Micah 5:2-5a • Hebrews 10:5-10 • Luke 1:39-45, (46-55)
The excitement was too much to keep in. All by herself, it had to be let out. Looking around, who would understand? Whom could this good news be shared with?
Luke’s Gospel says that Mary “went with haste” (1:39) to tell Elizabeth about God’s creation of the Messiah in her just as soon as the angel Gabriel had left her. God was with her…her of all people! And God would bear God’s own Son in her. Elizabeth, she would know…she would get how big this news was.
Have you been you blessed with a promised event, a circumstance, a big date, or another big day to look forward to that you were so, so excited about, it was impossible to sit and wait for it to come? Whether it’s a graduation date, a party, the paying off of a loan, a really big trip, or like Elizabeth and Mary, the birth of a child, there’s this sense of anticipation…of knowing that something really big, something really good is going to happen…but the long wait for it to come can almost seem unbearable.
As much as we may be ready for Christmas, it is a big, big day, when something really really good happens…but it’s not here yet. There’s still today and four more days to Christmas Eve. Why not celebrate Christ’s arrival already? Why wait any longer? The thing is that we do have something besides Christ’s arrival to celebrate right now, today, and it’s not what we think it is….we get to celebrate the anticipation, the expectation of God’s promise—a promise that hasn’t arrived yet—but a promise that we still know is on the way! The promise of a blessing in Christ is so rich, so great that it even blesses us now…even in the waiting, even in the wondering of what God’s revelation among us will exactly look like. God blesses us now, today, even though we know that Christ is what’s coming!
God’s covenant blessing doesn’t just mean that we give God praise when God follows through with the appearance of Jesus. We can give God praise even now…in advance of what blessings God will bring to fruition….not just that God will reveal Jesus, but that God fulfills the promises of covenant love and forgiveness in our lives even now. God’s coming advent, not yet seen in Christ, gives us pause to praise because Jesus has been promised as a blessing…This is a promise God foretold of with Abraham, a promise of blessing his descendents so that the whole world would be blessed. God extends that promise to Elizabeth, and to Mary, and ultimately through Jesus. Even though God in flesh has not yet appeared…we can shout with a loud cry with Elizabeth; we can sing with loud praise with Mary, we can pray a fervent prayer that yes, God’s blessings fill us even now with the Holy Spirit.
Elizabeth and Mary both grasp this present expectation for what God will do in their encounter with one another as pregnant mothers. Their unborn children have not been made visible, but yet they are the very much alive promised ones of God, stirring within. This encounter between Elizabeth and Mary has that giddy-like quality you would expect two cousins to have when they share that they are going to have babies. But their joy, their enlivened Spirit and their magnified faith do not rejoice primarily anticipating what they will do, but rather what God has already done in them, what God is doing in them and what God will do through them. God, in Elizabeth’s old age, awakened her barren and frail womb to life with a son, John, who would pave the way for Jesus and announce God’s forgiveness and righteousness through him. God, in Mary’s young age, in her unmarried status, stirred up in her the work of holy grace that would bear the fruit of God made real and concrete in a holy child.
Elizabeth and Mary model for us today the praise we can give to God in anticipation and also in thanks for the blessing God has, is and will weave and sow in them and in us as we encounter one another. Elizabeth, seeing Mary, her cousin, blesses her, and blesses Jesus, still unborn and of no particular significance yet. Even John, still unborn within Elizabeth, praises Jesus in anticipation of his reign with a dance of joy inside of Elizabeth. John is still unborn but very alive to God’s presence and promise of doing wondrous things. Elizabeth does not just see Mary, she sees God standing before her, who is and who will prepare a body will embody who God is and who God desires to be for all Creation.
And Mary, her words of Elizabeth speak so powerfully and mightily of what God has done, of what God is doing and what God will do. As she marvels with Elizabeth at the blessing work God can do even for them, Mary even has the audacity to speak as if God has already birthed and revealed Jesus to the world—as if it has already happened! She says, “for God has looked with favor on the lowliness of God’s servant…” (3:48) This not only proclaims what God did in choosing a lowly peasant woman to bear God within her, but also testifies with amazing trust of what Jesus will do. It indeed is a blessing right now brothers and sisters, to know that God in Christ has, is and will look upon all the lowly, all the humiliated, all without honor or without power and see them—and see us—favorably! That is a promise that is a blessing not for heaven, not for Christmas, not for some unknown future point, but today…now.
As we anticipate, God already blesses us this day. But God does not do this amazing blessing work…God does not show strength in lifting up the lowly, God does not promise to reveal a Son to us for such a blessing to be between us and God alone. Bono, the lead singer of the Irish rock band U2--who is an outspoken advocate for the world’s poor and sick…and someone who has often seen God up to the work of blessing more out in the world than inside the church…--Bono laments that the church can often turns into what he calls “bless-me clubs.” The blessings we celebrate, we anticipate today…they can turn us inward and focus on ourselves…can make us think we know who the high and mighty are whom God brings down…and that we ourselves are the lowly ones whom God lifts up. But God “blesses not just the ones who kneel” (“City of Blinding Lights”, from How to Dismantle an Atomic Bomb, by U2), but God blesses the cries of people like Elizabeth and like Mary, the cries of the world’s poor, the cries of those who face despair, the cries of those who know shame, who know lowiness, who know no way out.
As we receive the blessings of this present day, and as we anticipate the future blessings of our souls in the advent of Jesus, as we magnify God who turns the world upside down, God empowers and frees us all to turn our eyes not just up in praise to God…but out. God empowers United Lutheran Church to look out, look forward, look beyond and be blessed today in anticipation that we know God has, is and will bless the whole world through this church! God turns our eyes not just on ourselves, not just in the church, but out, to share the praise and affirmation God gives to Elizabeth and to Mary, to share the favor of God. God blesses us with anticipation that those cries of world’s despair will turn to words of thanks like Elizabeth, songs like Mary’s, they will turn to dances like John’s, and they will turn the church into a flock of blessed blessers. Thanks be to God. Amen.
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