Göttinger Predigten
Göttinger Predigten im Internet hg. von U. Nembach
Fourth Sunday in Advent, 12/20/2015
Sermon on Luke 1:39-55, by Paula L. Murray
39 In those days Mary arose and went with haste into the hill country, to a town in Judah,
40 and she entered the house of Zechariah and greeted Elizabeth.
41 And when Elizabeth heard the greeting of Mary, the baby leaped in her womb. And Elizabeth was filled with the Holy Spirit,
42 and she exclaimed with a loud cry, “Blessed are you among women, and blessed is the fruit of your womb!
43 And why is this granted to me that the mother of my Lord should come to me?
44 For behold, when the sound of your greeting came to my ears, the baby in my womb leaped for joy.
45 And blessed is she who believed that there would be[g] a fulfillment of what was spoken to her from the Lord.”
46 And Mary said, “My soul magnifies the Lord,
47 and my spirit rejoices in God my Savior,
48 for he has looked on the humble estate of his servant.
For behold, from now on all generations will call me blessed;
49 for he who is mighty has done great things for me,
and holy is his name.
50 And his mercy is for those who fear him
from generation to generation.
51 He has shown strength with his arm;
he has scattered the proud in the thoughts of their hearts;
52 he has brought down the mighty from their thrones
and exalted those of humble estate;
53 he has filled the hungry with good things,
and the rich he has sent away empty.
54 He has helped his servant Israel,
in remembrance of his mercy,
55 as he spoke to our fathers,
to Abraham and to his offspring forever.” (ESV)
When God wants to do something extraordinary, he begins with a baby.
That which he makes new is first made flesh, incarnate in the soft skin and tightly clenched hands of an infant. With the single exception of Adam and Eve, created fully in adult form, God reveals his intent and his work in, with, and through an infant. The genealogies of the Bible, Old Testament as well as New, reveal not so much the lineage of an important family as they do the means by which God’s almighty hands form and reform, direct and redirect, his creation.
I am not talking about the everyday miracle of birth. Granted, that any of us exist, indeed, that the beautiful world we live upon exists, is itself a miracle given the odds against the creation of the universe and of a single, living child. Physicists become believers as the very impossibility of creation becomes apparent in their own data sets and theories. The millions of near flawless cell divisions necessary for the development of zygote to viable infant leads the new parent to see the hand of God in the tiny face and perfect digits of his or her newborn. That there is something, anything, rather than nothing at all is the first and greatest wonder of our existence, a wonder science cannot resolve but faith can celebrate. Still, miracle though creation be, this is not what is meant when I say that when God wants to do something extraordinary, he begins with a baby.
It is from dead ends that this divinely ordained new life comes. The womb that stubbornly refuses to bear or sustain new life, the germinal cells lost to time, the murderous circumstances into which new life is born, it is in those sad dead ends that God decrees a particular new life and with it the redemption of the whole of creation. That any of us was born at all is the result of the survival of many hundreds of generations of grandparents many times over in times that were both uncertain and perilous. Once the first miracle was made manifest in the actual birth of a living child, war, famine, accident, and disease all made the survival of that child to the age of reproduction a toss of a cruel set of dice. So we are all of us the result of many miracles, not merely the latest miracle, the one that resulted in our births. But the births of the children of which I speak were never even in the cards. Sarah’s safe delivery of Isaac at 90 plus years of age, Moses’ royal rescue from the murderous knives of Egyptian soldiers, Hannah’s gifts of children after years of barrenness, including he who became the prophet Samuel, the conception of John, whom we call the Baptist, to his elderly parents Zechariah and Elizabeth, and last but greatest the birth of Jesus our Savior to his virgin mother, Mary, are the best known examples of God’s command that life take root and be sustained when all that is natural declares that such life is impossible.
The births of which we speak were truly impossible, and thus extraordinary, and the children given us were, in each case, the instruments through which God advanced his plan for our salvation, and the creation’s ransom from sin and death.
When God wants to do something extraordinary, he begins with a baby.
That the redemption of everything that is, that ever was, that will ever be, rests upon so small a bit of created matter as a baby is breathtaking. And perhaps for this reason we enmesh ourselves too deeply in the sweet sentimentality of the nativity tableau or turn Jesus’ birth into an object lesson on our own helplessness and dependence upon God in the face of sin and death. The story of Jesus’ birth as told in the Gospels of Luke and Matthew is beautiful, in all its parts, and we are indeed helpless before our own sin and death. But instead of thinking of the infant’s helplessness, its dependence upon others for everything necessary for life, think of the possibilities each new child represents.
