Hilton Head Island, SC – December 11, 2016
The Chapel Without Walls
Luke 1:26-33; Luke 1:34-38
A Sermon by John M. Miller
Text – And the angel said to her, “The Holy Spirit will come upon you, and the power of the Most High will overshadow you.” – Luke 1:35a
The Songs Of The Messiah
2) The Overshadowing God
This is the second in a series of four sermons called The Songs of the Messiah. It is based on four poetic songs that are found in the first chapter of the Gospel of Luke.
There are more advantages than disadvantages to people having been raised in Christian families, who to some extent may thus be classified as “always to have been Christians.” People whose parents take them regularly to church are more likely to remain church members for their entire lives than people whose parents rarely or never took them to church. In our type of society, it is very unusual for someone who never went to church to become a Christian at any later stage of adulthood. It happens, but not often. As someone who has been associated with many thousands of parishioners through more than half a century as an ordained, practicing minister, I can attest to the validity of what I just said. There are also many other advantages to people “always having been Christians,” but I shall not attempt to enumerate them.
However, one of the problems of having always gone to church and having heard certain passages of the Bible read many times over the decades is that our ears may become numb to the essence of what these passages were meant to convey. An example of that is the Christmas story as found in the Gospels of Matthew and Luke, which are the only two biblical sources to say anything at all about Christmas. We have all heard Matthew 1 and 2 and Luke 1 and 2 so frequently throughout our lives that we can almost recite parts of these chapters by heart.
But what do they really mean? And have these words truly entered into our hearts? What did the writers intend to convey by what they said? What are we, the people who hear these words almost two thousand years after they were written, to deduce when we hear them yet again? We shall not go into anything Matthew said; we will leave that for another Advent and Christmas season. But what did Luke want to happen when he included five different poems which became songs in the early Church?
Let me ask this question in a different way. Did the angel Gabriel, or Mary, the mother of Jesus, or Zechariah, the father of John the Baptist, or Simeon, the elderly sage in Jerusalem, actually verbalize the poems or songs attributed to them eighty years before Luke wrote his Gospel? Or did Luke simply include them in his Gospel because they had been in use in the early Church for twenty or thirty or forty years before Luke sat down to put them into print?
Let me postulate a theory for you. There is no way of corroborating or “proving” what I am going to say, but I want you to think about it. Here is my thesis. The life and teachings of Jesus had a major effect on those who knew him and heard him during his lifetime, but the effect of Jesus was infinitely greater in the first fifty years after he lived than it was before he died. By the year 80 CE, when Luke wrote his Gospel, there were probably at most twenty or fifty or a hundred thousand Christians in the entire world. But those people were so transformed by a peasant carpenter from the Galilean town of Nazareth that already they had developed a system of worship not only for the God who sent Jesus into the world but also for the one who was sent, Jesus himself. Likely included in that liturgy were songs or hymns which the Church had created for every season of the liturgical year: Advent, Christmas, Epiphany, Lent, Easter, and the long period leading back to Advent once again.
The five songs found in Luke 1 and 2 are examples of those liturgical hymns. Whether the words were originally spoken as Luke suggests or they evolved by the fervor of the early Church can never be ascertained, but it seems both possible and plausible to me that these songs became part of the standard Advent and Christmas liturgy of the New Testament Church.
Be that as it may, today we come to the second song in the first chapter of Luke’s Gospel. According to Luke, the first song was uttered or sung by the angel Gabriel to Mary, as was the second of the songs. And what Gabriel declared to the astonished teenage girl was this, referring to the child Mary would bear nine months later,
“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 called holy,
The Son of God.”
Gabriel insisted that though this child would be born like any other baby, nevertheless he would be the Son of God, God’s Son, the Son-of-God-capital-“S.” Mary asked a perfectly legitimate question, despite being confronted by an angel, “How can this be, since I have no husband?” The answer, said Gabriel, is that the Holy Spirit of God would cause this world-transforming event to occur. I doubt that Mary had a clue what Gabriel meant by that, but that is presumably what he said.
The Gospel of Luke is quintessentially the Gospel of the Holy Spirit, as well as the Gospel of Jesus Christ. Mark and Matthew say relatively little about the Holy Spirit. John says much more, but in a different context and with a much different theology. It is beyond dispute that the person who wrote the Gospel of Luke is the same man who wrote the Book of the Acts of the Apostles. However, “Acts” could have as legitimately been called “The Book of the Acts of the Holy Spirit” as “The Book of the Acts of the Apostles.” Time and again it is the Holy Spirit who caused certain things to happen, not “God” or “the Father” or “the Lord,” but “the Holy Spirit.”
One of the ways we may choose to understand this particular theological usage is to say that God had decided to act among His people Israel in a unique and powerful new way, and that was to manifest Himself as the Holy Spirit. The Church eventually perceived the Holy Spirit to be the Third Person of the Trinity. Definitely that had not happened by the time Luke wrote either His Gospel or the Book of Acts, but in time God came to be grasped by most Christians in a Trinitarian mode. The concept of the Trinity is immensely helpful to countless millions of Christians, and it is problematic to many other Christians. Nevertheless, “the Holy Spirit” came to be part of the Godhead to a majority of Christians by the fourth century of the Common Era.
