Intro: Last week we read from the third chapter of Luke and heard about John the Baptist describing Jesus. At that point, they were both fully grown adults. Today, our lesson is from the opening chapter of Luke and Luke tells us of Jesus and John meeting even before they were born. He tells us of their mothers, Mary and Elizabeth, who are cousins, and how their lives are forever changed by God’s grace. (Read Luke)
I’d like to start this morning with quick question. And I would like to ask those who have had children what they remember about the day they first heard they were pregnant. What was it like when you found out you were pregnant for the first time? I asked that Pathways a few weeks ago, and I remember at a bible study once, there was laughter and then someone said her first thought was “well, that explains a few things!” Someone else described an inner joy, and another said there was a feeling that an era was ending and a new one beginning.
As Luke tells it, the Christmas story begins in a way very different then we celebrate it in our culture. It begins in his gospel in a place of bareness, heartache, and sorrow. It begins with a couple, Elizabeth and Zechariah, who at first glance seem fine, even fortunate in their lives, yet who in fact carry great burden of grief and disappointment in their hearts.
Luke wants us to know right from the start, right up front, that the good news of great joy has come not to those who are already happy and fulfilled, and not to those who are content and complete in their lives. But rather it has come to those who bear a great pain in their lives, and that is the reason for rejoicing. For us it has come, for us who struggle with tragedy of whatever kind. It has come to those who feel that somehow hope has been stolen out of their lives. For us, who are plagued by despair and discouragement or sorrow and shame. For us, the good news comes.
Luke starts out this way to emphasize that the good news of great joy comes to the place of great need. We should take care then not to assume that just because this is a celebration of glad tidings that everyone is happy this season, because this is not always the case. For some, this season brings into focus some of the most painful areas of their lives, memories of loved ones now separated by death, or the absence of children who live with the other spouse, or some other reminder of how things are not the way we would like them to be. Luke opens his gospel reminding us that Christmas begins in a barren place.
They seem like such a perfect couple, you wouldn’t have thought they have any problems in their life. If you weren’t one of their close friends and had not heard the lament in their lives, you would have thought that Elizabeth and Zechariah had it all. For Jews, living in the time when Herod was king of Judea, to be a priest like Zechariah was a wonderful thing. To be the daughter of a priest, as Elizabeth, was an even more wonderful thing. No doubt when they were married people said you will be doubly blessed in your life together.
They began that life, we might imagine, in great joy and anticipation. It was back then the hope of every Jewish bride that she might be the one that would bear the child who would be called messiah, the redeemer. So we might imagine that Elizabeth also began in marriage with hope and joy, and perhaps had a dream that she might be the one to give birth to the promised one. She most likely had assumed that she would have children. It probably never had occurred to her that it could be otherwise. In a society that had little value for women, giving birth was on of those few ways that they might obtain significance.
Today of course we see that viewpoint as oppressive and devaluing. But in those days when Herod was king, a woman’s value was based on her ability to have children and more specifically on her ability to have a son.
So Elizabeth assumed she would also have children. The hope she began her married life with gave way to hurt as the years went by. That hurt turned to despair as she moved in to the middle years of her life, until finally that despair hardened into disgrace in the twilight years of her life. That Elizabeth could not have children was without a doubt her greatest shame, her greatest sorrow. One that probably grew more difficult every time she heard the sound of children playing outside. We can hear her asking God, how could it be that she would be barren?
For Jews, to be barren would immediately be seen as God looking with disapproval on a couple. Some even felt it was punishment for sin. Yet Luke records what everyone had known that Elizabeth and Zechariah were upright before the Lord. They had done nothing wrong. It had plagued them, and it was a mystery that wove itself into the fabric of their prayers and found expression in that question we like to ask when God does not do what we like. It was formed on their lips and etched in their hearts, the question why? Why have you not blessed us with children?, Why have turned your face away from us?, Why has this tragedy come upon us?, and Why don’t you come and make things better?
Those are questions that are not just restricted to the times when Herod was king in Judea. We read about children dying of aids, we hear about wars and famine, and homelessness. It leaves a barrenness inside us, filled only with that question of why?
That’s how Luke starts his gospel, in a barren place But it doesn’t end there, it quickly, although for Zechariah and Elizabeth at long last, moves to the promise of hope and the experience of joy. Luke’s point, and the point of the whole incarnation that we celebrate here in the Christmas season, is that God sends the promise of new life directly into the barren place, into the place of despair and discouragement.
It is not coincidental or incidental. It is at the heart of what the Gospel means. Elizabeth rejoices and says “the Lord has done this for me, and shown me favor and taken away my disgrace.” And then Elizabeth has a rather interesting reaction. According to Luke she doesn’t go out and announce the good news to her neighbors, Luke says she remains five month in seclusion. In seclusion. We’re not told why. We are free to guess.
Maybe it is because the news was too fantastic to believe and there was no use telling others until she began to show. Maybe it was because there are mysteries that happen to us that can not be shared. Times that are too precious and extraordinary and to even speak of them is to reduce them and rob them of their glory. Like Mary, when she learned she was pregnant, pondered all these things in her heart.
Perhaps we have been touched in the center of our souls, in a way we can not describe yet can not deny That may have been the case for Elizabeth. That she choose to honor that gift of grace that had come into her life. Sometimes it seems that no one can understand those moments and that is why we don’t speak of them, sometimes it seems that no one can understand them unless they have had a similar experience.
Which brings us to the meeting of Mary and Elizabeth, sisters of a common grace. They are both recipients of a rare mystery. They feel an immediate bond because they have been visited by the spirit of God, and the mystery inside of them needs no explanation for they understood. Mary’s voice calls out, and a baby leaps within Elizabeth’s womb, and they have shared more than could ever be said by words. There is a unity they have experienced that reaches out beyond any need to explain, and they connect. Beneath their words, beyond their family ties, beyond their age differences, the life of God inside one touches the life of God inside the other, they discover they are sister of a shared surprise.
There are mysteries beyond our ability to explain, and we do not have to define or defend them. God chooses to come to us a child, to show us how to live and love. Why is God like that? Who knows? We gather to celebrate the grace and gift of God. We remember our common barrenness that cries out for the life of God. We are all in need and in the Christmas story, we all find hope. We are not forgotten or forsaken. In Jesus Christ we are favored.
We don’t have it all together, thought at first glance we may want to seem or least appear that we do. There are places in our lives that hurt and need healing, there are places in our lives that sorrow and need comfort, places that sin and need forgiveness. When we least expect it, we are visited and nurtured in ways we can not describe. God does binds us in worship as children of a shared surprise. Happy are those who believe what the Lord has promised to them – will be accomplished. Amen.