The future rests within the clenched fists and the unfocused gaze of the newborn. Old categories of thought, entrenched social forms, hidebound perceptions are challenged by the very existence of the newborn child, and how much more so with the birth of the child who is both perfectly human and perfectly divine. Mary’s first act upon agreeing to be the one to bear eternity within her finite form is to travel to the home of her Aunt Elizabeth, who Mary has been told by the Angel Gabriel is pregnant in her old age with a child.
When God wants to do something extraordinary, he begins with a baby.
Mary sees confirmation of the angel’s wild tale in the six month baby bump of her elderly aunt. In the early pages of the Gospel of Luke, the faithfulness of Mary is contrasted with the doubt of Zechariah, John’s priestly father. Zechariah’s questioning of the angel is not unlike Mary’s own response to the angel’s message, “How can this be,” nonetheless, Zechariah is made mute for his doubt until Zechariah affirms in writing Elizabeth’s naming of her eight day old son at his circumcision. Then Zechariah’s voice is liberated, and he raises it to praise his Lord and God. But that is still three months in the future. If Mary did doubt the angel’s tale she does so no longer, for little John, still hidden within his mother’s flesh, leaps to point to the Lamb who is come to take away the sins of the world. Elizabeth gives voice to John’s witness, “And blessed is she who believed that there would be a fulfillment of what was spoken to her from the Lord.” Mary knows now with absolute certainty that she will be the mother of Israel’s infant Messiah, and the enormity of her unique ministry becomes apparent to her.
When God wants to do something extraordinary, he begins with a baby.
It was not doubt that brought Mary to Elizabeth’s door but the extraordinary possibilities of the child being knit together in her womb. It is those possibilities, those soon to be incarnate possibilities, that Mary sang of when she borrowed long dead Hannah’s song and made it the theme song of the soon to be born King of King’s kingdom.
“My soul magnifies the Lord, and my spirit rejoices in God my Savior,” sings the young mother. She begins with what is intensely personal, my soul, my spirit, but uses what is personal only to glorify God, who alone is holy and merciful and almighty, the God of her ancestors, Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob, and her Lord and master. God has looked upon this one young woman of humble means and station, she sings, and though she is young and poor and largely still unmarked by life’s brutalities, has chosen her for the work at hand, to bear and raise Israel’s Savior, and ours. For this reason and only this reason she will be blessed by generations to come.
God’s choice of Mary to bear and raise his incarnate Son has little to do in the end with Mary, and everything to do with the nature of God and the redemption of Israel. And Mary is fine with that; like all faithful witnesses to the work of God she is happy to point attention away from herself and towards her Lord. John the Baptist is not the only prophet of the infancy narratives of the Gospel. Mary prophesies in song of the possibilities of the future once it is redeemed by her holy Son.
Mary does not speak as we do of the cross and of his resurrection from the dead. She borrows the words of past prophets to describe in global terms what God will do in the future through the child she bears. He will so scatter the thoughts of the proud, those that pat themselves on their own backs and take credit for their goods and wealth, that they will forget to oppress the powerless. He will overturn the thrones of the rulers and lift up over them the slave and the servant. He will feed the hungry with many good things, and he will send the rich away hungry. In other words, he will no longer allow those with the strength of an army to overcome the needs of the poor and the powerless, no matter how entrenched that power structure is in human culture.
When God wants to do something extraordinary, he begins with a baby.
It is not until we come to the last days of Advent that we turn our attention to the newborn Prince of Peace. For most of Advent’s four weeks we hear of the coming of the Christ who won his victory over sin and death on the cross, not the child Jesus. It is our Lord and Judge we await, with holy fear and trembling, and with gratitude for his mercy and grace. As we turn our attention to the joy of the season of Christmas, let us remember that what God effected in the enfleshing of his Son was nothing less than the restoration of creation to its intended form and purpose. The fulfilment of God’s purpose and our salvation is at hand, and it came to us not with a mighty rush of power like the winds of a hurricane or the thunderous drone of a fleet of fighter jets, but in the form of a little child. This little child, this baby, not only represents the possibility of life lived free of the limits imposed on it by sin and death, but the reality of it. God has taken the everyday miracle of a baby, and made for us a luminous new creation, a new creation fulfilled in the return of our Savior and the completion of his work. So, even as we put the baby in the crèche next to his mother, Mary, and her husband and son’s protector, Joseph, let’s all look beyond the stable scene, to those divinely given possibilities, and in our own small ways, give them flesh. Go then, and be not ordinary but extraordinary in the name of Jesus Christ. Feed the hungry, shelter the homeless, sit with those who mourn, care for the sick, and wait patiently, faithfully, joyfully, for him who is possibility without end.