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| God has done great things |
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(Please feel free to email questions or reactions) Dec. 20, 2009 Luke 1: 39-55 May the words of my mouth and the thoughts of all our hearts be acceptable to you, O God, who sent your word to live among us. Amen. We have framed our Advent season this year as a journey to Bethlehem and we have met some interesting characters along the way. We have encountered voices from the Jewish prophets like Isaiah and Jeremiah and Micah looking forward to a time when the Holy One of Israel would be in their midst, bringing justice to an oppressed people, the one who will feed the flock and who will be the one of peace. We have encountered a grown-up Jesus, talking about a time when the world as we know it will be gone, replaced by the world that God envisions. We have encountered a grown-up John the Baptist, who told the people gathered with him in the wilderness that “every valley shall be filled, and every mountain and hill shall be made low, and the crooked shall be made straight, and the rough ways made smooth.” We have heard the voices of people displaced in our own day, people like Amal Othman, a Palestinian woman whose family lives in exile. We have heard a voice praying in Aramaic, as Jonathan Harrison led us in the Lord’s Prayer in the language that Jesus used. We have heard voices like the angels who served as God’s messenger as our choir and soloists sang the Gloria last week. And we have seen the landscape change on this journey, from a simple strips of cloth and a single candle on the first Sunday of Advent to gorgeous tree welcoming us in the second week to a landscape that has grown more abundant with each step toward Bethlehem. Today we walk along a side path on this journey. Luke’s story of Mary’s encounter with her cousin Elizabeth happens several months before the birth of Jesus. The place where this event is celebrated in the Holy Land is on the southwest side of modern-day Jerusalem, about four miles from the Old City. This is an encounter when two very different women -- both perhaps feeling very isolated and perplexed by what was happening to each of them -- reached out to one another in support. The created a connection with each other that formed the basis of a community that would then reach out to alter the world around them. I suspect there people here who know that feeling of isolation and confusion in their lives. Those feelings are hard enough when they come from the normal conditions of life – relationships ending, illnesses discovered, loved ones dying. Those feelings have been accentuated for many people this year by the dislocations of the economy and by the on-going deployments of troops to war zones. I hope for us here, this story of God entering our world through the life of a very ordinary young woman can have resonance far beyond its first century setting. Let’s start with Elizabeth, since she is the lesser known of these two women. She was an older woman – Luke does not say how old, just that she was “getting on in years.” Her husband, Zechariah, was a priest who was part of a long family line of priests who were entrusted with the honor of entering the sanctuary in the temple to offer incense while the people prayed outside. He was a good man, Luke tells us, and held a post of great importance. But Elizabeth had important family ties of her own. Luke tells us she was a descendent of Aaron, the brother of Moses and Miriam, the ancestor of all the priests in Judaism. All of this matters in our story today because of the contrast it sets up with Mary. Luke’s Gospel has Mary living with her parents in Nazareth, about 90 miles north of Jerusalem. If Jerusalem was the great social and political and religious center of Judea, then Nazareth was a backwater agricultural village out in the region of Galilee with perhaps 1,500 or 2,000 residents. Imagine the physical distance and the demographic and cultural differences between Madison and Wautoma and you begin to get the picture. We know very little about Mary or her family at this stage in the story. The assumptions are that she was young – she was not yet married and was still a virgin – and that her family was unremarkable, probably relatively poor, without any power or prestige. Beyond their relationship as cousins, Mary and Elizabeth would not seem to have a lot in common. Except for this: They both became pregnant when they were not expecting it. Elizabeth thought she was too old. Mary thought she was too young. And they both knew what it was like to be shunned. For years, Elizabeth undoubtedly had to put up with the snide remarks of others as they raised their children. Being barren in the culture of that day was a condition of great shame and it was always blamed on the woman. For all the prestige in her heritage, Elizabeth was surely made to feel like a failure by those around her. For her, the pregnancy -- even though she was getting on in years -- surely gave her a sense of vindication. But it also may well have started a whole new