Anyway (to come back to Luke 1), Gabriel told Mary that the baby she would bear was a child of the Holy Spirit, and that he would be called holy, and also, the Son of God. But I want you to consider this announcement from Mary’s point of view. She is not overjoyed; she is terrified. She was to be the mother of the Son of God? Mary suddenly feels huge darkness, not radiant light, descending on her. But, said Gabriel to Mary, “The power of the Most High will overshadow you.” What, specifically, does that mean?
When anything overshadows any of us, it means that particular factor or event drives everything else that happens to us. We may feel consumed by darkness, and then a great light breaks through. When you were a young man or woman, you weren’t sure where you were headed, and anxiety took hold of you. Then you were given a certain position in a certain organization, and from that point on, your life was determined greatly for the better because that happened. If it had not occurred, your career path would have been much different than it was. Or, on a particularly enchanted evening, you saw a stranger across a crowded room. Life was never the same afterward. One time, when your finances seemed very tight, you made what you thought was a minor investment, and it turned out to be a major bonanza.
For me, being called as an assistant pastor at the Fourth Presbyterian Church of Chicago in 1968 was that kind of overshadowing event in my life. Being on that church staff for the next five years and having the opportunity to be mentored by Dr. Elam Davies, the pastor of Fourth Church, directed the trajectory of my ministry from that point on. Whatever I preach, however I perceive ministry, whoever I am, was immeasurably affected by being under the tutelage of Elam Davies and hearing him preach on most Sunday mornings. Next month I am going to have a book published called The Communion of Saints: A Pastor’s Pot-pourri of Parishioners. It gives short summaries of some of the thousands of parishioners and the many ministerial colleagues I have known in nearly eighty years of life. Chronologically, they go from my parents and brothers through every congregation I have served, ending up with a few people from The Chapel Without Walls. My life has been overshadowed by a whole host of saints whom God, by His providence, interjected into my earthly pilgrimage. I would not be truthful if I did not say that I hope you will purchase a copy of that book better to understand my own divinely inspired overshadowing. In subsequent weeks you shall be hearing more about the book.
In the Bible, there are many examples of the overshadowing activity of God in various people’s lives. Things seemed to be bleak, but then the shadows were lifted, and God took measures to dispel the darkness. God moved Abraham to leave the comfortable life he had in the land of Haran and to go to an unknown future in an unknown land called Canaan (Gen. 12). At a burning bush God spoke to Moses and convinced him to go back into Egypt, from he had fled forty years earlier, and to lead the children of Israel across the Sinai Desert into the Promised Land of Canaan (Ex. 3). God overshadowed Jael, and by a lethal stratagem she overcame the general Sisera of the Canaanite army (Judges 4). Three times the overshadowing God spoke to the boy Samuel, finally telling him, after He managed to get Samuel’s attention, “Behold, I am about to do a thing in Israel at which the two ears of everyone who hears it will tingle.” Then God indicated it was going to happen through Samuel (I Sam. 3). After Saul failed to be the king Israel needed, Samuel went to Bethlehem and carefully checked out each of Jesse’s seven sons, and decided that the youngest son, David, was to be the new king (I Sam. 16). David was overshadowed by God throughout his entire life, even when he disobeyed God.
Sometimes God works with extraordinary power in our lives, but it is only afterwards, looking back, that we understand what it was that God did. Only when Mary looked back, and the early Church looked back, did they perceive the overshadowing God in the appearance of the mysterious angel Gabriel to a young girl of Nazareth in the Galilee.
Another peasant girl of nineteen, with the short hair of a man and the huge heart of a ferocious linebacker, led a French army against the English. Joan of Arc felt that the overshadowing God directed her to defeat the English, which she did, preventing the traditional enemy of France at that time from making France a vassal province of England.
Lightning struck a brilliant, young, gifted, stubborn German, nearly killing him. “I will become a priest!” the young man exclaimed, supposing it was God who hurled the thunderbolt at him, wanting to get his attention. It did. Martin Luther believed it was an action of the overshadowing God. Was it?
By the end of May in 1940, the German Army had driven British, French and Belgian troops to the beaches of Dunkirk, in northern France. In a giant pincers movement, they could have captured all of them, and World War II would have been over before the US had even entered it. The German generals wanted to close the trap, but a German corporal from World War I, a man named Adolf Hitler, dithered. Between May 26 and June 4 of 1940, a huge flotilla of British maritime vessels, from large transport ships to fishing trawlers to rowboats, crossed the English Channel and rescued every stranded soldier cowering on the beach. Many people all over the world considered it a divine redemption, what in this sermon might be called salvation by the overshadowing God. But was it?
Seventy-five years ago last Wednesday, on Dec. 7, 1941, the American aircraft carrier fleet happened to be out of Pearl Harbor on a training exercise. Were that not the case, it is conceivable that the United States of America would have been knocked out of World War II before we ever became involved in World War II. Did the overshadowing God intervene? How would you answer that?
“And 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 called holy,
The Son of God’” (Luke 1:35).
When God overshadows us, can we tell it has happened? Can we know it has happened? Do we trust that it has happened?
A baby was born in Judea about the year 6 BCE. (Don’t let the “BC” part throw you; the Christian calendar is about six years off because of a miscalculation by a medieval Irish monk.) Light shone in the darkness, and the darkness could not overcome it. About thirty-three years later the man who evolved from that birth was crucified in Jerusalem. Within fifty years of that event, apparently the early Church was regularly singing a hymn based on a story told about the visitation of an angel to the mother of that baby. The angel told the soon-to-be mother that God had “overshadowed” her. And the question is: Did He?