So What Do You Expect? Expect Goodness
By Dr. Tom Pace
Sunday, December 3, 2017
Luke 1:26-33, 46-49
We’re starting a new sermon series today. This is the first Sunday of the church year, the beginning of Advent, and one of the themes of Advent, one of the motifs, is about pregnancy, of being with child. Our story, our Bible passage today is Gabriel’s conversation with Mary, and sometimes it’s called the Annunciation. This is when Gabriel announces to her that she’s going to have a child.
It’s followed a little bit later by her response and that’s sometimes called the Magnificat. So pay attention to what Gabriel tells her and how she responds. Listen now as we hear the Scripture read this morning.
In the sixth month the angel Gabriel was sent by God to a town in Galilee called Nazareth,to a virgin engaged to a man whose name was Joseph, of the house of David. The virgin’s name was Mary.And he came to her and said, “Greetings, favored one! The Lord is with you.”But she was much perplexed by his words and pondered what sort of greeting this might be.The angel said to her, “Do not be afraid, Mary, for you have found favor with God.And now, you will conceive in your womb and bear a son, and you will name him Jesus.He will be great, and will be called the Son of the Most High, and the Lord God will give to him the throne of his ancestor David.He will reign over the house of Jacob forever, and of his kingdom there will be no end.” Luke 1:26-33 (NRSV)
And Mary said: My soul magnifies the Lord, and my spirit rejoices in God my Savior,for he has looked with favor on the lowliness of his servant. Surely, from now on all generations will call me blessed;for the Mighty One has done great things for me, and holy is his name. Luke 1:46-49 (NRSV)

Join me in prayer: Gracious God, open us up. Open our eyes that we might see what you want us to see, and our ears that we might hear your word for us today. Open our hearts, God that your love might fall in, and then, O Lord, open our hands that we might serve you and our neighbor in all that we do. Amen.
In 1984 a woman wrote a book that is now one of the 25 best sellers ever. Her name is Heidi Murkoff. I wonder if any of you might know what book I’m talking about. If you do, if you have a clue, raise your hand. Aha! You will when I tell you the title. It’s called What To Expect When You’re Expecting. It’s a book about pregnancy. It’s one of the 25 best sellers ever.
It’s been through many printings and I would tell you that my girls have it laying around the house once they’re had their first child. They used it.
I was actually going to use that as the title of our sermon series but our team said people will think it’s about pregnancy so I didn’t want to do that. But I want to ask you during this season of Advent one of the motifs is that of pregnancy. Of preparing, of expectancy. What do you expect when we’re expecting the baby Jesus to be born? What do you expect?
Do you expect stress and busyness and parties, family squabbles and financial challenges? And all of that stuff – bah humbug! Or maybe you’re on the far other side and what you expect is Norman Rockwell. You expect it to be just exactly perfect.
I don’t really understand. Does anybody actually carve the turkey on the table like they do in the pictures there? The turkey is right on the table. I don’t think people carve it there. But we get these pictures in our head that this is the way it’s supposed to be and we begin to expect that.
What I want us to think about is what do we expect not just about Christmas, about this season in the world? What do we expect about our lives? I suspect that we can use this story of Gabriel telling Mary what to expect and we might learn something from it.
The first thing I want you to see is that this story tells us that we can expect God to show up. We can expect God is going to do something. Listen to how the Scripture begins: “In the sixth month the angel Gabriel was sent by God …” Did you get that? “Sent by God.” God is the initiator here. Later on he says the Holy Spirit will come upon you. This is God’s doing. He doesn’t say to Mary, “Hey, would you do this?” There’s no question involved. It’s God’s initiative.
So much of the time we think that the Christian faith is about what we do. The Christian faith is first and foremost about what God has done for us, what God does for us. God is the initiator. God is the one who does it.
