Sermon: December 22, 2024 4 Advent

During the season of Advent, I have been using an Ignatian Spiritual exercise in which I imagine myself sitting alongside Elizabeth and Mary as we see them in the first chapter of Luke and getting to know them better. My spiritual director suggested this chapter from Luke to me because thought Elizabeth and Mary might have something to say to me. And you know what? He was right. And I’d like to share some of what I’ve learned with you.

As I have sat with those two women in my imagination, I found myself becoming very curious about them. Who were they? What was life like for them? Why did God choose them? What message is God sending all of us by choosing these two women?

So, let’s start with Elizabeth. We know that she was past what was child-bearing age in her time and place. This does not mean that she was old by our standards. It probably means that she was in her late 30’s or early 40’s. The life-expectancy for women of that time was about 40. It was reasonable for her to conclude that she would die without children.

She was from a priestly family, as was her husband. Her husband, Zechariah, was a priest. This means they were well-off and well-to-do. She had a comfortable and good life. But there was one shadow in her world, she was unable to bear children. In a culture where a woman’s primary role was to bear children, this was a shameful thing. She is humiliated by not having a child. In Luke 1:25 she says that God giving her a child, “Took away the disgrace I have endured among my people.” When God does the impossible and grants her a son, her life is changed, and her shame is ended. She is a woman who has had to live, in spite of her status and wealth, on the edge of her culture because she doesn’t quite fit into the expectations her culture placed upon her.

Elizabeth has a cousin, Mary. When Elizabeth is 6-months pregnant Mary is visited by the same angel who visited Elizabeth’s husband. The angel Gabriel comes to Mary, a betrothed 12 to 13-year-old girl, and tells her that she will bear God’s son. After a little disbelief, Mary says “yes” to God’s invitation to her.

To be betrothed in Mary’s day was something different than any practice that exists in our present day. In the Judaism of Jesus day, marriage wasn’t about love or romance, but was about procreation and a contract between two families. A father made the decision about who his son or daughter would marry. Once two families agreed that their children would marry, and the daughter had reached sexual maturity (usually at the age of 12 or 13) the daughter would be betrothed to the son. Typically, men in Jesus’ time would not marry until their late 20’s or early 30’s, so usually a young girl was betrothed to an older man. Betrothal was a legally binding commitment between two families. The only way a betrothal could be broken was through divorce or death. It wasn’t marriage but it was a lot more than engagement as we think of it today.

Marriage would usually take place about a year sometimes two years after the betrothal. During the betrothal period the bride would prepare for the marriage by sewing and making the goods they would need in their new household. The groom would prepare the home in which they would live. The groom would also spend the betrothal time studying Torah more intensely. The bride and groom did not have a lot of contact with each other during this time, and the union would not be consummated until the marriage took place. For the bride the betrothal time was a liminal time between girlhood and womanhood. It was a time in which she would also prepare psychologically and spiritually for the enormous change that was about to take place for her.

It is during this liminal time that God chose Mary to bear Jesus. She is no longer a girl and not yet a woman. This is also a very vulnerable time. To be pregnant as a betrothed woman when her husband knows that he has not been with her, is to commit adultery. To commit adultery as a woman in Jesus’ day was to risk being stoned to death or at least risk becoming a social outcast without the protection of family, friends, and community.

It is no wonder that Mary leaves town in haste after she accepts God’s call to bear Jesus. She must have been terrified of how her parents, friends, community, and most importantly her husband were going to react. I am sure getting out of Dodge seemed like the best solution, and so she travels as a young, pregnant betrothed woman to so her cousin Elizabeth, now 6-months pregnant when she thought she would never bear children.

We don’t know why Mary went to Elizabeth. We don’t know if they had a close relationship prior to this encounter. I wonder if she had some intuition that Elizabeth would receive her with love and understanding because Elizabeth also knew what it was to live in disgrace and then to have God do the impossible in her life. We don’t know, because Luke doesn’t tell us, but I think she chose Elizabeth because Elizabeth could give her what she needed.

And thankfully, Elizabeth does give Mary what she needs. She greets Mary not with judgment, disappointment, or sorrow, but with great joy.

“Blessed are you among women and blessed is the fruit of your womb. And why has this happened to me, that the mother of my Lord comes to me? For as soon as I heard the sound of your greeting, the child in my womb leaped for joy. And blessed is she who believed that there would be a fulfillment of what was spoken to her by the Lord.”

She even honors Mary beyond herself. This is exactly the support that Mary needs, and she bursts out with the beautiful song that we call the Magnificat.

And as I sat with these two women in the midst of their remarkable story, I have had the same thought again and again—the most important moment of our salvation, the moment upon which the rest of the Christian story rests, depends on a young, betrothed girl at risk of being accused of committing adultery and a long-barren woman. The moment upon which God’s work through the incarnation depends rests on two women who were regarded as mere property and vessels for procreation—women who had no rights of their own.

Perhaps God is trying to tell us something. Maybe the world as it is with its divisions by gender, race, class, sexual-identity, religion, nationality, ethnicity and all the other ways that people divide humanity is not the world that God intends. The world might regard these two women as being at the bottom, but God does not. God has always acted through powerless people, just take a journey through the Hebrew Scriptures sometime and you will see this. God has always acted in unconventional, extraordinary ways. This is the way God works. If this is the way God works, ought we not to work this way too, we who were made in God’s image?

In just a few days we will celebrate God’s breaking into our world through the Incarnation, the birth of Jesus, God’s son. If this does not turn each of our worlds upside down in the same way it turned Elizabeth and Mary’s worlds upside down, then we probably have misunderstood what the birth of Jesus is really all about. God does not care about empire, nations, wealth or worldly power. God does not align and identify with these things. God cares about the poor, the outcast, the prisoner, and the oppressed. God dreams of a world in which all are seen and treated as children of God. For as Mary spoke those many years ago:

He has shown strength with his arm;

he has scattered the proud in the thoughts of their hearts.

He has brought down the powerful from their thrones,

and lifted up the lowly;

he has filled the hungry with good things,

and sent the rich away empty.

May your world be upturned this Christmas too. Amen.