This is the sermon I prepared for Holy Cross Lutheran Church, Beatrice, Neb., for the Feast of the Annunciation of Our Lord on Thursday, March 25, 2010.

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Readings

Isaiah 7:10–14
Psalm 40:1–11
1 Timothy 3:16
Luke 1:26–38

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Prayer

Send your Holy Spirit upon us, Father in heaven, just as you blessed Mary, your servant, with that same divine gift, so that we may hear and heed your will for our lives; through Jesus Christ our Lord. Amen.

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Message

One of the new television shows returning for its spring season
is a science fiction drama called FlashForward.

Like any good work of speculative fiction,
it contains a creative premise
that places its characters into a situation with challenges
and then invites us to share their struggles to make sense
of their new and bewildering reality.

FlashForward’s hook
is that everyone in the world experiences a two-minute, seventeen-second blackout.
Then they wake up with vivid memories
of their lives six months in the future.
The question plaguing the characters
is whether the visions are suggestion or sentence.

Tonight we have gathered to celebrate
our own kind of flash-forward.
We set aside Lent,
our season of penitence and preparation,
and for these few brief moments,
we experience a glimpse of the Christmas season.

This festival, the Annunciation of our Lord,
reminds us, by a strange entwining of time,
that our Lord, who now makes his way to the cross,
is the same Lord whose birth we will celebrate in nine months.

And so, this feast,
marking the Angel Gabriel’s announcement to Mary
that God the Father had chosen her
to become the mother of the Son of God,
is a time to look back into history
as history itself looks forward.

And we do all of this while we observe Lent
and prepare to turn our attention to the events of Holy Week:
Christ’s triumphal entry;
his gift of the Holy Meal;
his betrayal, arrest, sentencing, suffering, and crucifixion;
his death, his descent into hell;
and his rising in vindication and victory.

It can get a little complicated as past and present and future
all wrap themselves around one another.
But it helps to remember that the future is the key.
The future helps us to make sense of the past,
to know how to live in the present,
and to anticipate in the future in trust and hope.

The only reason we celebrate the announcement
of Mary’s calling as the bearer of God—the theotokos—
is that her pregnancy and birth take on cosmic significance
because of the death and resurrection of Jesus Christ.

We stand with Mary in this evening’s feast
but we look to her son’s future
to make sense of her present.

And then we see that
Christ’s death and resurrection
again only reveal their true meaning
when we look at them from the future,
from the vantage of God’s kingdom.
It’s only because we pray, “thy kingdom come,”
and trust that the Father will make it so,
and that he began to bring in his kingdom
by raising his Son from death,
that the cross and the tomb and that blessed morning
matter at all to us and to the whole world.

We gather at the cross to witness Christ’s sacrifice,
but we look to his future as our victorious Lord
to make sense of his past.

And then, we turn to the kingdom
and realize that while it is good for God’s kingdom to come,
we wonder whether it will ever come to us.
That redirect us to reflect upon our baptisms.

Once again, we look back into history,
and we see that somewhen and somewhere—
whether we recall it or not—
at some font or pool or stream,
with a splash or a dunking,
God poured out the water of life flowing from his kingdom
into the dark and sinful recesses of our lives.

We were raised from the water,
lifted struggling into new life,
into a lifetime of discipleship,
living as though God’s kingdom has come,
because it indeed has come to us.

Then with the water,
God our Father poured out upon us the Spirit of his Son and his resurrection.
And that is the same Spirit that Gabriel announced to Mary
would overshadow her and bless her with bearing the life of the Son.

The flash-forward for us is this:
we have been made and redeemed and blessed
by the Father whose kingdom is coming,
by the Son who brings that kingdom by dying and rising,
by the Spirit who gathers us into that kingdom.

This is true for us now.
For now, we trust God in hope that this truth is our reality.
But one day, we will know the truth of God in its fullness,
deep in the recesses of our hearts,
fully in the thoughts of our minds,
totally with all our strength of our bodies,
completely with every inclination of our spirits.

Then, we will join with Mary and all the saints and angels,
and sing Timothy’s song about this great mystery:

He was revealed in flesh,
vindicated in spirit,
seen by angels,
proclaimed among Gentiles,
believed in throughout the world,
taken up in glory. (1 Timothy 3:16, NRSV) Amen.