Today’s reading is from Luke chapter 1 starting at verse 39. At that time Mary got ready and hurried to a town in the hill country of Judea, where she entered Zechariah’s home and greeted Elizabeth. When Elizabeth heard Mary’s greeting, the baby leapt in her womb and Elizabeth was filled with the Holy Spirit.

In a loud voice she exclaimed, blessed are you among women and blessed is the child you will bear. But why am I so favoured that the mother of my Lord should come to me? As soon as the sound of your greeting reached my ears, the baby in my womb leaped for joy. Blessed is she who has believed that the Lord would fulfil his promises to her.

(0:51 – 1:16)

And Mary said, my soul glorifies the Lord and my spirit rejoices in God my Saviour, for he has been mindful of the humble state of his servant. From now on all generations will call me blessed, for the mighty one has done great things for me, holy is his name. His mercy extends to those who fear him, from generation to generation.

(1:17 – 3:16)

He has performed mighty deeds with his arm, he has scattered those who are proud in their inmost thoughts. He has brought down rulers from their thrones but has lifted up the humble. He has filled the hungry with good things but has sent the rich away empty.

He has helped his servant Israel remembering to be merciful to Abraham and his descendants forever, just as he promised our ancestors. Mary stayed with Elizabeth for about three months and then returned home. Morning folks, good to be with you this morning.

The Nativity is always a tough act to follow, isn’t it? I feel a bit like, you know, as they say, after the Lord Mayor’s prayed, but we’ll do our best. If you’ve got your Bible there and you had that passage open, then do keep it open. Again, you’ll find that in the Red Church Bibles as we’ll be going back there this morning.

Len Collins said to me that the title for today’s service was Christmas Nostalgia for Happiness. I thought, great, we can just watch a video of Morcombe and Wise. For those of you who weren’t about in the 1970s, that was the kind of feel-good, must-watch programme at Christmas.

I thought that, of course, because my peak Christmases were in the 1970s when I was at primary school and, of course, for most people, Christmas never gets better than when you’re about age eight or thereabouts. So as we grow up, we typically look back, don’t we, to our early Christmases with nostalgia. Nostalgia, as we thought last week, being that kind of mix of warm feelings and pleasant memories, often with a sense of loss because, of course, it was better in the old days.

(3:17 – 5:48)

A yearning for that elusive place when you felt safe and content when you were happy. But, of course, nostalgia is usually pretty selective, isn’t it? And it’s often, if we’re honest, a bit of a fiction. I’ve just finished reading quite a weighty tome about Britain in the 1970s.

And in it, the author Dominic Sandbrook describes a Britain which is very different from my Christmas memories. A Britain that was lurching from crisis to crisis, ridden with massive industrial conflict. The dead were unburied.

Public parks were turned into huge rubbish heaps, bombs going off in English cities. The cabinet meeting in January 1978 to discuss declaring a state of emergency and bringing in the army. And yet the nostalgia persists.

There’s a lot of nostalgia today isn’t there for a Britain that never really existed. But maybe, maybe perhaps that yearning for a happy place is an echo of something deeper, perhaps even something divine. Andy MacDonald was speaking last week and he read a quote from the author C.S. Lewis, the author of The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe, famously.

I’m not going to read the quote again, but basically C.S. Lewis equated the idea of nostalgia with what we might call a God-given memory. So the sense of longing and loss that we feel is because there is a place that can satisfy those longings. A place where we can be content, we can be secure, we can be at rest.

The place that we were made for, but which has slipped away from us when we became disconnected from the God who made us. The great church scholar from the early centuries of the Christian church, Augustine, put it like this. He said of God, you have made us for yourself, oh Lord, and our heart is restless until it rests in you.

(5:48 – 8:05)

And the wonderful news of Christmas, the news that we are celebrating today, and in the week to come, is that there is a way back. That the God that we rejected has made the first and greatest of all moves to bridge that gap, to reconnect you to himself, to the only place that can truly satisfy the deepest longings of the human heart. And if it feels surprising to us that that move, that story started in rural Israel 2,000 years ago, then our passage will give us an explanation about that.

Because God, the God of the Bible, the God and father of the Lord Jesus Christ, is a God who loves to work in the unlikeliest places and in the unlikeliest people. So let’s go to this passage and see if we can pick up the trail that leads us to true happiness. We picked up the reading, Fione read to us, in verse 39 of Luke chapter 1, and we picked up the story just after the angel Gabriel had famously appeared and announced to Mary that she would bear God’s son.

If you’ve got your Bible and you look back in the passage, you’ll see there in verse 31, you will conceive and give birth to a son and you’re to call him Jesus. 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, and he will reign over Jacob’s descendants forever and his kingdom will never end.

A pregnancy that was going to be miraculous, a work of the Holy Spirit, no other human would be involved. But in giving her that news, he also notes, Gabriel, that one of Mary’s relatives, possibly a cousin or an aunt, was also expecting another miracle birth. Verse 36, even Elizabeth, your relative, is going to have a child in her old age.

