Fourth Sunday of Advent
Grace be to you and peace from God our Father and the Lord and Savior Jesus Christ. Amen.
“In those days Mary set out and went with haste to a Judean town in the hill country.” Thus begins our gospel reading this morning. In other words, Mary runs. The angel Gabriel had just left her after announcing that she would become pregnant from the Holy Spirit and bear the savior of the world. She had agreed to it, but now she runs to the hills.
Why does she run? Luke doesn’t say, but we can guess she runs because her pregnancy would cause a scandal in the village. Young, unmarried women had no business getting pregnant. They could get punished rather severely, anywhere from exclusion to death. To escape all that, Mary runs.
I imagine she also runs because she needs someone to talk to. Her parents would be too angry, Joseph too hurt, neighbors too skeptical. Whom can she talk to? Who would listen to her? The angel points her in the right direction: Her kinswoman Elizabeth. Why Elizabeth? Because she herself is also experiencing an unexpected pregnancy.
Elizabeth had been childless. In those days, a woman unable to give birth was considered a failure. For years and years, I imagine, she had fervently prayed for a baby. Then she went through menopause and gave up the dream and settled into the idea that she and Zechariah would grow old together alone.
Yet lo and behold, the angel comes and announces that Elizabeth will have a baby after all, and not just any baby, but a messenger of God who will prepare the way of the Lord.
Usually, pregnancies are greeted with joy and excitement and hope and dreams. Sometimes, however, that joy is dampened, if not overshadowed, by the circumstances in which the pregnancy occurs.
I remember a conversation with my great-aunt Lotte. Lotte and her husband Karl had gotten married right at the beginning of World War II. They had both survived, but had been completely bombed out. Lotte’s mother took them in. The apartment was completely over-crowded with family members just like Lotte and Karl, stranded at the end of the war with no place to go. Food was tight, space was at a premium, the future was uncertain.
And then Lotte discovered she was pregnant. She was devastated, and she dreaded having to tell her mother that there would be yet one more person entering the cramped situation.
A couple of years ago, I sat with several young adults at coffee hour. One woman announced that she was pregnant. We all cheered and congratulated her. She broke into tears. She had no idea how she and her husband were going to afford the costs associated with having and raising a child. She felt completely overwhelmed.
Not every pregnancy is all good news. Sometimes they occur at inconvenient times and overwhelm the women and men involved.
As we read the story of Mary and Elizabeth today, I would like us to pause and consider what their pregnancies must have done to them and their lives. Christmas cards and classic paintings tend to romanticize the situation. Let us take a moment today to truly ponder their situation.
Elizabeth must have been overwhelmed. She is old. Her husband is old. When I taught a Bible study on Elizabeth once, I found a drawing of two octogenarians gazing down at a newborn, and it hit me just what a challenge this pregnancy and birth presented. I know how uncomfortable and draining pregnancy was in my late twenties and early thirties. I can’t imagine going through that now, let alone a couple decades from now. Physically, this must have been overwhelming.
On top of that, I am sure the gossip mongers had a field day with this, an old couple pregnant. Whom would Elizabeth talk to? Who would she go to for support? Nobody in her age group had ever experienced anything like this. It must have been a lonely, scary time for her.
Mary experiences a similar time of anxiety and isolation. She is young. First pregnancies are always scary; I remember feeling quite anxious at times. But I had the loving support of a husband and an extended family, the wisdom of a congregation, and the approval of society. Mary had none of that. And so she runs to the hills.
She runs to her kinswoman Elizabeth, the only other woman who might understand her strange circumstances, the person the angel had pointed her to.
I love how these two women are there for each other. Both overwhelmed by their pregnancies, their callings, their roles in God’s salvation story, they greet each other and rejoice in each other and affirm each other. This is friendship or community or support group at its best: being there for one another and affirming one another and comforting one another and giving one another hope.
There is more going on here than mutual support, though. It was pointed out to me in an essay by Pastor Debie Thomas in her blog “Journey with Jesus”. She writes: “The story of the Visitation […] is nothing less than the story of the first Christian worship service in history. The call-and-response of Mary’s greeting and Elizabeth’s leaping uterus, Elizabeth’s prophetic blessing and Mary’s glorious Magnificat, is the first liturgy enacted in a gathered celebration of Jesus the Christ.”
I had never noticed this before. Yes, these women are worshipping! The angel of the Lord brought them together, just like the Holy Spirit gathers us here. They are gathered around the word of God’s promise and around the body of Christ, as yet in utero. In their worship, they experience community and hope and the presence of God, and together they embrace the future with the hope born of faith.
In this ambivalent, challenging time in their lives, God brings Mary and Elizabeth together to worship. In worship, they celebrate that God is present with them through the incarnation of the Savior about to be born.
Week after week, we see terrible images of destruction from all over the nation and from around the world. Another school shooting last Monday. Another bombing in Russia’s war with Ukraine. Another revelation of atrocities committed by Assad regime in Syria. It is all so completely overwhelming.
When terror or disaster strike, what do countless overwhelmed people do, almost immediately? Hold vigils. They come together in worship. They gather with other equally overwhelmed people to embody the presence of Christ for one another, to affirm God’s presence to one another, to recall hope born of faith.
Elizabeth points out to Mary where the grace of God is in her life: You are blessed, and the child you bear is a blessing. When Mary is too overwhelmed to recognize signs of God’s presence, Elizabeth helps her see them, so her faith can be restored.
We do that for one another in the aftermath of disaster, and all other times, too. When we share God-spotting stories, we affirm the good God is doing in the world right now. When we celebrate the money we collected for Hurricane Helene relief, we give thanks for God’s real presence in the world. When we collect so many gifts for Springfield Hospital that we almost couldn’t get them all into Terry’s truck, we assure people in mental health distress that God is with them and loves them. When we show up for the Blue Christmas service and invite others to lean on us, we show them that Christ cares.
In word and action, we point out the presence of God, the incarnation of grace. We find comfort and hope in seeing those signs of Emanuel – God with us.
Pastor Debbie Thomas writes in her essay: “It’s worth noting then, that the worship we see on Elizabeth’s doorstep doesn’t take place at some sanitized remove from fear, pain, and loss. This is worship in the crucible of uncertainty and hardship. This is worship as haven, worship as healing, worship as real-time formation in the spiritual disciplines of trust, hope, and surrender. As Mary falls into Elizabeth’s arms, as the two women exchange stories, as they confirm each other’s testimonies with loving acceptance – genuine praise and wonder erupt between them. They don’t have to scrub their worship clean of all “real life” traces in order to make it faithful. Their worship emerges on a doorstep. Neither-here-nor-there, in-betwixt-and-between, in the tender spaces between yearning and fulfillment. As 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.”
I mentioned earlier how so many depictions of Elizabeth and especially of Mary are beautiful, romantic, ethereal. Countless statues of the Virgin Mary show us a beautiful, serene woman who seems somewhat above it all, somewhat removed from the realities of life.
I find the Mary and Elizabeth of the gospel today a lot more helpful and inspiring. Two women find themselves in overwhelming situations that are down to earth, that we can relate to, that are real.
These two women show us how to cope in times like that: gather with the faithful for worship, because in worship we recall the promises of God, we affirm the presence of Christ, we strengthen each other’s hope born of faith, we point each other to the signs of God’s grace, we break into songs of praise.
Thank you that you followed the urging of the Holy Spirit today and gathered here for worship. May this holy time with God and one another help us to sing God’s praise, even in times when we feel overwhelmed. Amen.