First Presbyterian Church of Winchester

Serving Christ and Neighbor in Winchester and Beyond since 1800

  • Home
  • Contact Us
  • Service Times
  • Help with WATTS Week!
  • Are You New?
    • Service Times
    • Directions & Parking
    • Accessibility
    • Child Care
    • Sunday School
    • Membership
  • About Us
    • Beliefs
    • History
      • Boyd Memorial Chapel
    • Affiliations
    • Baptism
    • Communion
    • Weddings
    • Request to Use the Facilities
    • Church Leadership
    • Staff
    • Employment
    • Facebook
  • Ministries
    • Children’s Ministry
      • CM News
      • Kids Sunday School
      • Child Care
      • Safe Sanctuaries
      • Sign up for the Weekly CM Email Blast
      • Vacation Bible School
    • Youth Ministry
    • Adult Christian Education
    • Weekday Preschool
    • Mission and Outreach
    • Rise Against Hunger
    • WATTS
    • Care and Compassion
    • Prayer
    • Music
      • Children’s Choirs
      • Youth Choir
    • Worship
      • Watch Worship Online
      • Worship and Discipleship Council Collaboration
      • New Stone Gathering
    • Congregational Life
    • Stewardship
      • Make a Pledge!
      • Questions and Answers About Pledging
      • Planned Gifting
      • Automatic Withdrawal
        • Printable Form
      • Frequently Asked Questions About Donating Online
      • Donate
  • News & Events
    • View Online Worship Services
    • Coronavirus
    • eNotice
    • Calendar
    • Subscribe to Weekly eNotices
    • Member Directory
  • Sermons
    • Dan McCoig
    • Amanda Thomas
  • Donate
  • WATCH WORSHIP
You are here: Home / Uncategorized / December 21, 2014 Sermon: “Impossible Things”

December 21, 2014 Sermon: “Impossible Things”

December 22, 2014 by Todd Bowman

December 21, 2014

“Impossible Things”

The Rev. Maren Sonstegard-Spray

Luke 1:26-38

26 In the sixth month the angel Gabriel was sent by God to a town in Galilee called Nazareth, 27 to a virgin engaged to a man whose name was Joseph, of the house of David. The virgin’s name was Mary. 28 And he came to her and said, “Greetings, favored one! The Lord is with you.” 29 But she was much perplexed by his words and pondered what sort of greeting this might be.30 The angel said to her, “Do not be afraid, Mary, for you have found favor with God. 

31 And now, you will conceive in your womb and bear a son, and you will name him Jesus. 32 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. 33 He will reign over the house of Jacob forever, and of his kingdom there will be no end.” 34 Mary said to the angel, “How can this be, since I am a virgin?” 35 The angel said to her, “The Holy Spirit will come upon you, and the power of the Most High will overshadow you; therefore the child to be born will be holy; he will be called Son of God. 36 And now, your relative Elizabeth in her old age has also conceived a son; and this is the sixth month for her who was said to be barren. 37 For nothing will be impossible with God.” 38 Then Mary said, “Here am I, the servant of the Lord; let it be with me according to your word.” Then the angel departed from her.

Let me ask you a question to begin out time together: for those of you responsible for the naming of a child, did you struggle with what to name your child?

Lara Davis, our weekday school director, asked the staff that question this week as she was leading the devotion at our weekly staff meeting.  And the answer for most of us was yes.  There is power in a name, some might even say there is destiny in a name.

So we try to come up with a name so that our children won’t get made fun of.  Can we ourselves make fun of it?  If so, it is off the table.

At our staff meeting our secretary Pat said that at her last place of work they called her “Ginger” – her last name is Snapp.

 

And special thanks to Shaun Galang for coming up with the name “Ocean” for my first child, so that would have been “Ocean Spray.”

 

We think of names that connect us to the past, to our families.  Maren Sonstegard was my great, great grandmother who traveled to this country in the 1860s from Norway.  There are several of us with this unique name.

 

We think of names that make our child unique. I read an article recently about the actor Benedict Cumberbatch, who was getting nowhere in his career when he took the stage name Benedict Carlton, when his agent suggested he try his real name, to which he said something like, “but even I can’t pronounce it.”

 

We have to figure out how to spell the name the way we want since there are many ways to spell a name, and many of us will spend our lives having our names misspelled or mispronounced.

 

Do we want our child to have a nickname and what will it be?

 

We consider what the initials will spell.

 

There was a study published in 1999 in the Journal of Psychosomatic Research, that found that males with positive initials (like ACE, ICE, JOY, VIP, CEO, GEM, FLY, FOX, HIP, WIT and WIN) lived 4.5 years longer than a control group of males with neutral initials, while males with negative initials (like DIE, ZIT, PIG, DUM, RAT, GAS, BAD, BUM and SIN) lived 2.8 fewer years. That study has been challenged – but names still can have a powerful influence over us.

