December 14, 2025 – Third Sunday of Advent
Daniel 8.15-18, 9.20-23a
Luke 1.26-38
Annunciation Moments
Third Sunday of Advent
I joked last week that, with this year’s Advent Devotionals arriving so late in the season, I was going to have to preach on all 38 entries at once since today is my last sermon of Advent. Yeah, that worked out about as well as you thought. But I did find a thread of a sort, a commonality, that runs through at least three of the past week’s devotions, and decided I would call on these trusted colleagues to assist me this morning.
Quinn Caldwell wrote on Tuesday about the wide variety of Christmas pageants churches put on this time of year. Gone are the days of simple tableaux, he writes, when all you had to do was choose a little girl to play Mary, a young lad for Joseph, and somehow find a church member or friend who is willing to lend their newborn to the cause for the baby Jesus. I speak from experience, since both my daughters played that role, as I’m sure did some of your own children. Today though, Quinn observes that church pageants seem to need a hook. There are pageants written from the point of view of the animals in the manger, of the shepherds, of the innkeeper, of the innkeepers wife – shades of a recent sermon – I once wrote a pageant from the point of view of the star of Bethlehem. Another clever hook is Christmas pageants about Christmas pageants; those of you who have read The Best Christmas Pageant Ever know it is probably the best of the genre – in fact one of my youth groups wrote and performed one of these years ago. But I have not yet seen or heard of anything from the point of view of one of the most central characters in the nativity, one without whom the entire story would never get off the ground – the angel Gabriel. (And, speaking of angels, I have taken the unchronological liberty of putting the angel on our manger scene ten days early for the sake of this morning’s sermon, though a closer look will reveal that at the United Church of Chester anyway, our angel is more a Gabriela than a Gabriel.)
Gabriel is the angelic messenger in the two most important annunciation moments in Luke’s story of the nativity. Cheryl read the better known of the two a moment ago. “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 his message is a familiar one; it’s likely we can recite at least a bit of it from memory: “Do not be afraid, Mary, for you have found favor with God. And you will conceive in your womb and bear a son, and you will name him Jesus… the child to be born will be holy; he will be called the Son of God.”
Gabriel is one of the rare biblical characters who appear in both the Old and New Testaments. In the Old Testament book of Daniel, he is mentioned on two different occasions, both times as a messenger of God come to help Daniel discern his dreams and visions. Gabriel is depicted here as a mortal, not an angel, but he still delivers the same message he did to Mary, a message of revelation combined with a word of assurance: “Daniel, I have now come out to give you wisdom and understanding… for you are greatly beloved.” Indeed, it was Gabriel who helped Daniel navigate his prophecy against Nebuchadnezzar, which landed Daniel in both the lion’s den and the fiery furnace, and helped him survive both.
By the time we meet Gabriel in the New Testament, he is an angel. And though there is agreement that this is the same character, there is no explanation of how he became an angel, except maybe by the traditional method of dying first, ascending to heaven and receiving his wings, but the Bible is silent on that point. However, his encounter with Mary is not his first appearance in the New Testament, or even the first in Luke’s gospel. The annunciation to Mary was his second annunciation; his first was to Zechariah, whose wife Elizabeth was also going to have a child. Elizabeth, you may recall, was Mary’s cousin, and she and Zechariah were about to welcome their son John into the world – John who would grow to be John the Baptist and whose life was forever connected to Jesus. That connection begins in Luke chapter one. You can how deliberate this pairing is in the two Bible verses we printed in under this morning’s sermon title in the bulletin; they are almost exactly verbatim: Luke 1.13 reads, “The angel said to him, Do not be afraid, Zechariah, for your prayer has been heard.” And Luke 1.30 reads, “The angel said to her, Do not be afraid, Mary, for you have found favor with God.” From this moment on, John and Jesus were forever linked. Remember, it was John who baptized Jesus thirty years later, and it was John who died at the hands of Herod in a foreshadowing of Jesus’ death at the hands of Pilate. Gideon’s annunciation set the stage for both. “Do not be afraid.”
