Scripture
Gospel for Advent IV, RCL Year C: Luke 1:39-45
Sermon
We’re entering now one of the more intense weeks of the year. In liturgical time, or Church Time, this is the final week of the season of Advent, a season of intentional waiting, preparation, and anticipation ahead of the feast of the Incarnation.
In secular time, we’re on a luge towards the big family holiday. Many of us have urgent to-do lists that range from wrapping up final papers and exams for the semester to finishing Christmas shopping – or starting it, if you’re very unlucky – to menu planning to handling the zillion work emails and meetings that inevitably come before many of us, and our coworkers, are out of the office for a time. What a strange conflict of time we experience each year! Are we sitting in hopeful, full, connected anticipation; or are we racing toward Christmas in frantic, anxious, disconnected anticipation?
Maybe a bit of both.
This Advent season has found us nearly two years into a reality that has seemingly warped our sense of time. Beginning with the lockdown in early 2020, so many I’ve spoken with have echoed my own sense that time has gotten weird. We’re on the doorstep of 2022, and yet I still think that 2019 was last year. Did you know that early 2019 was nearly three years ago? I had to check a calendar to confirm this before saying it out loud in front of you all today! Somehow, in my waiting and anticipation of the end of Covid and the coming of a New Normal, I lost a year; time slipped past me.
Luke’s Gospel begins by locating us in chronological time and in space – these were the days of King Herod of Judea, the story begins. If you sneak backwards from today’s Gospel reading, you see the story of Elizabeth and Zechariah, who have no children but, with God’s promise via the Archangel Gabriel, conceive despite being past childbearing years. This child will be John the Baptist, whose arrival anticipates the coming of Jesus, the Messiah, the Christ.
In the sixth month of Elizabeth’s pregnancy, Gabriel appears again, this time to Mary. Gabriel tells Mary that she will conceive a son, Jesus, who will reign over the house of Jacob forever and of whose kingdom there will be no end.
Imagine taking that news in. Mary handles it famously well, and faithfully, saying “let it be with me according to your word.” But she doesn’t have to do this alone, either. “And now,” Gabriel tells her, “your relative Elizabeth in her old age has also conceived a son; and this is the sixth month for her who was said to be barren.” And so Mary makes a beeline, with haste, for her cousin, to the woman most likely to be able to understand her situation. She stays with her for three months, Luke tells us, which would be until Elizabeth’s nineth month.
We so often think of the story of Jesus as beginning with his birth, or with his ministry as an adult. But here, Luke reminds us that there’s deep story and truth in the time pre-dating Jesus’ birth. This is important time. Amidst all the goings on of the world, amidst the waiting and yearning for the coming of the messiah, sacred time was bursting in, anchoring and sacralizing the present, all while anticipating the culmination of that waiting.
We’ve been waiting for a New Normal for almost two years. 2020 was so odd, so weirdly boring and scary and frustrating all at the same time as we anticipated a vaccine, that many of us mentally skip it when we think about time. Of course 2019 was last year! With 2021, we enter a different kind of anticipation: we’re vaccinated, and so surely the New Normal we’ll be settling into is right around the corner. But most of us office workers are still working from home, we’re still in Covid protocols, our hospitals are still full. Surely this interminable anticipation will soon end, and we’ll get to whatever is next!
I wonder about the anticipation Mary and Elizabeth felt. How odd things must have seemed to them, in the moment. When Elizabeth finds out she’s pregnant, we’re told that she goes into seclusion for 5 months. After Mary’s experience of Gabriel, she goes “with haste” to Elizabeth’s house out in the hills, perhaps also a kind of seclusion. They walk through this time of mutual waiting together, perhaps finding strength in each other, able to experience the joy of waiting on the Lord together amidst the deeply weird reality of the unexpected.
Mary and Elizabeth both lived in the world of Micah and Isaiah, despite being separated from them by hundreds of years. They are themselves the culmination of prophetic expectation, and yet amidst the fulfillment of expectation – the young virgin is indeed pregnant -- they are expecting.
The human story, the story of our relationship with the living God, is full of this sort of paradox in the experience of time. Karen Armstrong defines myth, that core element of human experience, not as “a story people told once which may or may not be true,” but rather as “something that happened once, but also something that happens all the time.”
Once, Ancient Israel waited for the Messiah to come. Once, Mary was pregnant with the Christ, the incarnate Word of God, and Elizabeth recognized it. We, today as in ancient times, look for the second coming of the Christ and the culmination of all things. And now, right now, the past and future are here, in the present, lived by us in prayer and song and liturgy and the everyday. The Incarnation is coming, and it already happened and is ongoing right now and here among us.
St. Maximus, the great theologian of the 7th century, wrote that, in faith, “Christ is born mysteriously and willingly, becoming incarnate through those” who believe. “He causes the soul which begets him to be a virgin-mother.” That applies somehow to all of us, and so Christ is somehow becoming incarnate again and again in each moment, in you and in me and in that guy at the gas station; each of us may be pregnant with the Word.
When Mary arrives at Elizabeth’s house and greets her, Elizabeth is present to this reality in Mary, able to hear the Holy Spirit which fills her such that she cries out her recognition to Mary: Blessed art thou among women, and blessed is the fruit of thy womb!
All of us may be pregnant with the Word. And all of us may be Elizabeth, pregnant with anticipation, yes, but also with a sense of being in the presence of the Christ borne within another.
The present of Christian time integrates both past and future. In Elizabeth we see a world alive with mystery and possibility—Micah’s hope and anticipation, as well as our own, play out in her interaction with Mary. “Who am I that the mother of my Lord should come to me?” And who AM I? Who are WE? The Lord will be born in the future, many months from this conversation, 2000 years ago and more, and also six days from now. But Mary, pregnant with the Word, is there right now. Is here right now, amidst the chaos and not-yet-ness of 2021! The living God breaks through into time from Eternity, and we catch glimpses of this in-breaking, experiencing a sense of fullness and presence. The great in-breaking will be what we celebrate on Christmas, but eternal time breaks through year ‘round.
We mark this with the sacraments: with Holy Communion the eternal becomes present, and we are in some way united with the divine and each other through the body and blood of the One who is at once coming and has come and will come again. We experience it in the transcendent beauty of music, of paintings, of poetry, in the sunset and landscape, and in each other.
As we walk together into this final week of Advent, the last week of liturgical anticipation in what has been a long season of existential anticipation, I invite you to awareness. This is a week of pilgrimage, where the journey matters; a path of logistics and holiday prep and also, simultaneously, of spiritual preparation. Ahead of us lies the Incarnation. This time, this present, this now, is also important. Like Elizabeth, we are filled with anticipation for that which comes next. Like Elizabeth, we watch for the Word among us, now, coming to be in those who greet us.
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