round of gossipy chatter among those who knew her. Mary, meanwhile, faced a dilemma known to women across the ages. Suddenly, she is an unmarried teenage mother-to-be. She couldn’t exactly expect people to believe her if she tried to explain that this was God’s baby. We can only imagine what her parents thought, the shame and anger they must have felt. And Joseph – the guy she was going to marry – well, it took an angel appearing in a dream to settle him down. As word spread, the stares and put-downs directed at Mary must have grown more and more harsh. She probably also knew that as word of her pregnancy spread, her life could be in danger. This was a crime that according to the legal codes of the time could be punished by death—either by stoning, strangling, or burning. You can understand why Mary might want to find a different place to spend some time as this baby was growing within her. In Luke’s story of the angel Gabriel telling Mary that God had chosen her for a special role in history, Gabriel also tells her old cousin Elizabeth is already six months pregnant. Whatever relationship they had before, now seems like a perfect time for these two women in connect with each other. A few years ago, a woman named Joyce Hollyday was the associate editor of Sojourners magazine. She wrote about the connection between Mary and Elizabeth with these words: “I like to imagine what their days together were like. They must have been filled with shared secrets, laughter, a few tears, and dreams of a future unlike any they had conceived before. They watched their wombs swell, felt their sons growing within, probably rubbed each other's aching backs and sore feet at the end of the day. “Elizabeth, in her experience and wisdom, had much to share with her younger cousin. “She understood the requirements of faith and the challenges of marriage. “She knew that some would point with scorn at Mary, pregnant before her wedding, just as some had spoken of her own barrenness with reproach. “She knew how to live proudly despite the whispers behind her back, and how to be grateful to God no matter what the circumstances. “She understood what it meant to be a vessel of God's will.” Joyce writes that together, these two women were nurturing a revolution. Years later, their sons would wander far from Nazareth and Bethlehem and Jerusalem. They would call people to a new way of living, they would shatter past expectations and show that in God’s vision for the world, “the crooked shall be made straight, and the rough ways made smooth.” So they meet, these two women, one old, one young; one married, one single; one urban, one rural, both unexpectantly pregnant, both key people at this hinge of history. Their connection to one another gives them the support they need, but it does not stop there. Their connection to one another also connected them to something much bigger than themselves. On a micro-scale, this is the message Jesus would teach his followers and this is what we try to be to a community of Jesus’ followers. We help connect people in need to one another and in that connection, we find God’s grace for each other. God comes alive in the acts of human beings like us. Just like Elizabeth and Mary, we find that we are not alone in tough times as long as we reach out to one another. Having found one another, these two women bubble over with excitement. “Blessed are you among women,” Elizabeth says in greeting Mary – wonderful words of welcome to a girl who had been shunned at home. Mary launches into a song of her own. Luke drew on the song of Hannah in the Hebrew Bible for what we know as the Magnificat, or Mary’s Song. Hannah, like Elizabeth, had long wanted a child but was barren. When she learned she was pregnant, she broke into a song about how God has turned the world upside down. She stood in the line of women from Abraham’s wife to Sarah up through Elizabeth whose story is one of unexpected new life. An author named Jim Taylor has paraphrased Mary’s Song, so I’d like to end with some of his version and then invite you to join in the spirit of that song by listening to a rendition of Mary’s song from Kelly, Lynn, Connie and me. My body grows round with wonder, my soul swells with thanksgiving. For God has been so good to me; God did not say, "She's just a girl." In all generations, I am blessed. How could anyone miss it? This new life in me is divine. It is holy. God grants new life to all who have not lost a child's wonder; they will be born again, and again, and again. God's fierce love fills predators with sudden fear. The miracle of birth levels our human differences: tough men become tenderly gentle, learned professors blurt out baby talk, even politicians fall silent in awe. But the small and helpless are wrapped warmly in soft blankets; they are held lovingly in caring arms; they drink their fill with eyes closed. The rich, for all their wealth and status, can go suck lemons. That is how God deals with all of God's faithful people, all who do not put their faith in themselves. So God has always done, so God will always do. from Sarah's miracle, to mine. |