In your Sermon Notes inside your bulletin I printed two verses from the beginning of the Gospel of Mark. It’s really a theme verse for a thesis statement for the whole New Testament. You can read it there if you want but let me read it to you: “Now after John was arrested Jesus came to Galilee proclaiming the good news of God. And saying the time is fulfilled, the Kingdom of God has come near. Repent and believe the good news.”
We’re going to talk about repent next week but I want you to first hear “The time is fulfilled; the Kingdom of God has come near. It’s time! I’m going to show up!”
During the Advent season often we talk about the prophets and one of my favorite prophecies is from Isaiah 64:1. The prophet Isaiah says, “Oh, that you would rend the heavens and come down.” The word rend means to tear, to tear open. “Oh, God, that you would tear open the heavens and come down.”
We just sang, “Come, Thou Long Expected Jesus…” We expect God to show up. Or do we? Do you really expect God to show up?
My grandson Carter is four years old and recently Carter got really, really mad at his parents. I mean really mad. I don’t know what their crime was but he was really mad. They were trying to make him do something, and he said, “I am really mad!” They said, “Okay.” I don’t think that was what he wanted to hear. So he said, “No, I’m really, really mad! I’m going to turn into a werewolf I’m so mad!” They said, “Oh, really? Okay. Do that.” Then he said, “No, I’m really going to do it – I’m getting ready to do it! I’m going to turn into a werewolf!” They’re thinking, “Okay, bring it on, Carter.”
They didn’t believe he was going to turn into a werewolf. I think sometimes that’s how we treat God. “I don’t really think you’re going to show up. For 2000 years every Advent we hear it, ‘Peace on earth, good will to men. The lion shall lie down with the lamb. Suffering shall be ended.’ We’ve been waiting, and we’ve been waiting. We don’t believe it anymore.”
Or maybe in our own lives we say, “Look, it’s the same stuff I’ve been dealing with year after year after year. Same problems, same issues. You’re not going to show up.”
The first thing I want to tell you in this Christmas Advent season is that we need to expect God to actually show up, to do something. It’s not what we do, it’s what God’s going to do. Now, I think it goes further than that. We are to expect God to show up and do something and that something that God is going to do is good. God is going to do something and it’s going to be good.
So the angel Gabriel appears to Mary and tells her that she’s going to have a baby. Now when you tell an unmarried woman at the time of Jesus in that culture that she’s going to have a child, that’s not a good thing. Their first thought is that it’s not good, because what that’s going to mean for her that she’s ostracized from her family, that she’s shamed and marginalized. And it may mean that she’s stoned to death.
So angel Gabriel cuts that off at the pass. Here’s how the angel begins, “Greetings, favored one! The Lord is with you. You are a winner!” You’ve opened the envelope and it says, “You are a winner! This is a good thing. Before I even tell you what it’s going to be, I want you to know this is a good thing. You’re going to give birth to a son and he’s going to be the king – the Messiah we’ve waiting for. This is a good thing.”
And Mary gets it. At first she says, “Let it be to me as the angel has said.” But even more than that, listen to what she says in what we read just a moment ago – the Magnificat. And Mary says, “My soul magnifies the Lord, my spirit rejoices in God my Savior,for he has looked with favor on the lowliness of his servant. Surely, from now on all generations will call me blessed; for the Mighty One has done great things for me…” This is good; I believe it’s good even in the face of being ostracized and being marginalized and maybe being stoned to death. This is a good thing and I’m claiming that. I’m believing that!
Now listen, that’s not to say there aren’t bad things. When we begin to look and believe that God is going to do something good in our lives, that does not mean that there are no bad things. When I hear people say, “It’s all part of God’s plan,” I want to say, “Well, maybe it’s not. Maybe this is a bad thing.”
Look, there are Herods among us. There are evil things that are going on. It’s not that everything that happens is good. But the question is, “Will we take hold of, will we believe that what God is doing is victorious over that evil?”