 

And then there is the meaning of our names.  Jennifer our bookkeeper discovered in our staff meeting that her name means “white enchantress” and her last name is White.

 

And that brings us to Mary.  Mary and I share something in common.  My name, Maren, is the Norwegian or Germanic form of Mary – and it means most likely “sea of bitterness” from the Hebrew word for bitter.

 

In Exodus the wandering Israelites comes to a place where the water is so bitter that they cannot drink it, and so they call the place, “Marah.”

 

Naomi, when she returns to Bethlehem with Ruth, as an impoverished woman who has lost her husband and two sons, tells the people she meets, “Call me no longer Naomi, call me Mara, for the Almighty has dealt bitterly with me.”

 

What do we know about Mary?  Not a whole lot.  She appears a handful of times in the stories of Jesus’ life.  Luke describes her the most.

 

In Mark, her most memorable appearance may be the account in which she and her other sons come to take Jesus home, hearing from others that Jesus is out of his mind.

 

In Matthew’s account she is mentioned only at the birth of Jesus and at his death. John never mentions her by name and Paul makes no mention of her at all.

 

Some years ago a vandal attacked Michelangelo’s Pietà with a hammer, seriously damaging the face and arm of the figure of Mary. A magazine article writing on the incident suggested that the act was symbolic of the misuse of Mary by the church – by the Catholic tradition which has given Mary a lot of attention, while our own tradition has perhaps ignored her too much.

 

There have been times in history when she has been raised to the level of “Mother of God” or medieval theologians used to speak of a “quaternity” instead of a trinity.  Accusations of Mary worship have been thrown around.

We know that she was young, married off by her father to a likely older man.  During the first year of her engagement she would have lived at home with her family, after which her husband would come retrieve her and there would be a weeklong wedding celebration.  In the account we read this morning, the wedding hasn’t happened yet.

 

We picture her in our minds as beautiful, meek, holy, gentle.

 

But what if it was not so.  What if she was a sea of bitterness or rebellious (as another meaning of the name Mary implies), as a young teenager, maybe 12 or 13 bonded in marriage to a man she barely knows, forced away from her family, angry and isolated.

 

What if she wasn’t gracious and grace-full?

 

What if she was angry, scared, rebellious and bitter?

 

Let’s take this in light of what happens in the story.  The angel Gabriel appears to her and says, “Greetings favored one.  The Lord is with you.”

 

And then we read, “But she was much perplexed by his words and pondered what sort of greeting this might be.”

 

So far the angel has said nothing shocking or miraculous, but you notice that Mary is baffled, not by the angel (which we would probably take as the part that is baffling and miraculous), but by his words.

 

“Highly favored” means “to grace,” or to be the object of grace, translated elsewhere in the New Testament as “accepted.”

 

What if his greeting is the first miracle?  That God would enter into our bitterness and rebellion and call us favored.  That is the first miracle and that is what Mary struggles to understand.  She hasn’t really done anything.  She hasn’t sought out this encounter – God seeks her out.

 

Karoline Lewis, who is a preaching professor at Luther Seminary, shares the story of being a Lutheran preacher’s kid at a Catholic high school, and when she hears the passage we read today it brings her back to the celebration of Annunciation Day in High school.

 

She writes “I remembered being amazed and even surprised when I first attended an Annunciation Day mass at San Domenico School for Girls. I had some sense that as a Lutheran this was neither an event nor day that we acknowledged or celebrated. I was perplexed and considered the rationale for and reasons behind why our classes would start an hour late that day. But the primary image that came to my mind is being surrounded by girls, by my friends, and thinking, God has looked with favor on us. The feeling that I remember from that day in the midst of unfamiliar ritual and religiosity is that God had regarded me.

 

It is no small thing to be regarded, to be favored, especially when you are exceedingly aware that you should not be.”

 

It is no small thing to be regarded especially when you are aware that you should not be.  That’s Mary.

 

So what we find in our text this morning is a string of impossible things, miraculous things, but it begins here, with this idea that is played out in the Bible and in our lives.

 

This is the Biblical story – the whole big arc of the story tells us this one thing: that God regards us, seeks us out, and we are keenly aware that we should not be.  The glorious, miraculous announcement of Jesus’ birth, that God will be with us, that is part of the same story.  It fits right into the miracle that God calls us “favored,” that God is with us – that is the beginning of the miracles.

 

The final piece, the final miracle, is that Mary says, “Let it be.”

 

In his book “Here I Stand,” Roland Bainton writes that Martin Luther saw three miracles in Christ’s nativity: God became human, a virgin conceived, and Mary believed. In Luther’s mind, the greatest was the last.

 

Luke’s account of Mary paints a picture Christian discipleship – like Mary, we discover to our immense surprise that God has favored us, that God is with us.

