Dec 19, 2021; ICCM; Pastor Rebecca Ellenson; The Visitation
Who is “your person?” You know, the one you turn to when you need to process an experience or share a concern? If you’re married it may be your spouse, but it might not be too. A sibling or a parent perhaps, someone who “gets” you. Maybe you’re even able to count more than one such confidant. As a raging extrovert I’ve never quite understood people who can process internally, …just saying. If you’re like me, a person who hardly knows what she’s thinking until she’s talked about it out loud with someone, you are sure to have a variety of people to turn to.
My mom was “my person”. When she was dying this summer, I wound up turning to my cousin Jean who had already travelled that difficult journey with her mom, my Aunt Carole. Jean is exactly 6 months younger than I am, but she’s always been an old soul. She was born on her mother’s birthday, exactly 6 months, to the day, after I was born, on my mom’s birthday. Like me, Jean is the younger of two girls. Her mom was my mom’s big sister and they were so close.
Jean and I have spent our lives in parallel steps, from the weeks in our childhood when my sister and I went to their dairy farm and when she and her sister came to our lake home, to our weddings just a few months apart, to the last prayer she prayed with us around my mom’s beside the day mom died, Jean has always been there for me.
I’m not sure how I would have gotten through some of those days this year without her. I didn’t have to explain a thing, she just knew. In recent decades we haven’t seen each other often, but that doesn’t matter. She was there for me when I lost my first pregnancy, when my first marriage ended. We’ve prayed over our children together. Some days, the first text I find on my phone in the morning is a prayer she’s written in her morning prayer practice lifting me up to God because I’ve been on her heart. I feel safe and loved and known in her care. I count that connection as a God given blessing of immeasurable worth.
Evidently Mary had a cousin like that too, Elizabeth. Elizabeth was older to be sure, a generation older it seems, but the connection was strong. As soon as Mary learns of her daunting role, certainly before the angel’s message had fully sunk in even, she left with haste for the hill country, some 80 miles away to her cousin’s house.
The text tells us that Elizabeth had been pondering her own impossible pregnancy for 6 months already. It was Elizabeth’s husband, Zechariah, that received the angel’s message about the role their son John would play, but he had been left mute all through his wife’s pregnancy. The text tells us Elizabeth had been in seclusion for the first 5 months, until Mary’s visit. We’re left wondering which of these two mothers to be is more unlikely the aged childless one, or the young inexperienced maiden. Mary greets Elizabeth and must have told her all about the angel’s visit for when Elizabeth hears the greeting, the child leaps for joy within her.
Luke’s telling of these intertwined stories is full of prophetic words and the fulfillment of the hopes of centuries of waiting. This interpreted history shows how and where God is acting to bring justice and salvation. The stories ring with similarity to the well-known Jewish history of unexpected pregnancies, Hannah, Sarah, Hagar, and so many songs of praise reverberate in the telling of this song of Mary.
The story of Mary’s visitation to Elizabeth is so familiar that we have come to expect hearing this story and may have lost the unlikelihood of it all. Think about it—the Messiah’s coming is proclaimed not by the high priest or the rulers, not even by Zechariah who is mute, but by two marginalized pregnant women.
As I read this text this year, I found myself imagining how it could play out in theater. With all these songs in Luke’s gospel it might be best portrayed as a musical, with cool special effects happening then the angel Gabriel appears. Sometimes its good to let our imaginations fill in the blanks—Mary: young, poor, unwed, and filled with joy and willingness, Elizabeth, by all accounts too old to conceive—grey hair perhaps, suffering from ankles swollen from pregnancy and varicose veins too perhaps, Zechariah, normally full of words, like any clergyperson now strangely silenced, unable to preach, unable to man-splain. Personally, I can’t even imagine what it would be like to be unable to speak for 9 months! Maybe some of you don’t know that Brent has starred in many musicals back in Canada. What would it be like for you to play that role? Would that be fun Brent, to figure out how to express yourself only with facial expressions and gestures? You might be just the right age and character to be cast in that role. Carol could play Elizabeth. She’s warm and hospitable, I know that from experience. She has welcomed my phone calls and visits this year, both back home in Wisconsin and here in Mazatlan. Like Mary, I’ve run to her to share my thoughts and feelings, finding a listening ear and a loving heart, I’m sure a young pregnant girl would find the same reception. To find the right demographic for Mary, we’d need to call on Daniel’s daughter Grace who’s been running our sound and video board. Can you begin to see the ludicrousness of this text? The coming of the Savior is in the hands of the most unlikely cast of characters imaginable and they keep breaking out it song, like in a musical.
Back in medieval and early modern European times they put on plays, called it the Feast of Fools. As early as the 9th century in Constantinople there is a record of such an event to portray God’s inclination to topple human power structures and raise up the downtrodden. A young boy was cast as a mock Patriarch, the Eastern Church’s equivalent of a Pope, and this young boy, dressed as the highest ruling figure in the church was paraded through the city, now Istanbul, riding on an ass.
These celebration days fell right after Christmas and acted out the reversals outlined in Mary’s song, the lofty torn down from their thrones and the humble lifted up, the rich sent away empty and the poor feasted and filled with good things. They continued and became more farcical until the last known record of them in 1685 in a Franciscan church in Antibes. Lay brothers and servants put on vestments inside out, held their books upside down, wore spectacles filled with orange peels instead of lenses and blew smelly incense in each other’s faces while chanting offkey and in gibberish. There were cross-dressing, masking up as animals and other methods to mock the conventional pretentiousness of the church.
Mary was willing to have her life turned upside down. Elizabeth too. Don’t you wonder what they talked about and shared together during those three months as Elizabeth grew as big as a house and Mary started to feel her own child move inside her? I think Mary found a welcome with “her person” and learned what she could expect as the time passed and the baby grew. Was she there at the birth of John? Did she in turn help Elizabeth deliver the child?
Medieval theologian Meister Eckhart once asked, “What good is it to me if Mary gave birth to the Son of God, 1,400 years ago, and I do not also give birth to the Son of God in my time and in my culture? We are all meant to be mothers of God.”
I just love how earthy and fleshy this text really is. When we spend the time filling in the backstory, the plot, the characters then we can see how preposterous this God of ours is. This story is rooted in contrasts of age and class. We can make room in our lives to care for those we know and those we don’t to practice hospitality like Elizabeth did and attentiveness like Mary did. In doing so we go beyond the politeness and sentimentality that so often crowds out the radical character of Jesus coming as the son of Mary.
Mary heard the angel say she had found favor with God, that God was with her. She wondered how it could be and heard that all things are possible. She responded with Let it be to me. That’s quite a pattern that we can follow.
Where and when have you found favor with God? What were or are your questions? Who do you run to, to share your thoughts and find connection and community? What are the times that God is working through you? What is your role in the drama of God? What song will you sing? How will you bear Christ into the world?
God comes to each of us, not in our moments of triumph and accomplishment as much as in the struggles we must overcome, the wrong turns we make and the closed doors we encounter. The people in our lives help us to understand how and when God is working through us. We find our role in relationship. It is as true for us as it was for Mary and Elizabeth and Zechariah: God is with us, all things are possible when we listen to God’s claim on us and respond as she did, “Here I am, the servant of the Lord; let it be with me according to your Word.”