by Pastor Kelli Schmit

Our reading today begins with, “In those days Mary set out and went with haste to a Judean town in the hill country…”  This is a terrible way to begin a lectionary reading because it begs the question, in what days? A Thursday? The days leading up to a great, Jewish festival? Her birthday? What days?

Just moments ago, an angel named Gabriel visited the young, teenager Mary. Now, a personal visit from a messenger of God, that alone is enough to make anyone freak out a little. But the message Gabriel brought Mary wasn’t “remember to get fruit at the market” or “avoid the lamb kebabs later this afternoon…take my word for it.”

The message was, “You’ll conceive and give birth to a son. His name has already been picked out; it’s Jesus. He will be called lots of things, like Son of the Most High. Oh yeah, and God will give him the throne of his ancestor David.”

I would have loved to watch Mary try to take in all of this information. Like, “Oh really?  Is that all?” When she asks how this could literally, physically take place, Gabriel explains, by the power of the Holy Spirit. Like that clears up the confusion. If anything, that should compound it ten-fold. 

But Mary, not a sarcastic cynic like some preachers – but Mary, full of devotion and faithfulness and trust, agrees to God’s plan. And to offer a little proof that God’s word can be believed, Gabriel mentions that Mary’s elder cousin, Elizabeth, the branch of the family tree that will not extend because she is too old to have children – this Elizabeth is six months pregnant.

So when our story begins with “in those days,” those are the days we’re talking about. No wonder she leaves and hurries off to see Elizabeth. One, to see if Elizabeth was really going to become a mother, and two, to tell her trusted relative everything that had just happened to her. Not only did Mary’s conversation partner, Gabriel, bring an unbelievable message, but the whole context around Mary’s story complicates things further.

Mary was unmarried and pregnant, by the Holy Spirit no less, and the baby will be called Son of the Most High and take over the throne of the great king David. She can’t get her brain around this so she rushes to someone she can trust, someone who won’t scorn or shame or dismiss her.

Not only is the plan unbelievable, but by agreeing, Mary is risking her relationship with Joseph. Her family’s honor is at stake. She could be stoned to death for being pregnant without a husband. No wonder that when she agrees to God’s plan, she rushes with great haste to Elizabeth. In a time of great confusion and joy and fear and misbelief, who does she go to? Elizabeth emotionally supported the mother of our Lord in what I would have to think is in the Top 5 of the most difficult days in Mary’s life.

These two expectant mothers stay together for three months. Both of their bellies growing along with their nerves and excitement, their hesitation and joy. I wonder if Elizabeth helped Mary with tips and tricks for taking care of morning sickness? Did Mary help Elizabeth with common tasks as it became difficult to maneuver through life with swollen ankles and heartburn. During a time of absolute fear and confusion, joy and disbelief – God’s presence and promised movement in tumultuous times continues, even more noticeably in some moments.

In response to John’s fetal gymnastics, Mary sings a song of praise to God. Mary’s song reveals trust in what God will do in the future all because of what God has done in the past. Mary sings of the powerful being brought down from their thrones, the lowly being lifted, the hungry being fed with good things, and the rich being sent away empty. But God’s reversals continue.

Author Debie Thomas writes, “The barren conceives.  The peasant girl becomes the God-bearer. The mundane, the intimate, and the too-often-discounted (morning sickness, fatigue, varicose veins, and Braxton Hicks) become the locus of the divine.”[1] No wonder Mary sings!

But she doesn’t sing just this once, this melody must have floated throughout the home as Jesus was growing up. The woman who taught him to sit up, to walk, and to pray also talked to her son about to whom he was praying. These melodious reversals echo through his life. You can feel reverberations of her song in his ministry. Just check out his first sermon in Nazareth.[2] Jesus is giving voice to how he was taught, who his mother believed God to be. Maybe he already knew, he is divine after all, but I like to think that his mama taught him well.

Scholar O. Wesley Allen writes that the Magnificat is “announcing a major theme that will unfold across the narrative of Luke-Acts: salvation by reversal.”[3] You see this salvation by reversal throughout Jesus’ ministry as the sick are healed, the hungry are fed, the cast-out are brought into community, and the discarded are loved. And, of course, the final salvation by reversal is when Jesus reveals that death isn’t the end of the story.

Mary’s song of praise is full of past-tense verbs proclaiming the greatness of all that God has done on behalf of the lowly, the hungry, the forgotten.[4] In other words, God has a history so we can have a future. Dr. Matt Skinner describes the Magnificat as if Mary is “saying, ‘here is a character sketch of the God who is at work today. This is the kind of stuff that this God […] regularly does.”[5] 

Mary offers a litany of all that God has done as a way of explaining why she agreed to the unbelievable and risk-filled plan set before her by a messenger of the Lord. She gives examples of all that God has done because, if God has done all of that, then God has the capacity to keep God’s word with her. She trusts her future because of what God has done in the past.

What Gabriel described was unreal and impossible…but God has a history of doing unreal and impossible things. And this baby being in the womb of this particular mother is a delightful continuation of God’s work. This baby will do something new and different and continue God’s work of shocking reversals that bring love and salvation into the world.

Through the unbelievable message from Gabriel and from the fetal leap of baby John, it was proclaimed that God became human and started as we all do, as a baby. For as beautifully diverse and different as we all are, beginning this whole thing as babies is something we all have in common.

God’s choice to take on flesh as a baby in the womb reveals that God is not far away or detached or removed from our realities. God is so intimately connected and close to the human experience that the Son of the Most High did summersaults inside his mother and kicked into her ribcage.

God experienced everything we can and ever will experience – joy, pain, sorrow, laughter, exasperation, delight, and even death. Jesus knows what it is to be human and walked out of an empty tomb to assure us that God’s love for us is too big for us to even fathom. So what we have done or anything that has been done to us has no bearings on whether or not God will love us today or will be with us tomorrow. Whatever our pasts may be – the good, the bad, the ugly – we have a future because God loves us too much to ever let us be past tense. God has a history so we can have a future.  Thanks be to God.

[1] Debie Thomas, “At the Threshold”, Journey With Jesus: A Weekly Webzine for the Global Church, Since 2004, December 12, 2021, accessed December 14, 2021, https://www.journeywithjesus.net/lectionary-essays/current-essay.
[2] Karoline Lewis, “Craft of Preaching, Dear Working Preacher: A Merciful Advent” Working Preacher from Luther Seminary, https://www.workingpreacher.org/dear-working-preacher/a-merciful-advent (accessed December 18, 2021).
[3] O. Wesley Allen, Jr., “Preach This Week, December 19, 2021, Gospel Reading, Commentary on Luke 1:39-45 [46-55],” Working Preacher from Luther Seminary https://www.workingpreacher.org/commentaries/revised-common-lectionary/fourth-sunday-of-advent-3/commentary-on-luke-139-45-46-55-5 (accessed December 16, 2021).
[4] R. Alan Culpepper, The Gospel of Luke: Introduction, Commentary, and Reflections, in The New Interpreter’s Bible, vo. 9 (Nashville: Abindgon Press, 1995), 55.
[5] Matt Skinner from: Working Preacher, “Brainwave 817: Fourth Sunday of Advent – Dec. 19, 2021” Dec 12, 2021, video, 25:12, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3URGucKaKX8.