 

Why?  We are screw ups, we hurt other people, we hurt ourselves, we damage our planet, we are selfish, sometimes our marriages fall apart, sometimes we cannot bear our parents or our children, we get stuck on things that we just cannot let go of, we are afraid and anxious, we are so distracted by our lives that we barely give a thought to God, we are bitter, we are rebellious.  It is impossible for God to love us – most of the time we don’t even love ourselves.  It is impossible.

 

And yet, God announces to each of us, through Jesus Christ, “I am with you, favored one.”

 

And Mary’s response is the model for our response, “Let it be with me according to your word” so much like what Jesus says towards the end — “Not my will but yours be done.”

 

Luke wants to make sure we know why she is favored and blessed.

 

Her relative Elizabeth, who has also been visited by an angel about a miraculous birth says, “blessed is she who believed that there would be a fulfillment of what was spoken by the Lord.”

 

So Mary is not blessed because she is going to be the physical mother of Jesus, but because she believed what God said.  She was open and willing to walk the road with God in humble trust.

 

This is a good place for us to arrive at in this fourth week of Advent.  What have all these weeks of preparation meant?

 

Hopefully our time of mindfulness and self-reflection and repentance and walking in darkness has brought us to this place of humble trust in God.

 

The road ahead of us is unknown.  What God will do next is unknown.

 

There are impossibilities staring us down: Can we break through this addiction?  Can we mend this friendship?

 

Can we remain in communion with people with whom we strongly disagree?

 

Will we finally find out way out of this depression, will our child, will our parent, will our friend?

 

Will we figure out what to do with our lives?

 

Will this bitterness ever leave our hearts?

 

Seemingly impossible things.

 

When the Angel appears to Mary we learn that the impossible becomes possible – that with God, the impossible becomes possible.  Let it be.

 

Amen.

Filed Under: Uncategorized

Serving Christ and Neighbor in the Heart of Winchester and Beyond

View Online Worship Services

Facebook Feed

Instagram Feed

firstpresbyterianwinchester

First Presbyterian Winchester
Worship at home with us this morning! Click the li Worship at home with us this morning! Click the link bio to go to our Facebook page, YouTube Channel, or our Virtual Church webpage for worship at 10 AM.
eNotice - Link in bio (FPC News) We're putting tog eNotice - Link in bio (FPC News) We're putting together care packages for our healthcare heroes! Have coffee with the pastors over Zoom this Sunday! and more! #winchesterva #pcusa
Whoo-hoo! Many friends were able to sign-up to hel Whoo-hoo! Many friends were able to sign-up to help with FPC's WATTS Week, but we still have some spots to fill out! In Guest Services, we need a few friends to assist on each day, and on the last day--Saturday, January 30. If you are able to volunteer, please sign-up wherever you can. Go over to http://ow.ly/Jd0w50D9PNO and take a look at each tab to see where help is needed. Instagramers, click link in bio. We do not have much time left before our assigned WATTS week. Please prayerfully consider how you can help if you are able. WATTS week is Saturday, January 23-Saturday morning, January 30. If you have signed up to donate supplies or food, come to the church parking lot for a drive-thru WATTS donation drop-off on Saturday, January 16 from 2pm-3pm, and Thursday, January 21 from 4pm-5pm. If you cannot make those dates, please contact the church office at info@fpcwinc.org. Drop-off via our kitchen door will also be available on Wednesday & Thursday, 1/20-21 from 10am-4pm.
Our Adult Faith Formation class begins tonight in Our Adult Faith Formation class begins tonight in 1/2 hr at 7:30pm.
Instagramers, click the link bio, we have the Zoom class link and class materials buttons in our Linktree.
OR...
To access the online class, click here: http://ow.ly/LE0K50D8TYJ
To access the class materials, click here: http://ow.ly/jfju50D8U1g

Led by Pastor Dan McCoig Jr. See you soon!
Special Announcements. Click in bio for latest FPC Special Announcements. Click in bio for latest FPC News.
(1) Adult Faith Formation MLK Jr Class Series begins TONIGHT at 7:30pm. Access via Zoom at https://us02web.zoom.us/j/89841223984
(2) WATTS needs YOU! You can donate money and/or supplies! We do need volunteers to assist in-person but we have safety protocols in place. Please read this email or go to fpcwinc.org/watts and click the Sign-Up Genius links for details on how to help and availability. WATTS hosted at ONE site this year at 308 N. Braddock Street. FPC's week to help is January 23-30.
(3) We are putting together care packages for our healthcare heroes! We are in need of donations and/or handwritten notes.
Read this special email for details and information.
Have you signed up yet to help with WATTS Week for Have you signed up yet to help with WATTS Week for FPC? This year will be a little different due to COVID-19. Go to https://www.fpcwinc.org/watts and click the Sign-Up Genius logo to be taken to the online sign-up forms. Please read each tab's description and details on how to help. If you need assistance, please send an email to info@fpcwinc.org for help.

