A sermon on Luke 1:39-55 by Nathan Nettleton
I have Rita’s permission to tell you about something that happened to her this week, something which provides a rather wonderful little introduction to what is going on in our gospel reading tonight. As most of you know, after graduating from her teaching course, Rita has spent the last year looking for her first proper classroom teaching position, and just recently that dream has come true. Rita is of course delighted, and we’re delighted too, not only because her dream has come true, but because it has come true in our neighbouring suburb, Richmond West, so she won’t have to leave us to take up a job in some distant place. Although she begins there next year, Rita spent time at the school twice this week for transition sessions where the students met up with their classmates and teachers for next year’s classes. They were an exciting few days for Rita, but it was a couple of almost insignificant little things that really brought home the reality of what was happening for her. The first was when she was handed a class list for the first class and she saw her own name on the top of the page. Of course her name was on the top of the page, it was her class, but Rita had never seen a class list that said “Teacher: Rita Wang” on the top of the page before. What a thrill! She’s a real teacher! And then later she was taken to the staff room, and shown where her pigeon hole was. And there it was, a pigeon hole with a little sign on it that said “Rita Wang”. Her own pigeon hole! Rita’s heart was nearly exploding with joy! She was a real teacher, with her own pigeon hole! Of course, a pigeon hole is nothing but a pigeon hole on its own, but nothing is ever on its own. Everything has a context, and having her own pigeon hole means that she has her own class and her own school and her own workmates and that she belongs, and that what she has studied so hard for and worked so hard for and searched so hard for has finally come true, and there were fireworks going off in her eyes and nothing could wipe the smile off her face.
All of which is a lot like what is going on in our gospel reading tonight. Read Mary and Elizabeth through Rita’s eyes, and you’ll get a sense of the joy and expectation that is bursting like fireworks and bubbling over in all directions in this story. Mary and Elizabeth are both pregnant, and both full of the joy that usually accompanies a welcome pregnancy, but as the story is told, they both sense that there is something even bigger going on than just the imminent birth of two babies. God is doing something more here, and they are bursting with joy over the privilege of being participants in the wonderful things God is doing. “My soul magnifies the Lord, and my spirit rejoices in God my Saviour.” If you don’t get the vibe of Mary’s explosion of joyous praise, go and talk to Rita!
Now it must be said that for Mary in particular, but actually for both women, there were plenty of reasons for them to have a rather complicated mix of feelings over these pregnancies. Elizabeth had been through the frustrations and tears of years of infertility in a culture where a woman’s worth was measured almost entirely by her ability to bear children. Even if she had been fertile, there is a bell curve of what age women normally cease to be fertile, and Elizabeth was now way out the end of that bell curve in the last tiny fraction of a percentile. So there is probably no doubt that Elizabeth is going to be totally over the moon about her own pregnancy, but how will she feel about Mary’s? Mary who is almost too young to be having a baby. Some women say their husband only has to take his shoes off and they fall pregnant. Well that’s got nothing on Mary! So after all her years of tears and fruitless trying, how is Elizabeth going to feel about Mary’s in-your-face super-fertility? She could easily be imagining that Mary was feeling rather smug and superior. She could easily feel resentful and bitter. But there doesn’t seem to be even a hint of that. Elizabeth is overjoyed for Mary, and honoured by her presence. “What a privilege, to be visited by the mother of my Lord!” she exclaims.
Well, if Elizabeth had reasons to perhaps have complicated feelings about all this, how much more so Mary? She’s expecting a baby when she is not yet married, and while that is pretty unremarkable in the world we live in, in the world she lived in, that would often result in an honour killing. She could be dragged out and stoned to death to protect and restore the honour of the village. In Matthew’s gospel it is suggested that the only reason that didn’t happen was because Joseph was a big enough man to protect her by wearing the scandal himself by claiming the baby as his own, even though he was quite sure he had had nothing to do with it.
Whether you believe the biology of the story of the virgin birth or not doesn’t really matter. Luke the gospel writer may have been a doctor, but he’s not trying to make biological points, but theological points. As Frederick Buechner puts it, “If you believe God was somehow in Christ, it shouldn’t make much difference to you how he got there … and life is complicated enough without confusing theology and gynaecology.” And as he goes on to say, “In one sense anyway, the doctrine of the Virgin Birth is demonstrably true. Whereas the villains of history can always be seen as the products of heredity and environment, the saints always seem to arrive under their own steam. Evil evolves. Holiness happens.” (Frederick Buechner, Wishful Thinking, ©1993)
So here we have these two women, both with potential grounds for resentment and anger or at least for feeling uncertain and conflicted, but both of them are leaping and singing and dancing with joy. So over the moon that when a baby kicks in the womb, its over-excited mother interprets it as the baby joining in her dance of joy! And it seems that much of this exuberance is because they both sense that God is doing something big here, and that they’ve been given the privilege of being a part of it all. They haven’t just found pigeon holes with their names on them, they’ve discovered that they have been chosen to be the pigeon holes; to be the pigeon holes through which God would deliver the good news of a world made new, of the great reordering of everything so that there would be no more hunger and no more tears and no more resentments and no more honour killings and no more children shot in their classrooms and no more rocket attacks or drone attacks on villages and towns and no more people fleeing from violence and being denied places of refuge and welcome.
All of that can be heard in Mary’s song, the song usually known as the Magnificat after its first word in the Latin translation. One of the things that is so wonderful about that song, and for which we rightly hold Mary up as first among the saints, is that it is not all about her. The song is all about God and all about what God is doing, and Mary only features in her own song as one who has unexpectedly been given the enormous privilege of playing a part in the bigger purposes of what God is doing. And there is something really important here, because being chosen can result in a toxic pride that mutates into something ugly and sick. Whenever being God’s chosen ones begins to be misunderstood as being God’s favourites and having superior rights and privileges to other people, it becomes a cause of division and rivalry and hostility and injustice, exactly the sorts of things that God is actually choosing people to help bring to an end. God’s chosen people are not chosen to be exalted above others. They are chosen to help lift others up that all might be exalted together. They are chosen to be a light to the world that all the world might be illuminated. They are chosen to be the pigeon holes through which God delivers the good news of a new world in which love and mercy and rights and privileges are lavished with equal abandon on everybody.
Well now all this infectious joy and enthusiasm can bubble over and begin to catch us up in its song and dance too, because as Mary and Elizabeth faithfully do the job for which they were chosen, so the message reaches us that we are similarly chosen. If you like, they were chosen to help bring the message that all of us are chosen; that all of us are chosen to participate in the wonderful things that God is doing. All of us are chosen to break free of our complicity in the deadly spirals of hostility and injustice, and to become instead, part of God’s solution, or God’s remaking the world in the image of the love and compassion revealed most fully in the fruit of Mary’s womb, Jesus. All of us are specially chosen to play a part in the great reversal, in turning things around and setting things right, in bringing healing and blessing to the world. Who knows what apparently insignificant little detail it might be that really brings the reality of that home to you? Who knows what might suddenly make it all feel so real that your toes begin tapping and your heart begins singing? Your name on a pigeon hole? A phrase of scripture that leaps from the page and explodes in your heart? A glimpse of eternity in the face of a newborn baby? Who knows? But whatever it is, when each of us have our pigeon hole moments and the reality of what God is doing and how God wants to involve us in it really grips us, we will all be like Rita gazing in wonder at her pigeon hole, with fireworks going off in our eyes and smiles all over our faces.
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