We turn on the news every morning and there’s something terrible that’s happened. It might be people killed in a church in Texas, it might be people shot in Las Vegas, it might be in a mosque – a Sufi mosque. There are all sorts of things that happen and we turn on the news and we think, “Seriously? Seriously?”
But what happens is that we begin to let those things set our agenda. Those are going to command our attention and that is what we dwell on. When we stand around the coffee pot that’s what we talk about. When we post things on social media, that’s what we talk about. And all of a sudden our eyes are down all the time. Our eyes are down and we’ve let the King Herods set the agenda.
It may be true in your own life. Let’s be more personal instead of the global. When I went to camp as a kid we used to sing this song and I have no idea why they taught us this song. It goes this way, “For life is a toil, and love is a trouble, beauty will fade and riches will flee. Pleasures they dwindle and prices they double. And nothing is as I would wish it to be.”
Isn’t that a joyful song? I don’t know what they were trying to teach us. I don’t know what kind of camp I was at. And I think sometimes we get that way. We begin to let the negative and the bad things in our lives begin to dominate our attention. And they begin to define us. We begin to define ourselves by our pain and our hurt and our brokenness.
I have a friend – I guess he’s sort of a friend – and when we’re having coffee and I whine about something going on in my life, he’ll say, “Waaaa, waaaa. Do you want me to call you a “waaambulance?” And I respond, “Well, thank you so much for your compassion. I appreciate that.” But what he’s doing is, he’s calling me on it. He’s saying, “Is that how you want to spend your energy and your time? Do you want all of your focus to be on that which is broken?” I want you to hear me say again, those things are real. Even the passage we read where it says, “After John was arrested, Jesus came preaching saying, the Kingdom of God is at hand. Repent and believe the good news.”
“After John was arrested…” it means that Herod has put him in jail which ultimately leads to his execution. He said, “Repent and believe… the good news.”
This story is about what God has done for us, and why is it that we’re so prone to go to the dark side?
I’ll use a frivolous illustration here. A week ago yesterday, two Saturdays ago, I was watching the University of Texas play Texas Tech. Our team was winning and Spencer Tillman was announcing the game. He began to say, “Texas Tech is going to come back and win…Texas Tech is going to come back and win…” And they did! So I actually saw Mr. Tillman at an event this last week and I said, “I’m holding you responsible for the defeat of the University of Texas Longhorns. What would cause you to prophecy right there that the University of Texas was going to lose?” And he said, “Well, the way they were covering… the outside receivers…” I said, “I don’t care! You can’t go there. You can’t be drawn down into the negative all the time.”
He didn’t care.
One of the pastors I like to listen to is a man named Steven Furtick. He preaches at a church called Elevation Church, and it’s very different from our church. It’s one of those big megachurches with maybe 15 campuses, and all video venues. I like to listen to him because he’s got really good rhythm and he does these nifty alliterations and poetic stuff. Mostly because his congregation whoops and hollers all the time. You guys are a long way from whooping and hollering, I have to tell you.
But lest you think that you’d like Steven Furtick to be your pastor, his sermons are 50 minutes long. So you’ll have to factor that in when you’re calculating where you want to go to church.
I want you to listen to an illustration that he used because it really spoke to me. He said, “If I leave my soul in neutral…” Then he backs up and says, “… if I put my car in neutral on a hill and don’t put on the parking brake the natural reaction of gravity is to send my car in an undesired direction. Your heart is like that. You have to actively set your expectation in a heavenly direction. You can’t leave it up to the default that your heart will suggest to you. Your heart is dysfunctional. If you let your heart do what it wants to do and be what it wants to be, you will end up in some bad places.”
I think that’s right. We have to make an intentional decision to believe the good news. To believe that God is going to show up and is doing a good thing. And it’s happening around us and we’re looking for it. We’re pointing it out. We’re joining in. We don’t simply let ourselves fall back with gravity into that sense of, “Oh, the world is terrible.” What we say is, “God is showing up and is doing a good thing.”