(8:06 – 9:58)

This wasn’t going to be a virgin conception in Elizabeth’s case, but a miracle despite her old age. So what would you do if you were Mary? You’ve been given some quite astounding news, but you’ve also been told you’ve got a relative in not a dissimilar situation. Well, you would do exactly what Mary does.

You would hot foot it to that relative and let’s talk about this. Now, Mary’s faith is remarkable in all this. Indeed, her faith stands in great contrast to Zechariah, who was the father of John the Baptist.

You can read about his encounter with an angel at the very start of Luke chapter one. Zechariah, compared to Mary, is very much the senior man. He’s the priest, he’s the pastor, and yet he, when told about Elizabeth’s pregnancy, is very disbelieving and all over the place.

Whereas Mary, this young peasant woman, her faith stands out in real contrast. But nevertheless, she is still a real human being and she was facing some pretty daunting challenges. Not least, of course, the prospect of being an unmarried mother in a first century Jewish culture.

We know from Matthew that her fiancé Joseph’s first reaction to hearing this news was to cancel the wedding. She’s a young female peasant from Nazareth, and as somebody will say later in the Gospels, nothing good ever comes from Nazareth out in the sticks. Socially, religiously, economically, this isn’t great news.

(10:00 – 10:31)

So going to Elizabeth must have been massively reassuring, because the moment Mary enters that house, Elizabeth is in no doubt about God’s favour to Mary. Indeed, the entrance of Mary, and perhaps more significantly, the entrance of Jesus within Mary, is a moment of Holy Spirit activity. We read that in those verses, didn’t we? There in verse 39 to 45.

(10:33 – 11:16)

Elizabeth is filled with the Holy Spirit and her own baby John leaps inside her, verse 41. Did I make the joke? The first Christmas jumper? But notice her greeting, Elizabeth’s greeting that she gives to Mary. Three times in these verses, she uses the word blessed or blessed.

Verse 42, blessed are you among women. Blessed is the child you will bear. Verse 45, blessed is she who has believed.

(11:17 – 11:40)

And that Bible word blessed is a rich word. It contains the idea of divine favour, of being fortunate, and indeed of being happy. You might have seen yesterday that King Charles described the success of his cancer treatment as a blessing, and we’re thankful for that.

(11:41 – 13:23)

But the greatest blessing we can have is to be blessed in relation to God. The deep sense of being secure, of being at peace, of being in the right place spiritually. People often talk, or they post on social media about their happy place, don’t they? It’s usually a seaside town or reading a book beside a log fire.

But the ultimate happy place is to be in the place of God’s blessing, to be in the place of God’s approval, which is exactly what Elizabeth’s greeting confirms to Mary about her situation. Because yes, Mary, there are going to be challenges ahead. This high calling is not going to be plain sailing.

There will be gossip. There will be misunderstandings. There will be some deep sorrow ahead, not least in the road that your child is going to take to the cross.

Remember Simeon’s word to Mary when she took the newborn Jesus to the temple, and that old man Simeon held the baby, gave thanks to God for it, and then he turns to Mary, and a sword will pierce your own soul. But Mary, blessed are you, because you are in the place of God’s favour. And those words, that confirmation, that encouragement opens Mary’s heart.

(13:24 – 15:44)

And whatever fears she might have had are replaced and overtaken with this huge outpouring of praise and joy. It triggers her to magnify the Lord with overflowing happiness. Just as a sidebar, I think this highlights why Christians need other Christians, why church is vital.

Mary had got a word from heaven itself, but she also needed Elizabeth’s encouragement to ground her in the truth of it. C.S. Lewis, I got this from Tim Keller, writes in one of his books called The Four Loves about friendship, and he talks about a group of friends that he was part of, including J.R.R. Tolkien, the author of Lord of the Rings, who C.S. Lewis knew as Ronald. And one of the friends in this group, Charles, died.

And Lewis said that when Charles died, he didn’t just lose Charles, but he also lost the part of Ronald that only Charles was able to bring out. That’s why we need others, because there are things about God and of ourselves that without others there to bring them out and to point us to, we will never see on our own. That’s why for people in Greenview, our community groups are so helpful, because there people will say things and tell me things about God that I would never have thought of.

Faith strengthening, reassuring things that I’d otherwise miss. And in Mary’s response, this song the Magnificat called that, because that’s the first word in the Latin translation to magnify, Mary lays out why her place is the happiest place that anybody could be in. And she’ll do that in two main ways.

(15:45 – 16:29)

She’ll reflect on her own blessings, but most of all, she will reflect on the giver of those blessings, God himself. And that, let me say, is the kind of balance of biblical, of Christian worship. Christian worship doesn’t erase ourselves.

We can rightly talk about our privileges and the good things in our lives, verse 49, the mighty one has done great things for me. But the greater part of our happiness is simply to praise the Lord himself. And that balance, incidentally, is exactly how I think we should approach Mary herself.

