Please Click Here For Online Worship Video
There’s something about us humans that we like to make pictures of important events. They help us to remember the details, or the story behind the event. I have a picture here. To someone who doesn’t know the story behind it, it looks like a couple of men, one older and one younger, pausing for a picture before entering a house. Woohoo. Who would want a picture of that? A closer look and you will recognize the younger guy as me from about 20 years ago and by the resemblance between us, you will deduce the other man to be my father. Most people who see this picture will remark on the resemblance and assume that’s what this picture is all about. But there are plenty other pictures I could pull out to demonstrate the resemblance. That’s not why I framed it and keep it around. For me, there’s a story behind this picture that makes it very special. This picture was taken by a hospice volunteer who was very good at capturing moments. In this picture he captured the moment of the end of the last walk my father and I ever took together. That’s special. I’m kind of looking up and away. Dad is looking right at you with his hand on the door ready to open it and enter his home. We are both smiling. Though we both knew what was coming, there was joy that day. A few weeks later, Dad opened a door and went home. The smile on his face in this picture assures me everything’s ok. They say a picture is worth a thousand words.
In our reading from Luke, he gives us a word picture and throughout the history of the church many people have tried to paint pictures that tell this story. In the first few centuries of the church they painted pictures called icons that were not all that detailed like Medieval and Renaissance paintings are, but were actually quite simplistic and the point of them was devotional. You were supposed to just stare at them for hours prayerfully pondering who the people are or the moment depicted and come to the place where you see beyond the picture and catch a glimpse of the divine meaning of the moment. Like when I see the smile on Dad’s face in this picture. It says something to me about life now and the life to come.
There are many icons of this moment in Luke’s Gospel known as The Visitation of Mary. They usually depict two women in an embrace with rather placid looks on their faces. One woman will usually be depicted with graying hair, but you won’t be able to really guess the age of either of them. In most of the icons you won’t be able to tell the women are pregnant. Though there are a couple that draw little circles in their bellies that have baby boys in them and you can tell which woman is Mary because the John the Baptist baby is bowing to the Jesus baby. Anyway, for the most part when we look at the icons of this moment and the embrace of love between the two women, one old and one young, is what we’re led to prayerfully ponder. This bond of love is the story behind the story that has something to tell us about the nature or personality of God. God is like the love, the intergenerational love of mothers and daughters particularly around this thing of being able to have a human life growing inside of you. The personality of God as love and hope and joy pervades the icons the early church created to describe this moment of Mary visiting Elizabeth.
So looking at Luke’s word picture here, we should begin our understanding of God’s saving act of his creation having caught a glimpse of this intergenerational love, hope, and joy and the intuitive understanding that woman share around child-bearing. Luke’s backstory to his picture is of God acting in miraculous but very human ways. Elizabeth, who due to the stigmas of her day suffered scorn among women for being unable to bear children, is now pregnant in her elder years. Impossible and dangerous. People could have quite easily accused her saying that Zechariah must have been the problem all along and now your pregnant so it must be by someone else. Mary, a young girl twelve to fifteen years old, still a virgin yet pregnant. Umm. That’s not going to go over well in her small town hometown. She will be scorned for being pregnant out of wedlock.
But, Elizabeth and Mary, both knowing that God is at work in them, look beyond what other people will see and think and say. Elizabeth does not pass judgement upon Mary for what seems like it could be a very scandalous situation in the life of small town, traditional, faithful Jews. Instead of judging Mary she looks beyond and perceives the hand of God at work and then, honoured to be in Mary’s presence, she blesses Mary. And Mary, she forgoes the inclination to make a judgement of Elizabeth and how she might have gotten pregnant after all those years and looks beyond all that and believes what the angel Gabriel said and accepts Elizabeth’s pregnancy as the sign that what the angel said about the baby growing in her was true.
And so, blessed by Elizabeth Mary sings a song of praise from deep within her being. Her whole being is deeply, moved with love, hope, faith, and joy. God is at work through them. The words of the song are in what I would call the prophetic past. The prophets often said what God was going to do by saying God has already done it in order to add certainty to the fact that God will do it. Her song is about how God will remember his people and his promises to his people to show them healing love and basically turn the world order upside-down to fix and heal everything. He will scatter the proud and bring down the powerful from their thrones and lift up the lowly. God will equalize things. The hungry will receive good things, but the rich will receive no more. Everyone will have enough.
We can ask how will this happen. Well, the great books of history depict pictures of men doing heroic things. Typically, the male way is to say, “Bring me my coonskin hat and rifle. Let’s forge and empire.” But in Luke’s picture, we find God acting through the impossible, seemingly scandalous pregnancies of two women and the bond of intergenerational, maternal love and understanding they share. Somehow that’s the way God will bring about his future. We will find God turning this world order upside down and healing his creation by causing humanity to understand the weakness, the vulnerability, of this intuitive understanding and bond of love that women share with respect to child-bearing. Jesus said that the suffering and troubles of this world are the birth pangs of creation giving birth to the new world coming. We must learn to love and support one another and the Creation in the midst of these birth pangs instead of continuing on in this exploitative “Serve me” attitude that we have. We must learn to maternally love the future that’s coming for the sake of the children who will live in it.
As Elizabeth was honoured to be in Mary’s presence and blessed her so must we regard everyone. We must honour and love and bless everyone. Even if the biggest jerk on the face of the planet is standing before us, we must humbly accept the honour of being in their presence and find a way to bless them. Quite often this looks like finding the courage to speak the truth in love.
We must continue on in faith, hope, and joy. God will bring this future healed reality about. In hope, we must act accordingly in love. Our only reward in this life will be the tasting the Joy of the Lord as he moves us to praise. The joy of the Lord is our strength. Ponder this picture of the love that Mary and Elizabeth share and understand it as the healing way of God and strive to live according to the hope there in. Amen.
