Note: This is the text of my sermon from this past Sunday (December 19, 2021). The sermon is written similar to how I speak, so please disregard the grammar mistakes. If you’d rather listen to it you can find it here, starting around the 31:30 mark.
I think we all feel like Mary at times. I say that, knowing that there’s absolutely no way I can ever actually, fully understand what Mary went through after the angel Gabriel came to her. We don’t live in her time, or her culture, and we obviously have never been visited by an angel of the Lord telling us that we will birth the one who is to save the entire world from their sins.
But, still, I think we all feel like Mary at times. Right now, I kind of do. With the sudden and unexpected death of my father a few weeks ago, I’ve been given some news that I don’t quite know what to do with. I’m not certain what to feel, how to react. What’s enough grief, what’s too much. And, I’m holding all of that within me, reaching, longing for Christmas morning.
I want to get there quick. I don’t want to waste any more time waiting. And, my wait is only a few days now, not 9 months or so like Mary had to wait, and be sick, and ache, and ultimately travel a long distance at 9 months pregnant, just so Rome can get a few more tax dollars. But, I want to get to a place of safety hastily, even though I know, I’m cognitively aware, that grief is a long process, and that Christmas morning won’t fix everything for me. I know that the birth of our savior won’t take away the grief or the unexpectedness or the worry or concern over the future.
In fact, I’m very aware that once Christmas morning comes, I’m sure it will still feel like I’m in some unknown, unnamed town, in the middle of the wilderness of Judea, somewhere in the mountains of Judea.
Ironically, I preached on the wilderness the day before my dad died. Here’s a few quotes from December 5. The wilderness is “essentially any place seen to be unfit for permanent settlement.” That sounds about right, for me, right now. “God shows up in the wilderness probably more than any other place in the Bible.” From Joshua 7, “I will make the Valley of Heartbreak a door of hope.” “The Lord starts the path in the wilderness that leads straight to Jerusalem.”
In talking about Christmas I said this, “This is one of those promises. That Christ came the first time, with John the Baptist as his road construction foreman, and he started to make the paths straight, and he started to lower the mountains and raise the valleys of trouble and heartbreak. But, they aren’t gone for good. The mountains are still there, the walls of the low valleys still shadow over us from time to time, but we still have this promise of the coming peace of the world, the coming taming of the wilderness.”
I knew those words were true – that’s why I preached them two weeks ago – because I believed them to be true. And, I still do. But, this week, they’ve taken on a more acute meaning. One I can’t fully describe or explain.
Mary has wandered through the wilderness. She seemingly has traveled by herself – a strange thing for a young woman to do by herself, and she comes to Elizabeth still essentially in the wilderness. Again, she comes to this unnamed place in the mountains and finds her cousin there – a cousin who has been through the wilderness herself a time or two.
And, even though Elizabeth blesses her and prophesies to her; and even though it seems like Mary has accepted her calling from God to be this unwed young woman, pregnant with the “Son of God,” as Gabriel tells her in the passage just before this one; even though all of this is true, I still doubt that everything is just fine for Mary. I doubt all her worries have been assuaged. I bet she is still scared and worried about the future. After all, there’s still many months to go when she will start showing the world she’s pregnant, when she will have to travel with Joseph to Bethlehem.
Because, how could you? How could you be fine if you were her? How could you not be worried? The world is still the world, and the upcoming months for her are going to be tough – not just with morning sickness, or aches and pains, but also with reality of her position in society.
Yet, even in the midst of al that is going on with her, she still praises God. I don’t want that to sound too cliché, but maybe it’s somewhat cliché for a reason. As New Testament scholar Beth Johnson says, “There is a sense, though, in which the song belongs to both Mary and Elizabeth – and beyond them, to all women and men who long for redemption, who chafe at the [permanence] of poverty, warfare, injustice, racism, and oppression.” To that I might add grief, or loneliness, or simply being lost in a world that they’re not certain they understand, even if they continue to have faith in God.
Dr. Johnson goes on to say, “The longing of Advent is rooted in the obscene contrast between the way things are in the world and the way God would have them be.” That word obscene sums it up pretty well, and takes us all the way back to the dawn of time, where we get the contrast between how God created the world and how the world is today. God created the world with no death, no murder, no greed, no pride, no exploitation – which, in an odd way, is obscene to us today because that’s so far from the reality we live in.
Yet, in this reality that we live in, that Mary and Elizabeth lived in, there is pain and suffering, there judgment and isolation, that are all of these things that stand in stark contrast to the world God created and to the way God wanted the world to be.
And, still, Mary praises God. Because what else can you do? What else can you do? I don’t know what else to do.