Sermon for the Fourth Sunday of Advent – December 22, 2024
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Sermon for the Fourth Sunday of Advent – December 22, 2024
Luke 1:39-45
Dear friends, grace to you and peace from God our Father and our Lord Jesus Christ.
Some of the most cherished and precious memories of my life are from when my wife was carrying our unborn children. I remember the first time our first son kicked in the womb. It was at a Mariners game after Amy had eaten a half-order of garlic fries. He leaped with joy for those garlic fries, and he still likes them! I remember with our second son lying on the couch in the parsonage in Winlock and Amy picking up my hand and resting it on her belly, right on the place where our son was kicking. I remember with our third son going to a performance of the Seattle Symphony with my wife, late in her pregnancy. She was wearing a little black dress, proudly protruding with seven months’ worth of baby underneath. She was gorgeous and radiant. And this wasn’t just me who thought so – she cut through the crowd like a rock star or a queen. People were pointing at her and smiling. Part of the concert was a performance of Bach’s Magnificat, so people were already excited about pregnant ladies, and they were all thrilled to see one in real life! Amy was the star of the intermission. These are some of my most cherished memories and my greatest blessings in life.
What we have in our gospel reading for this morning are some of the most cherished memories of the Christian church. Many of the world’s most respected Biblical scholars believe that Saint Luke, who set about to write an orderly account of the life of Jesus based on eyewitness testimony, wrote the verses we hear today based on conversations he had with Mary herself as she shared her cherished memories with him. And these memories are full of blessings! And these blessings are not only for Mary. These memories are full of blessings for all of us.
After learning that she would bear a child, Mary went to visit her aunt Elizabeth, who was herself six months along with a miraculous pregnancy, having conceived in her old age. When Mary arrived at Elizabeth’s home in the hill country of Judea, the baby Elizabeth was carrying leaped in her womb. We have here, preserved in scripture, the precious memory of a baby kicking. The unborn, grapefruit-sized prophet, John, was already doing his job of pointing to the unborn, pea-sized savior, Jesus. This led Elizabeth to proclaim the first of three blessings: “Blessed are you among women!” she said to Mary.
Now think about this blessing. Mary was not wealthy. She was not powerful. She was a poor girl from a small village. If she had an Instagram account, she wouldn’t have much to post about with the hashtag “blessed!” And yet, Elizabeth said, “Blessed are you among women.”
Mary is unique in the way she is blessed. We’ll hear more about that in a minute. But this memory is a blessing for all of us, because it tells us that God chooses people who are not the most obvious candidates for blessing. God calls those who are not necessarily wealthy or powerful. God notices and loves people who are not the “influencers” of their time. And so, God’s blessing falls upon us as well. Our often-unnoticed lives are not unnoticed or unimportant to God! God blesses us too. God blesses you.
And here is how God blesses you: he has come to you in Mary’s child. For the second blessing proclaimed by Elizabeth to Mary is: “And blessed is the fruit of your womb.”
Elizabeth knew who Mary was carrying. She said so in no uncertain terms. “Why has this happened to me,” she continued, “that the mother of my Lord comes to me?” Mary was carrying the Lord, a term which, for two Jewish women, meant one thing only. It meant Mary was carrying the Lord God himself! That is what this term Elizabeth uses means! And so Mary is uniquely blessed among women in that she is the mother of God.
Here we have what is the heart and the scandal and the wonder of Christianity: That the Lord of all creation, the One who established the entire universe, came into it as a cluster of fetal cells in Mary’s womb. “Blessed is the fruit of your womb,” Elizabeth proclaimed. Blessings, indeed. For by coming into the world in this way, God has become Emmanuel, God with us. In all our humanity, in all our frailty, in all our vulnerability, God has come to be with us.
Elizabeth then said to Mary, “And blessed is she who believed that there would be a fulfillment of what was spoken to her by the Lord.”
