If You Knew

4th Sunday of Advent

December 18, 2016

Canticle of Mary; Matthew 1:18-25

“If you knew.” It’s a fun game we humans like to play. Would you want to be 17 again? If I knew then what I know now. Would you do something wild and daring again? If I knew ahead of time what would happen. If you knew the end at the beginning, would you still go through it? If it has a good ending, of course! If it has a bad ending? There’s always been a young adult novel sub genre of tragic endings, which you know are coming. When I was growing up, the author Lurlene McDaniel wrote a lot of those types of stories. Tragic heroines who are coming of age and who have the odds stacked against them because of disease or some other tragic occurrence. The latest most popular one is “The Fault in Our Stars” by John Green; it was also made into a movie a couple years ago. It’s a classic love story of boy meets girl, with a twist. Both boy and girl have terminal cancer. Both are only teenagers. While reading the book, I kept wondering which one was going to die first, and I won’t spoil it for you and tell you. Love is always a risk; even more so when the one you love is expected to die. Is it still worth it?

My husband and I recently saw a movie where the woman knows that she will have a daughter who will die as a teenager. In the movie, she only just meets the man with whom she’ll have this child. At the end, the man finds out that she knew all along, and says she shouldn’t have chosen to have the child, anyway. Is it worth it? 15 years of joy and love, for a sad ending, and grieving that will never completely go away. The man thought it wasn’t worth it. The woman thought it was. If you knew ahead of time… what would you choose? Would the good times and love outweigh the bad ending? This woman thought so. And Mary thought so, too.

One of the Christmas songs we heard last Sunday in the Cantata is “Mary, Did You Know?” This song has been catching a lot of flack on social media by my clergy colleagues this year. Because if you think about it, knowing what we know of the nativity story, what the angel tells Mary, and Mary’s response, with beautiful Magnificat, or Canticle of Mary, yes, she knew what was coming. She knew there would be great joy and great heartache. She knew her son was the Savior of the world; and she knew the authorities and others would hate him for it. She knew. And her response to the angel was still, “May it be with me as you have said.” She still chose to go through with it. She may not have known crucifixion and resurrection. But she knew there would be good news to those who are oppressed, and she knew that the oppressors would resist that. She knew there would be miracles, and she knew there would be doubters. She knew there would be salvation, and she knew there would be a cost for that salvation. Dietrich Bonhoeffer, a German theologian and pastor, wrote a book on the cost of discipleship, and cheap grace and costly grace. He knew there is a cost for following Jesus. And if we act and live as always and accept things without thinking them through, then we cheapen the grace that Christ offers us. Bonhoeffer knew, and paid the price with his life, dying in a German concentration camp in 1945 because he dared to speak out against the Nazi regime.

If you knew the end at the beginning, would you still do it? It makes the risk a little more calculated, and if you’re like me, then you like that. I am only a “moderate risk taker.” I like to know as much as possible about what I’m getting into. And yet, that is the Christian life. That is this season of Advent. We knew when we lit the first Advent candle that we’d be lighting all four of them plus a Christ candle in the middle on Christmas Eve. During this season of preparation, we’ve known what’s coming. I suppose Advent is an easier season to go through than others. We know the end is a baby. We do know what’s coming. This isn’t a hypothetical question for us. We know the end. And not just the end of the season of Advent, but also the end that Mary knew. We know what is coming. We know there will be Epiphany and Jesus’ baptism and the beginning of his ministry at the wedding in Cana and the calling of the first disciples. We know there will also be heartache and rejection and that this spring we will walk through Lent again, journey with Jesus to the cross, and, thank God, not just there but to the other side of the cross, to Easter morning. We know new life is coming. We know that in the end, God wins. WE DO KNOW THE END. Trial and tribulation, yes. Brokenness and a change more radical than we’ve ever known, yes. Yet as Christians, we also know the end of the story. We have the blessed assurance that God is in control and in control of history. We know what will happen at the end of our individual story and the end of the story of the church. God takes us all up to heaven. There will be a new heaven and a new earth and no more crying or weeping anymore. We know the end of the story.

We know the end of our story. We know the end of the story of this little baby who’s about to be born. We go through the story with him every year, the highs and the lows, the good times and the bad. We go through the story with him every year in light of the end, in light of the salvation of the world. We know what’s coming, on Christmas Day, on Palm Sunday, on Good Friday, on Easter Sunday, on Pentecost. And we keep doing it again, because we are people of the story, people of the Book. And this Book, this story, is the one that defines our lives, that illumines our lives, that tells us how then we should live. We live expectant, like Mary, ready and waiting. We live accepting the nearly unbelievable, like Joseph, when we’re really not sure how God is going to make this happen. We live, knowing that while salvation is freely offered, there is a cost to accepting it, because it means we’re not going to be like the world. Our first day of Christmas is Christmas Day, not December 13th. The 12th day of Christmas is Epiphany, not December 25th.  We live differently because we follow this little baby who was born in a barn, because we know the end at the beginning.

For us, there is no hypothetical “if you knew the end, would you do something differently?” We do know the end, and so we do live differently. We don’t live in fear. We don’t live worried about what might happen tomorrow, or even what might happen today. We know God’s got it under control. And so we live generously, looking out for each other and for the poor. When my four year old asked last week why we were going to sing Christmas songs to a church member in a nursing home, my mom answered her, “Because Jesus tells us to visit the sick.” There really isn’t much more to say than that. We visit the sick and those in prison. We feed the hungry and give clothes to those without them. We work with organizations like Streets of Hope to provide hope to the homeless. We do live differently, because we do know. And we know that in a week, we will again celebrate the birth of a little baby boy, the one who saves us all. Thanks be to God!