Yael Lachman wrote about John the Baptist in Monday’s devotion with the same spirit and tone that Quinn wrote about pageants and their characters on Tuesday. “Day by day,” Lachman writes, “characters from gospel stories are being unboxed and plugged into the displays: trumpeting angels, watchful shepherds, bumbling donkeys, and wise kings bearing gifts.” Then he asks the question, “You know who never gets a spot in anyone’s holiday decorations? John the Baptist! Which is understandable, of course. Nobody wants to frighten their holiday visitors with a judgy, camel-clad locust-smacking wilderness hermit.” (Cue the joke about the super-calloused fragile mystic vexed by halitosis…) And Lachman is correct, of course. Even though John’s birth was a necessary prelude to Jesus’ birth, you won’t find him anywhere near the manger scene. Again, it is the angel Gabriel who connects the two. But what a connection it is – second cousins, connected in life and in death. And it is Gabriel’s annunciation, first to Zechariah, then to Mary, that unites them.
David Brooks, opinion writer for The New York Times, published a book a few years ago titled The Second Mountain: The Quest for a Moral Life. As Brooks describes it, the first mountain in human life is the self-interested pursuit of personal success, status and security. It is a mountain beyond which many never move. The second mountain though, is a journey beyond the first, the journey toward a more meaningful life through commitment and service to others. And what moves an individual beyond the first mountain to the second is what he calls “annunciation moments,” which he describes as either a moment or an experience that transforms your vision from one of self-interest to one that seeks the good of others. He adds that very often we are not aware of those annunciation moments when they occur; we are much more likely to recognize them in retrospect. One of our church’s own youth, now in her twenties, experienced an annunciation moment on our mission trip to the Lakota Cheyanne River Reservation in 2018. The experience of working with the women and children of the reservation, many of whom had been betrayed and abandoned by their fathers and husbands, moved her to pursue a career in public policy. She is currently working with refugees and asylum-seekers by providing English-language education and helping them overcome the barriers that keep them from employment and full integration into society. For her, our week in South Dakota was her annunciation moment. She leaned into Gabriel’s words of assurance, “Do not be afraid.”
They are words that speak to us as well, words that find their way into both Zechariah’s and Mary’s songs of praise. Do not be afraid to build a world where everyone – folks of all genders, races, orientations and abilities – are honored. Do not be afraid to challenge discrimination, equality, hatred and fear wherever they are found. Do not be afraid to live fully into yourself, the person God is calling you to be. Do not be afraid of your future, even and especially when it looks nothing like your past.
Both of Gabriel’s annunciations looked ahead to a birth, to something that had never been true before, the birth of the prophet and the birth of the savior. And indeed, every birth brings something new. It changes the reality of the parents, whose lives are forever altered by this new person in their lives, and by extension it changes the lives of those around them. My colleague and former associate Molly Baskette wrote wryly and profoundly about the birth of one of her children in last Sunday’s devotion. “It was the 12th hour of labor,” she writes, “and I was exhausted and scared. Like Mary, I had an angel attending me, a kind midwife at one shoulder…. [But] nobody – not my midwives, not my mother, nor any aunties or friend – had adequately prepared me for the endless agony of pushing a tiny human into the world.” While Molly is wise enough not to compare her experience to Mary’s too closely, she and we know there are certain experiences, both physical and emotional, to every birth. She writes of Mary, “Perhaps her greatest ally was her intuition to lean into the arms of God in this labor, and bring no preconceptions or plans of her own… Whether the labor pains are literal or metaphorical, solo or the collective cry of humanity,” she concludes, “Mary showed us how to breathe, push, and give birth to a Saving Grace.”
And not incidentally, Molly named her baby boy Gabriel – and I was privileged to baptize him. It is not every day you get to baptize an angel, but when you do, it is a genuine annunciation moment.