30 But the angel said to her, "Do not be afraid, Mary, you have found favor with God.
31 You will be with child and give birth to a son, and you are to give him the name 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 the house of Jacob forever; his kingdom will never end."
For many people Advent and Christmas to follow bring lots of "family" times. I know that not everyone has a family to go back to - and I genuinely feel sorry for them. Recently I was talking to a guy at the local YMCA and he told me that he was single and spent Thanksgiving Day alone...which he said "I've gotten used to it". I couldn't help but feel sorry for him that he didn't have any family to go back to.
Yet sometimes people either go back to family reluctantly, or skip it altogether. Family is just too hard to endure. The old adage is true: "You can pick your friends, you're stuck with your family."
Even Jesus went through this.
Mark 3:31-35 (NIV)
31 Then Jesus' mother and brothers arrived. Standing outside, they sent someone in to call him.
32 A crowd was sitting around him, and they told him, "Your mother and brothers are outside looking for you."
33 "Who are my mother and my brothers?" he asked.
34 Then he looked at those seated in a circle around him and said, "Here are my mother and my brothers!
35 Whoever does God's will is my brother and sister and mother."
It must have been one of those very awkward moments when Jesus' family came - not because they believed in him, but frankly because they didn't and wanted to take him home and stop what he was doing. They who grew up with Jesus couldn't see the Messiah - just the brother, son.
Perhaps we're all guilty of "putting" our family members in boxes. "They are always like this...or that". "They will never change". "Why do they have to be like that?" And, on and on it goes. We're not very good at allowing people who we've known for our entire life to become something different. Yet that is the very heart of the Gospel - the change to newness of life.
2 Corinthians 5:17-21 (NIV)
17 Therefore, if anyone is in Christ, he is a new creation; the old has gone, the new has come!
18 All this is from God, who reconciled us to himself through Christ and gave us the ministry of reconciliation:
19 that God was reconciling the world to himself in Christ, not counting men's sins against them. And he has committed to us the message of reconciliation.
20 We are therefore Christ's ambassadors, as though God were making his appeal through us. We implore you on Christ's behalf: Be reconciled to God.
21 God made him who had no sin to be sin for us, so that in him we might become the righteousness of God.
Here's a good Advent word: Reconciled.
In the original Greek the word is katallasso - it means to "let loose", "To exchange".
The idea is that in Christ, each of us have become new creations...we're no longer defined by our past, but only by what lies before us. God does not bring up the past, he does not "count our sins" because he is committed to reconciliation. Now, we are ambassadors of that message. We live as ones who personify Christ. We are not righteous in our own selves; but in Christ we have received this new life...and so have others!
How can we live reconciled? Christ does it to us by not "counting" the past sins...but instead treating us as "new". It isn't easy to do always but it is possible.
Corrie Ten Boom was arrested, along with her entire family, by the Nazi's. She and her family were all shipped off to a concentration camp, and then after the war, she alone returned. The rest died at the hands of the Nazis. In 1947 she was asked to speak in Holland at a church meeting - the topic was forgiveness. She spoke eloquently about God's forgiveness for each of us, and the need to extend that to others. Then when it was all over with a man came forward - a man she immediately recognized for he had been a Nazi guard at the Ravensbruck camp her family and she had gone to...the same camp they died in. All of a sudden forgiveness was no longer just a good Christian idea, or concept...it was up close and personal. She said,
“Even as the angry vengeful thoughts boiled through me, I saw the sin of them. Jesus Christ had died for this man; was I going to ask for more? Lord Jesus, I prayed, forgive me and help me to forgive him....Jesus, I cannot forgive him. Give me your forgiveness....And so I discovered that it is not on our forgiveness any more than on our goodness that the world's healing hinges, but on His. When He tells us to love our enemies, He gives along with the command, the love itself.”
― Corrie ten Boom, The Hiding Place
Advent is a season of knowing that God reached out when he could have justified keeping his distance.
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