Martin Luther once preached a sermon where he said there were three miracles in this chapter in Luke’s gospel. The first miracle, he said, is that a virgin would conceive. This wasn’t a huge deal, really. After all, God created the world out of nothing – surely he could have a virgin conceive! The second miracle is that God became a human being. This was a much bigger miracle, no doubt about it. But the third miracle, Luther said, was that Mary believed it – and Luther said that this third miracle was the biggest miracle of all! Mary trusted the word of the Lord! Mary had faith! She trusted the promise! “Blessed is she who believed that there would be a fulfillment of what was spoken to her by the Lord.”
This third miracle continues to happen today. It is happening right now as God speaks his word to you, stirring you to faith, inviting you to believe, calling you to trust in his promises. What God conceived in Mary’s womb continues to be conceived in your ear and in your heart as God puts his word in there, telling you that he is near to you, nearer than you might think or feel. He has come to you in the Lord Jesus to forgive your sin, to show you his great love for you, and to assure you that you belong to him forever. Blessed are you who believe that there will be a fulfillment of what has been spoken to you by the Lord!
We have a tendency to romanticize our memories. I know I do. As our boys come home for Christmas as young adults and Amy and I reminisce and share memories with them and the special people in their lives, I know we mostly remember the best parts. As magical as Amy’s pregnancies seem to me now, if I think hard enough, I can remember being worried – worried about money, worried about the responsibilities of fatherhood, worried knowing that giving birth is never without risk. It was indeed a wonderful time, but it was an anxious time too.
It is easy to romanticize these memories of the Christian church too, and we shouldn’t. We should remember the terrible danger Mary was in as an unwed mother in that time and place. While part of the motivation for Mary to go to her aunt and uncle’s house in the hill country was to see her pregnant Aunt Elizabeth for herself and probably to help as one of her midwives, it was also true that it was probably a pretty good time for Mary to get out of Nazareth. Once Mary started showing, there would be all kinds of rumors going around. Surely part of Mary’s motivation, then, was to avoid some of that scandal and the very real danger it brought. If she was out of sight and out of mind for a few months, the math surrounding the dates of her wedding and her delivery date would be a little more fuzzy. People would be less likely to figure things out. And so, even amidst the very real blessings, this was no doubt a time of anxiety for her.
There would have been difficulties for Elizabeth too. While she was no doubt thrilled to be expecting a child in her old age, she also probably had to endure the snickers and knowing smiles of people who were surprised to find out that their elderly priest and his wife were still…active in that way. More seriously, having a child now would also have been a sad reminder of all those lost years when she was younger and had more energy to do things with her child, when she might have expected to live long enough to see her child marry, perhaps even to become a grandmother – something that surely wouldn’t happen now. And so it had to have been bittersweet for her. There had to have been some complicated emotions around the edges of her joy, as is often the case for all of us.
But it was right into the anxiety and the danger and the bittersweet, right into the middle of these fraught situations and their complicated emotions that these blessings came: The blessing of God’s favor, the blessing of a Savior, the blessing of faith.
As Christmas comes this week, many feel immense pressure to create memories that are just so. Many people feel a lot of pressure to have things be magical in one way or another. If that’s how it ends up being for you, wonderful. For others who are experiencing grief or estrangement or loneliness, the joy of Christmas can be tainted by lots of complicated emotions. But know that the blessings of God came to Mary and Elizabeth in a complicated set of circumstances, and they can come to you that way too.
No matter what today or the next few days or the new year ahead brings for you, these precious memories of the nascent life Mary and Elizabeth carried are for you to cherish and ponder. They have been handed down to us by Mary and dutifully recorded for us by Saint Luke so that we might delight in them, that we might learn from them, that we might trust in what God is telling us through them. Whether you are young or old, a parent or childless, male or female, they are the memories we hold collectively as the church, and so they are yours.
And they tell us that God comes to and calls and notices and loves people you wouldn’t necessarily expect, people like you and me. They tell us that the Lord himself entered the world through the womb of Mary so that he could come and be with us, so that he could come to save us. They tell us that when we believe this, when we believe the word spoken to us by the Lord, we too are truly blessed.
Thanks be to God. Amen.
Rev. Jeffrey R. Spencer
Oak Harbor Lutheran Church
