who also prayed for a child.  

Then with Elizabeth’s pregnancy underway, the Angel Gabriel appears to Mary to announce that she is favored by God and that she would bear God’s own son. Right after Mary tells the angel “Here I am, the servant of the Lord; let it be with me according to your word,” we get to our Gospel reading for this morning, during which Mary will be inspired by the Holy Spirit with a song, not unlike the one Hannah sang when she gave birth to Samuel.  

So Luke has surrounded the reader with known settings and symbols. Luke wrote of in a Greek very similar to the Septuagint, the Greek Translation of the Hebrew scriptures. It would be like writing a new story in King James English. In that a skilled writer could give a new story a familiar, if churchy, ring to it. Luke consciously wove the story of Jesus’ with threads from the Old Testament. He is in no hurry with his story. We will get the story of John the Baptist’s birth to Zechariah and Elizabeth before we finish the 80 verses of chapter one and get on to the familiar chapter two of the gospel with Luke’s description of Jesus’ birth.  

Now that we can see how the first readers might have experienced today’s Gospel reading, let’s take a closer look at Mary’s song, known today as the Magnificat, for the first word in the Latin translation of her hymn.  

Mary’s extols a reversal of fortunes. In her hymn, God is being faithful to promises to those in ages past by bringing down the powerful and lifting up the lowly. The rich are sent away empty, while the hungry are filled with good things. As Jesus would later say, “The last shall be first and the first shall be last.” “The one who would be the greatest must be the servant of all.” The Magnificat proclaims just the sort of world turned upside down that Jesus will preach throughout his ministry. 

Mary needed no further outward sign that these things would come to pass. The proof of it all was growing inside her. She knew better than anyone that the child she bore was God’s son. Mary could have no illusions about her position in life. If anyone was lowly, it was Mary—a poor girl, from a small town on the backside of nowhere. Mary had none of the outward appearance one would associate with God’s blessing. She was not rich or powerful and never would be. Mary was one of the lowly whom God was lifting up. Yet, Mary could sing of God’s promises being fulfilled in the past tense, because if God would even bother to notice her and consider her blessed among women, then the world was as good as turned upside down. 

How did all of this happen? If the world is being turned upside down even as Mary is singing to her cousin Elizabeth, then how did God pull it off? Well, that’s a familiar story too. It might be in a new setting, but there is nothing new in how God was able to transform the world. Transformation came the way it had always come. The same way it worked for Abraham, Moses, David, and all the others from that family album we call the Old Testament. God took ordinary Mary and when she added her obedience to God something extraordinary happened.  

That process had a familiar ring to it. God had already taken ordinary Abram and transformed him into Abraham, a father of many nations after he and Sarah were long past child-bearing years. God had already taken Moses, the runaway Prince of Egypt, on the lam for murder, and turned him into the great deliverer of Israel. God had already taken the last-born David, the ruddy boy left on the hillside to tend the sheep while his brothers went off to fight for Israel, and turned him into a King.  

This transformation is the most familiar of stories from the Bible. God takes a plain old ordinary person. Not a perfect person. Not a person everyone saw as the best and the brightest. Just a regular person, sort of like you. Then God calls that person to a task and when they are obedient to God, extraordinary things happen. 

The equation is simple:

Ordinary + Obedience = Extraordinary. 

The amazing part of this equation is that God is even willing to bother with the ordinary stuff of life. Why would the King of Kings and the Lord of Lords bother with ordinary things like a stable and a manger or bread and wine? Why would the creator of all that is bother with ordinary me, and ordinary you? Probably because God made us. God loves us in spite of knowing just how ordinary we are.  

So remember that God does not need your holiness, your perfection, your smashing good looks and great personality. God needs your obedience, your willingness to listen to that still small voice which is the Holy Spirit speaking to your spirit. God will probably not need you to be an Abraham, Moses, David or Mary. Those are few and far between. But God needs obedient folks all the time in all sorts of situations. When others are lost, grieving, hurting, you may be the best eyes God has to see the problem, the bust arms God has to hug them and the best ears God has to listen, really listen. 

God is turning the world upside down all the time and God does not need leaders, but those willing to follow God’s will. God does not need rulers, but servants. God does not need you to be extraordinary. God just needs you to be willing and obedient. 

I know this might not be the most startling of messages. It probably has a familiar ring to it. It should. God has been transforming the world for thousands of years with the obedience of regular old folks like you and me and God will keep right on doing it until Jesus returns at the end of time. God will keep write on taking the ordinary and turning it into something extraordinary, if we are willing to be obedient. 

Amen.