(16:30 – 19:42)

Because Mary has historically in the church been the victim of two extremes and how she’s been thought of. On the one hand, the Catholic church, for example, has just made far too much of Mary to the extent that she’s put up as somebody to pray for almost a substitute Jesus, which isn’t the Mary of the Bible. Mary is just as much in need of Jesus as anyone else.

Notice in verse 47, she talks about God, her saviour. She wasn’t sinless. She had no special powers.

But on the other hand, perhaps largely in reflection to that, making too much of Mary, those false ideas, others, perhaps more in our tradition, have tended to ignore her maybe more than we should in the great Bible story. Maybe we’ve been guilty of not giving her the honour that she’s due, the one who would be called blessed in all generations, verse 48. Because of all the godly women that we rightly celebrate, Mary surely stands at the head of them all.

But what is it about God, her saviour, that makes Mary so happy, so blessed? In a nutshell, it’s that God, the God and father of Jesus Christ, verse 52 and 53, lifts up the humble and fills the hungry with good things. You see, in our world, and very much our world, but it’s always been the same really, obsessed with celebrity and money and power and status and self-promotion. God’s blessing, God’s favour, God’s approval is to the lowly.

And that’s not saying that somehow just being poor makes you virtuous. You can be arrogant and poor. Or that being wealthy is some automatic bar to God’s approval.

Many godly rich people have come to faith. As the church historian Andrew Bonar put it, far better to be a rich man seeking God than a poor man seeking riches. But rather, this is fundamentally about a spiritual lowliness.

It’s about our hearts. You see there in verse 51, it talks about scattering those who are proud in their inmost thoughts. How do we see ourselves before God? Do we even think that we need God? Remember a minister years ago talking about conversations he sometimes has with people when he’s talking about Christianity and Jesus and faith.

And sometimes people will say to him, I’m a good person. I’ve lived a good life. I’ve got nothing to be guilty about.

(19:43 – 20:26)

To which he would reply, well you won’t be interested in Jesus then. What do you mean? What do you mean why? Well because Jesus didn’t come for sorted righteous people. He came for the lost.

If you think you can lift yourself up to God, well good luck. But if you know that’s a dead end, then Mary’s song is saying there’s hope for you. If you sense that there’s something missing in your life, if you can admit that you’ve not honoured your maker as you ought, if you’re prepared to humble yourself and admit of all your shortcomings, then Jesus is for you.

(20:28 – 20:48)

That’s why he came into the world. That’s the reason for Christmas as the Apostle Paul will later put it in one of his letters, Christ Jesus came into the world to save sinners. And so this morning if you sometimes despair of yourself, you feel a bit useless and a failure.

(20:50 – 22:05)

And you’re not just feeling sorry for yourself, but you’re conscious of the great gulf that exists between you and the glory and goodness of the eternal and perfect God, then praise God. Because you’re in the place, verse 50, where from generation to generation God extends mercy. And that place, the place of mercy and forgiveness and salvation and God’s favour is the ultimate happy place.

Because whatever else happens, God will lift you up and fill you with good things. Don’t be deceived by the power of rulers on their thrones, verse 52, or the rich with their abundance and wealth. For without God it will all be taken away, scattered and empty.

You see, Mary is amazed that God would be mindful of her. A nobody, verse 49. Verse 48, the humble state of your servants.

(22:07 – 22:22)

But that’s what God does. That’s the revelation of the God of the Bible. You see, God’s MO, his modus operandi is always to turn human pride and self-sufficiency on its head.

(22:24 – 23:41)

A peasant girl to bear his son. The creator of the universe lying in a manger. A king who washes the feet of sinners.

Jesus, who being in the very nature of God, humbled himself and became a servant even unto death and death on a cross. But who having humbled himself was exalted to glory and sits today at God’s right hand, the one to whom all power and authority and dominion has been given. And Mary rejoices in such a God and such a saviour.

Because the road to true happiness in this life starts when people are ready to humble themselves. I noted at the start, the book I was reading by Dominic Sandbrook on the 1970s, and this is what partly brought it to mind, that such was the chaotic picture he painted of the time that one of the reviewers on a little bit of blurb on the outside of the book said, it makes you nostalgic for the present. In other words, perhaps we’re actually in the good old days now.

(23:45 – 24:55)

But now, then, Christmas aged eight, none of them are ever going to meet the longing behind that sense of nostalgia. Because the real answer to those longings are not in a time or a place, but in a person. The person who can satisfy our deepest needs, because he can make us right with God.

He can take away that obstacle between ourselves and God, all our shortcomings, all our failure, all our sin, and make us new again to live for the one that we were created for. The person who in every age from Abraham and his descendants forever, verse 55, can bless you. I hope that all of us will have a very happy Christmas.

There’s still a bit to go. Hope it will be full of warm, nostalgic memories in years to come. But even if the turkey burns and the boiler breaks, you can still be happy.

(24:57 – 25:09)

If Jesus is, God, your Saviour, then you can be truly, truly blessed and happy. May God bless these thoughts from his word to us.

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