Luke 1:39-55
A Strange Day in Zechariah’s House
James Sledge December 23, 2012
It
was a strange day in the house of Zechariah as two women, both pregnant, greet
one another. They are relatives of some
sort. I’d always heard that they were
cousins. The old King James translation
says as much, but in fact, Luke doesn’t specify how they are related, only that
they are.
They
are a study in contrasts. One is six
months pregnant; the other hasn’t even begun to show. One is old, too old to have children, so old
that her pregnancy can only be described as a miracle. The other is young, so young that she is not
yet married in a culture where girls were often married by 14.
As
the door opens, the very pregnant, very old woman greets her very young, barely
pregnant, barely out of childhood, niece or cousin or whatever she is. It must
have been quite an encounter. They’ve not seen one another in a long time. Mary
had just learned of Elizabeth’s pregnancy from the angel Gabriel. Elizabeth has no way of knowing that Mary is
pregnant, yet she knows. Imagine the
greeting, the screaming, the joy, the tears.
Imagine
poor Zechariah. Two pregnant women in the
house and he can’t even talk, struck mute by the angel Gabriel for not
believing that he and Elizabeth would have a son so late in life. I wonder if Zechariah headed out to the local
tavern to escape the screaming and yelling and singing of these two pregnant
women.
I
also wonder why Mary went to see Elizabeth.
Is she seeking reassurance, going to confirm what Gabriel told her about
Elizabeth and so confirm what Gabriel said about her own pregnancy? Is Elizabeth is the one person who can
understand, who she can talk with about these strange goings on? Is Mary just scared, wondering why she ever
said “Yes” to Gabriel, wondering what she will do when she starts to show? Is she wondering how to tell Joseph? Did she come to sort all of this out, or perhaps
to borrow some maternity clothes.
As
I said, it was a strange day in Zechariah’s house. All these things going on. All these unanswered questions, not to
mention the more run of the mill questions about morning sickness and mood
swings and midwives. So much to discuss
and talk about, yet we hear none of that.
Mary
walks in, and Elizabeth’s baby jumps in her womb. I still remember putting my hand on my wife’s
abdomen and feeling a kick. It’s an
amazing thing, to feel that life moving.
You might even call it miraculous, but it’s a fairly routine
miracle. It happens all the time. I’ve heard people try to interpret these fits
of activity. Some say that a loud noise
can trigger it. Some try to predict a
child’s gender based on how vigorous the activity is. Some claim that spicy food can send their
child into all sorts of flip and flops.
Elizabeth
has a different take on her baby’s movement.
It’s a rather novel interpretation , but Luke tells us that she is
filled with the Holy Spirit, so I suppose it is to be trusted. Elizabeth fairly screams out to Mary, “Blessed
are you among women, and blessed is the fruit of your womb.” And she calls Mary “the mother of my Lord,”
all because her baby jumped or kicked.
As I said, it was a strange day in Zechariah’s house.
And
it keeps getting stranger. When the old
woman stops talking the young girl starts singing. She doesn’t even answer Elizabeth’s question
about why she is there. She just starts
singing. Oh, I know, our scripture
reading goes, And Mary said, but it’s a song.
“My soul magnifies the Lord, and my spirit rejoices in God my Savior…
The Mighty One has done great things for me, and holy is his name.” And Mary, this young girl, this
barely more than a child, is just getting started. “(God) has scattered the proud in the
thoughts of their heart… has brought down the powerful from their thrones… has
lifted up the lowly… has filled the hungry with good things, and sent the rich
away empty.”
God
has? When? Where?
I hadn’t seen that. Mary hadn’t
seen that. It was no more visible than
her pregnancy which, at that moment, existed only as a promise from an
angel. But Mary sings that all of this has happened.
My
soul magnifies the Lord, for God has
thrown down those who exploit the poor and poison the environment, has given the homeless fine
houses, has rescued those in the
Congo and Somalia. God has destroyed all the armies of
the earth, has made the
children of Syria and Palestine and Israel and Connecticut and Washington, DC walk
in safety and peace.
Most
of us dare not sing such a song. Clearly
it is pure foolishness. The lowly are
still at the mercy of the powerful. The
homeless still sleep under bridges.
Starving refugees still scrounge for something to eat while the rich buy
gourmet dog food. Children are still at
risk and in danger. How can we sing such a song?
Except
at Christmas…then all sorts of otherwise reasonable people join their voices
together singing, “Peace on earth and mercy mild, God and sinners
reconciled!” Really? All that has happened? When? Where?
In
a sermon entitled “Singing Ahead of Time,” Barbara Brown Taylor says, “Prophets
almost never get their verb tenses straight, because part of their gift is to
see the world as God sees it…”[1] What God will
do is as real as what God is doing and what God has done.
It
was a strange day in Zechariah’s house.
The place was filled with the Holy Spirit, with prophecy and mixed up
verb tenses. What God is doing gets all
mixed up with what God has done and what God is about to do. And so the lowly have been lifted up and the hungry have been filled with good things.
It
was a strange day in Zechariah’s house, and it’s a strange time in this house
as well. Tomorrow night we will gather
and tell old stories that say God’s love became human and entered into this world
of ours. We will speak of a light
shining in the darkness and the darkness not overcoming it. And for a moment, we will speak and sing in
the manner prophets and angels, proclaiming the light that is shining, singing
of “Peace on earth .”
What
if we kept singing for more than a night?
What if all the faithful joined with Mary and prophets and angels in
singing ahead of time? What if with them we all glimpsed and proclaimed and
lived into that day “When peace shall over all the earth its ancient splendors
fling, and the whole world give back the song which now the angels sing.”
[1]
Barbara Brown Taylor,
“Singing Ahead of Time” in Home by
Another Way, (Boston: Cowley Publications, 1999), p. 18
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