Luke 1:26-38

A Blessed Disruption

Disruptions are often reviled. We don’t like having our concentration disrupted, our work disrupted, our sleep disrupted, or our meals disrupted. While life is filled with disruptions, we work hard to avoid them and sometimes lose our cool over them. Sometimes disruptions are welcome. We might welcome a disruption to that cavity being filled. We likely have enjoyed the disruption of our winter by some warmer days. I have enjoyed the disruption a good winter storm may bring as an entire community must slow down and take a big breath during the cleanup. Sometimes a disruption comes with havoc such as our current pandemic. It is an unwelcome disruption as it takes life and livelihood. It has disrupted our life together as a church and our worship together around the Means of Grace. 

Sometimes, disruptions create opportunities as life has to be rearranged and no ways developed to accomplish what can no longer be done in conventional ways. Today, more people are working at home than ever before. From conversations with others that have been doing it for years, it seems that productivity has a chance to increase just as time with family becomes more frequent and less rushed. For us, it has created a need to explore ways of using technology that we otherwise may not have explored or ventured into unless forced by some other circumstance. The current situation has created an opportunity for us to be more interested in our members, including those that we have not seen in a while. It gives us an opportunity to do for and care for those that have a need and gives us a reason to call and to offer help.

Today, in itself, is a disruption. If you have noticed, our paraments are white and our readings don’t seem to follow any kind of Lenten theme. That is because today we disrupt or interrupt our Lenten fast and we celebrate a feast day of the Church known as the Annunciation of Our Lord. Today we feast instead of fast because today we observe that day of the angel’s visit to Mary, the mother of our Lord. It is the day, nine months before the birth of Jesus, that Gabrielle announced to Mary that she was to be with child and that her child would be the Son of God and that He would eternally reign over the house of Jacob.

It wasn’t that first time that God had interrupted the lives of women and broken the fast of their wombs but it is the first time that God had brought about an abundance of a virgin womb and what a feast it has been and ever shall be, that we celebrate the coming of our Lord in the flesh. It was a welcome disruption to Mary and to all mankind that God would break the fast of righteousness and establish the feast of forgiveness in His kingdom of Grace. Paul tells us that at the right time, God sent forth His Son. He came at an opportune time to give opportunity to man, that all who would believe in Him would have the right to be called sons of God. The fast was broken, the feast had come, It was and is a time of rejoicing and celebration for in Christ, God was reconciling Himself to mankind.

It would not be the last disruption that Mary would see in lifetime. There would be the disruption of Herod’s villainous envy and the flight to Egypt. The disruption of normal life in Nazareth as Jesus would take His ministry on the road. Of course there would be the disruption of Holy Week and that fateful Passover in which her heart would be pierced as she would watch her son suffer and die. But imagine the disruption of such sorrow for the joy of seeing her Son alive on that first Easter.

We have many disruptions in our lives, some mild, some severe, but none like the disruption in the life of Mary as she received every word from the Lord in faith. While the suffering and death of Jesus was as a hope ending disruption, it is for us the basis for all our hope in the midst of disruption. We now see every one of life’s disruptions in the view of what Mary experienced. We cannot look at any disruption as hopeless for we know of the redemption and resurrection that is ours in Jesus. Disruptions are only bumps in the rode. They make the ride uncomfortable but they cannot keep us from our destination.

Today, our lives are disrupted by Coronavirus but we can and we should rejoice in the victory over Coronavirus that has been won for us by the disrupting of devilish plans through the cross bearing death of Jesus and His the life-promising resurrection. 

Don’t let the COVID disruption get you down but rejoice in God’s disruption of sin, death, and devil.

In Jesus name. Amen.