4th Sunday of Advent
I know that it’s close. It’s the fourth Sunday in Advent, after all! Christmas Eve is less than a week away, at this point!! But let’s just take a moment to sit with this story, shall we. I’m not sure how it is for you all, out in the pews, but for me, as a preacher, when it comes to the story of Mary and Elizabeth, I’m always drawn not so much to the story, but to the words. Specifically, the words of Mary in what we commonly refer to as The Magnificat. I know that’s what I focus on whenever it comes up as a reading. And why not? I mean those are some mighty powerful words, after all. But in doing so, I’ve lost sight of the story over the years. Which is a shame because what happens in this story is singular, it’s powerful (doing much more than merely providing context for Mary’s song), and it’s transformative.
It’s a story that starts slowly. The author of Luke begins with Zechariah and Elizabeth, an obscure priest and his wife. An angel tries to involve Zechariah in what God is doing, but Zechariah’s doubts and questions get him in trouble with the angel who shuts his mouth. The focus then turns to Elizabeth, his wife, a newly pregnant old woman. For years she has lived what in that culture was the disgraced and empty life of a childless woman. Now joyfully and miraculously pregnant, she shuts herself away from her peering neighbors to contemplate God’s goodness to her.
The story then suddenly shifts to another woman far away in Galilee. We know even less about her. We don’t know anything about her parents or siblings. We only know that Joseph her fiancée is of the house of David. She’s a young girl, really, engaged to be married to Joseph, and she gets an unexpected visit by an angel. But this visit turns out quite differently than the visit to Zechariah. While Zechariah dithers in doubt, Mary accepts the angel’s word in faith. “Be it done to me according to your word.”
Luke’s Gospel tells us that when the angel Gabriel leaves Mary, she runs. "With haste," he writes, the newly pregnant teenager races for the hills which lie eighty miles away, not slowing down until she reaches the home of her also-pregnant relative. Luke doesn't tell us why Mary feels the need to leave Nazareth so quickly, but we can easily imagine why a girl in her circumstances would do so. Tradition tells us that Mary is only thirteen or fourteen years old when the angel appears to her. In her cultural and religious context, her pregnancy – unlike Elizabeth’s – is not a gift. It’s a disaster. At the very least, it turns her into an object of gossip, scorn, and ostracism in her village. At worst, it means she’s at risk of death by stoning. Mary runs to put both geographic and psychological distance between her vulnerable body and those stones.
When Mary gets there what we see is nothing less than the first recorded instance Jesus-centered worship. But let’s remember that this moment of worship that we see on Elizabeth’s doorstep isn’t an isolated, insulated, sanitized spiritual “thing” that just happens. It takes place at a time of tremendous fear, pain, and loss. This is worship in the crucible of uncertainty and hardship. This is worship as a safe space, worship as healing, worship as real-time formation in the spiritual disciplines of trust, hope, and surrender. The call-and-response of Mary’s greeting and the unborn John leaping in Elizabeth’s uterus, Elizabeth’s prophetic blessing and Mary’s glorious Magnificat, is the first liturgy enacted in a gathered celebration of Jesus the Christ. When Mary, the first evangelist, and Elizabeth the first convert stand at this Advent threshold, what happens between them is Good News. It is the Good News proclaimed, honored, savored, and adored, nine months before the Son of God makes his way through a birth canal.
Mary falls into Elizabeth’s arms and the two women exchange stories and confirm each other’s testimonies with loving acceptance – genuine praise and wonder erupt between them. There’s no need to wash away all the traces of “real life” from their worship in order to make it faithful or acceptable. Their worship emerges on a doorstep, in the that tender delicate space between yearning and fulfillment. Mary and Elizabeth mirror for each other the tangible, physical evidence of God’s presence in their lives. Their worship emerges in shared communion, shared fear, shared consolation, and shared hope.
This moment of spontaneous worship does not remove the difficulties and complications which surround these two pregnancies. The hard questions remain. Will Joseph stick around? Will Zechariah speak again? Will Mary’s parents disown her? Will the elderly Elizabeth live long enough to see her son reach adulthood? Will both women survive the dangers of childbirth? Will these mysterious babies really and truly change the world? Or will they die trying – and shatter their mothers’ hearts with their deaths? In the midst of so much that remains unknown, Mary and Elizabeth find a way to sing God’s praises right from their hearts which harbor these burning questions.
Elizabeth worships by pronouncing a blessing on Mary’s fierce faith, a blessing that bridges the gap between the tenuous present, and God’s promised future: "Blessed is she who believed that there would be a fulfillment of what was spoken to her by the Lord.” She connects the dots in Mary's story, making explicit the connection between trust and blessing. Mary's "favored" status has nothing to do with wealth, health, comfort, or ease. Her blessing lies solely in her willingness to trust God. To lean hard into the angel’s promise, and believe that it will sustain her, no matter what lies ahead.
Mary finds her own prophetic voice and bursts into a hope-drenched song that soars with promise not only for the child she carries, but also for Elizabeth’s, and indeed for all the world's poor, brokenhearted, forgotten, and oppressed. "My soul magnifies the Lord," Mary sings, and then her song goes on to do just that. To make more visible and clear — to magnify for the world — a God invested in revolutionary and lasting change for Creation. Mary describes a reality in which humanity’s sinful and unjust status quo is gorgeously reversed: the proud are scattered and the humble honored, the hungry are fed and the rich sent away, the powerful are brought down, and the lowly are lifted up. Mary describes a world reordered and renewed — a world so beautifully characterized by love and justice, only the Christ she carries in her womb can birth it into being.
As Episcopal priest Barbara Brown Taylor notes, Mary describes these divine reversals as if they have already happened: “He has brought down.” “He has filled.” “He has sent.” “Prophets,” Taylor writes, “almost never get their verb tenses straight, because part of their gift is being able to see the world as God sees it — not divided into things that are already over and things that have not happened yet, but as an eternally unfolding mystery that surprises everyone, maybe even God.”
What these two women celebrate is not the easy answer, the carefree life, the guarantee of prosperity. What they celebrate is a God who sees. A God whose loving gaze is focused on the tiniest and most intimate particulars of their circumstances, their bodies, their desires, their lives. “He has looked with favor,” Mary says. Let’s honor the God who looks, watches, sees, and knows, because we are held fast and forever in that knowing.
Something powerful and transformative happens when we share the fullness of our embodied selves with God and with each other in worship. We see the image of God in each other’s faces, hands, feet, and, yes, wombs. Blessing happens in our fear, in our hope, in our uncertainty, and in our surrender. The spaces we create together are imbued with presence of God. Laughter becomes holy. Tears become a sacrament, a baptism of sorts. Time bends, allowing us, even for a few trembling moments, to perceive the world as God perceives it, bruised and beautiful, raw and redeemed.
It’s almost time. It’s almost time to encounter the divine in a laboring woman’s gasps and cries. In the tremendous power of the contractions of birth. In a rush of blood, sweat, milk, and tears that portend new life. In the arms that hold, the infant who latches, the breast that feeds. Get ready.
But for now, linger here, just for a moment, on this sacred threshold, and lean in so you don’t miss the details. It’s almost time for the fulfillment, the glory, the Word made flesh. And as Scripture promises us, may all flesh see it together.
AMEN