Image description: The color purple background. In the color white, the WATTS logo with outstretched hands sheltering a person icon. Also in the color white, it reads: WATT Week for FPC is January 23-January 30. The entire season of WATTS will be permanently hosted at First UMC at 308 N. Braddock St. What is needed: dinner sponsorships, perishable and disposable dinnerware donations, and guest services helpers. Find Details on How to Help or Donate at fpcwinc.org/watts
#winchesterareatemporarythermalshelter  #winchesterva #pcusa
FPC Epiphany Seasonal Team Newsletter - Click link FPC Epiphany Seasonal Team Newsletter - Click link in bio, click first button (FPC news), then click the most recent link.
Worship at home with us this morning! Worship at home with us this morning!
This Week's eNotice - Online Holy Communion this S This Week's eNotice - Online Holy Communion this Sunday  Online Ordination and Installation of Ruling Elders Worship on Zoom this Sunday  Drive-Thru "Remembering Our Baptism" event in the church parking lot THIS Sunday afternoon  Sign-up for WATTS Week and more! Click link in bio, then click the first button to FPC's news, then click the recent link.
Screen readers: black and white simpe, line drawin Screen readers: black and white simpe, line drawing of a person baptizing another in a river, with a dove flying above. Text: January 10 is Baptism of the Lord Sunday, a day on which Christians commemorate Jesus’ baptism by John and remember their own baptisms. We invite you to a drive-through commemoration from 2:00 p.m. to 3:30 p.m. on January 10 in our Cameron Street parking lot [weather permitting]. Wooden hearts will be anointed with oil by Dan and Amanda and placed in persons outstretched hands using an extended reacher with the words “As God’s beloved, remember your baptism.” In response, you are asked to speak quietly or silently, “I remember my baptism and will show the love God has shown me to others. Amen.” ALL ARE WELCOME!
Screen Readers: Watercolor of the Holy Spirit as a Screen Readers: Watercolor of the Holy Spirit as a dove, over water, with pastel colors. 
Ordination and Installation of Ruling Elders of First Presbyterian Church of Winchester, Virginia, after our live-streamed worship on Sunday, January 10, 2021. 11:30 AM via Zoom. Access by click the link in bio and click the "Ordination" button.
This Sunday Only - Ordination/Installation Service This Sunday Only - Ordination/Installation Service and Drive-Thru event at FPC! Plus, sign-up to help, through donations or as a helper, for FPC's WATTS Week! Click the link in our bio, then click the first button view details of this email. Click the second button to sign-up for WATTS Week, whether through donations or as a helper.
Worship at home with us this morning! Click the li Worship at home with us this morning! Click the link in the bio, then click the live stream button.
HAPPY NEW YEAR! 2021!Click on the link, click on o HAPPY NEW YEAR! 2021!Click on the link, click on our linktree, click on the latest link!
Worship at home with us this morning! Click the li Worship at home with us this morning! Click the link in the bio, then click the live stream button.
MERRY CHRISTMAS! and it's Friday! eNotice is here! MERRY CHRISTMAS! and it's Friday! eNotice is here!🎄 Click the link in the bio, then the first button to see the latest eNotice. #winchesterva #pcusa #christmas #matthew25
Screen Readers: Click link in bio, then select the Screen Readers: Click link in bio, then select the second button "Pastor Dan's Christmas Letter" for the text. #winchesterva #christmas #christmaseve #pcusa
Screen readers: Join us for an illuminated, safe, Screen readers: Join us for an illuminated, safe, and outdoor Christmas Eve Service. Dress warmly--masks and distancing required. Bring a chair if needed. 5 pm (service will be brief). This service will occur regardless of the weather. If raining/snowing, cars are welcome in the parking lot (first come basis) and friends are welcome to stay in cars with windows down for sound. Luminaries and candles will be available. Our parking lot is located on South Cameron Street, near the intersection of Cork and Cameron Streets. #winchester #winchesterva #christmas #christmaseve #pcusa #worship
Join us virtually or in-person on Christmas Eve! W Join us virtually or in-person on Christmas Eve! We will premiere our virtual Lessons and Carols worship by noon, and you are welcome to join us in-person (masked and distanced) in our parking lot at 5 pm for a special worship service. This year's Christmas Eve offering will go to the Helper Fund. If you would like to make a donation online, go to our website, fpcwinc.org, and click "Donate". Online donors: be sure to designate your giving.
Join us tonight at 5 pm in our South Cameron Stree Join us tonight at 5 pm in our South Cameron Street parking lot.
Load More... Follow on Instagram

Return to top

First Presbyterian Church of Winchester | 116 South Loudoun Street | Winchester, Virginia, USA, 22601

Tele. No.: 540-662-3824 | Fax: 540-662-8498