On our Gethsemane campus we have an African fellowship that’s there and when they worship together they sing a song in Swahili. It goes this way, “Mambo Sawa Sawa, Yesu Akiwa Enzini, Mambo sawa sawa.” That means “Things are getting better, things already better, Jesus is on the throne. Things are getting better.”
You’ve got to hold onto that, friends. We have to expect that God is going to show up and do a good thing, in our world. “Thy kingdom come… thy will be done on earth as it is in heaven.” The Kingdom of God is at hand and in our lives.
This is the first Sunday of the Christian year and when we look at the Christian year ahead that goes from Advent, to Christmas to Epiphany, the journey of the Wise Men, to Lent, the time in the wilderness, to Good Friday, to Easter. And then ultimately on to Pentecost when the Holy Spirit comes. That’s the trajectory. That’s God’s trajectory. We look at all of that knowing how it’s going to end. Even when we sit at Good Friday, and we’re there right at the cross and we’re seeing the pain. We’re identifying with Jesus on the cross, and our hearts break, and we have tears in our eyes as we contemplate this torture and this pain. Down inside us at the core there’s still this flicker of joy, because we know that Good Friday isn’t how it ends. We know that death doesn’t have the last word, that hatred doesn’t have the last word. We know that love has the last word. We look at the cross through resurrection eyes.
Mary looks at this statement, “You’re going to have a baby and you’re going to deal with shame, and you’re going to deal with being ostracized, and it could be really bad.” She says, “The Lord has done great things for me and holy is his name. From now on people will call me blessed.” She looks through resurrection eyes and doesn’t even know it.
God is going to show up and is going to do a good thing.
So one last component of that. We have to set our expectancy but not our expectations. Julie did a great job of trying to paint that for us. See, expectations are what we define. “I want it to be this way. I want to have that Norman Rockwell Christmas and that’s the way it’s going to be. That’s my expectation. I’ve defined that. I want my marriage to be just like this. My wife is going to come home early from work, earlier than me every day and have dinner ready and meet me with slippers on the porch.” Why are you laughing? That’s not happening, I’m just telling you. I can expect that all I want, but that’s not the way it’s going to work.
I can expect my child to be just this way. I can do all the expecting I want. That’s expectations.
No, what we’re called on to do is set expectancy. What expectancy says is, “God, I don’t know what you’re going to do. But I trust you and it’s going to be good. I’m leaning into it. I’m believing, I’m trusting you for it. I’m not going to define what it’s going to be like. You define what it’s going to be like. But I know it’s going to be good.”
There’s another word for expectancy and that’s the word “hope.” That sense of hope is this deep seated realization because of our trust in God that what God has in store for this world and for you and me is good. And we hold fast to that. Sometimes we can see it happening and sometimes it’s really hard to see. But we’re going to expect it.
Some you know John Duncan. He’s a member of our congregation. Many years ago he had a grandson who was born with Down’s syndrome. When that happened John talked about how it was heartbreaking and how difficult that was for him. But then he got to work and founded the Rise School which you may be familiar with. The Rise School, they do early childhood education for children with Down’s syndrome and special needs. And one of John’s ministries now is that he talks to people who have children or grandchildren born with special needs. He describes to them the realization that came about in his heart when he realized that he has a grandson now who loves him and who is overjoyed every time he sees him. What a joyful experience that is for him. And he says, “It wasn’t what I expected, and if I had set my expectations that’s not what it would have been. But it’s really good. It’s a really good thing.”
Friends, the time is fulfilled, the Kingdom of God is at hand. It’s right here. Believe the good news. God is going to do something and it’s going to be good. So expect it.
Gracious and loving God, we confess that too often our eyes are looking down and we are distracted by and focused on the King Herod among us. The brokenness, the terrible things that we see, and those become our agenda. Forgive us, God. Instead, help us to look for you, to look for you showing up and you doing a good thing among us. We lean forward with expectancy and hope. In the name of Christ. Amen.