Sermon for the Fourth Sunday of Advent

Texts:
Micah 5:2-5a;
Hebrews 10:5-10;
Luke 1:39-55.

This fourth and last Sunday of Advent is, for all kinds of reasons, a heavily pregnant time. The sights, the sounds, the frantic preparations. There’s the weight of anxiety and fear. There is breathless hope. Advent is a time of waiting, not passively but actively.

These things are captured in the story of Elizabeth and Mary. This version of the incarnation of God’s Son Jesus occurs only in the gospel of Luke. Have you ever wondered why?

Consider that Luke was the only gospel writer who we know was acquainted with the Christian communities of Asia Minor. He travelled there with the Apostle Paul. And Paul’s letters tell us that many of these open air or house-based churches were headed by prominent women.

Perhaps then, Luke gained a particularly feminine (some would say womanist) perspective on the incarnation of Jesus from these women. There are always at least two sides to every story. And the story of Elizabeth and Mary’s visit is rich in exactly the sort of detail that women have always shared.

The women speak companionably of the womb, with its warm pulsing movement. They are comfortable with God’s Spirit working mysteriously within them. They critically consider the world into which their babies will be born, a place in which their voices are mostly unheard.

Interestingly, Elizabeth’s husband Zechariah had been silenced by God’s messenger when he asked for proof that God had helped his wife to conceive a child. He was not able to speak until after the birth of his son John. And in Luke’s gospel, Joseph was simply and completely…silent.

Here are two women whose paths to pregnancy were complicated. Yet they are undauntedly looking forward. It makes complete sense that the younger woman Mary would have gone to see her elder kinswoman Elizabeth. Life experience counts when you face an uncertain future. Together they would figure things out.

This is a provocative story too. By choosing these women as special agents of grace, God works around the structures of power and authority that prevail. People cry out for God to come and act, and so God does. But not at all as we expect.

When Elizabeth spoke, she was filled with the Holy Spirit and spoke with a loud cry. Culture and tradition teach us to hear this text as saying that Elizabeth was very emotional in her greeting. But Luke’s actual words tell us that Elizabeth was speaking in a voice meant to carry across a listening crowd; a prophetic voice.

Luke had also mentioned Elizabeth’s lineage which is significant, given that at the time a woman’s lineage usually was a matter of little importance. She was from the house of Aaron, the brother of Moses. Aaron and his descendants were the first priests of Israel. The house of Aaron was responsible for leading worship and especially to offer blessings on things holy to God.

Elizabeth gave Mary a priestly blessing for her readiness to conceive God’s word in and through her, saying, “…blessed is she who believed that there would be a fulfillment of what was spoken to her by the Lord.”

Elizabeth was also God’s prophet of the incarnation. She was the first to identify and proclaim Jesus as Lord with her greeting to Mary: “…why has this happened to me that the mother of my Lord comes to me?”

And wait! There’s more provocation! Mary’s song, the Magnificat weaves in the voices of Miriam and Hannah whose songs both praised God and protested against the politics of their day. Their message continues to resonate among oppressed peoples, the poor in particular. The Magnificat was even banned as “dangerous” by India under British rule, and in more recent years in Guatemala, and Argentina.

Even so, Elizabeth and Mary did not presume to know how God would act. In their own time they would not experience under Rome’s violent rule the security or the peaceful reign that Micah prophesied. Nor would they see the world embrace Jesus as the only and final blood sacrifice acceptable to God, as the writer of Hebrews claimed.

These women only knew that God moved them out of their complacency. Their lives were unimaginably altered by God’s activity within them. Perhaps the unrecognized gift of their witness is that God’s working is not necessarily grandly structural. It can be profoundly intimate. And expectant and active waiting is just part of the deal.