Blessing and Joy

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Luke 1:39-56

Many years ago I had a conversation with a good friend and she coined a phrase I had never heard before and it sounded strange to me.  She said, “I’ve lost my joy.”  She was a Christian of a more charismatic variety than me.  She had been taught that joy is one of the fruits of the spirit that Christians receive through the workings of the Holy Spirit: love, joy, peace, patience, kindness, goodness, faithfulness, gentleness, and self-control (Gal. 5:22,23).  These spiritual fruits like fruit on a tree develop and ripen over time in followers of Jesus as a result of a deepening devotional life.  

Being raised your typical Presbyterian I had hardly heard of the Holy Spirit let alone that the Spirit works in us and brings forth these fruits.  I thought being a Christian simply meant being good and sticking to God’s rules all on your own efforts because that’s the deal if you want God on your side.  

My friend was the most committed and devout Christian I knew at the time and always seemed so joyful.  She was the first person I met who went to church and actually worshipped.  She said she lost her joy, that at the end of the day she wasn’t feeling joy anymore, but rather profound disappointment.  People she loved had let her down and hurt her.  These people wouldn’t give her the space to sort things out.  On top of all that she didn’t feel close to God anymore.  She lost her joy.  It even came to the point that this worship-filled person pulled away from church.  For a couple of years, she couldn’t worship.  She lost her joy.

Thankfully, her story is not tragic.  In time her joy returned.  God brought her life together in the way she felt he promised he would.  She married, became an elementary teacher, and had children.  She had hit a period where she just needed to walk alone, a period of time for God to heal some deeper hurts in her than just her present ones.

This friend is one of those people I think of when I hear Mary’s Song.  Let me give a rather expanded translation.  “My soul, the entirety of my being, worships the Lord and my spirit, that within me that makes me feel alive, rejoices greatly in the God of my salvation.  For, He has looked with favour on his overwhelmed servant.  From now on people will call me blessed!  God has done great things for me that only God can do.  His mercy is for all those who trust their whole lives to him.”  Mary sang that song the moment she realized that God truly did have his hand in her troubling circumstances.  The angel had told her that her elderly relative Elizabeth was pregnant and so she was. 

There is great joy in Mary’s Song, in Mary, but it leaves me with a few questions.  I don’t think that what she means by joy and by being blessed is what we think they mean.  Let me start with what it is to be blessed.

These are holiday times and most of us gather together with our families and have a big meal.  Usually someone will say grace and in that prayer begin to count the many blessings the family enjoys.  Everybody is reasonably healthy.  Everybody enjoys a comfortable life.  The family has a good name.  We give thanks that God has blessed us in so many ways.  Gratitude is a good thing to feel towards God, but I don’t think this sort of “count your many blessings” is what Mary meant when she said people would call her blessed.

For Mary, being blessed meant God had included her in his mission to bring healing salvation to his hurting, broken, suffering world.  Oddly, this blessing came by means of an unexpected pregnancy that was troubling, indeed scandalous in so many ways.  In our eyes Mary was disturbingly young, probably somewhere between 13-15.  It was not unusual back then for marriage arrangements to be made between a father and a man between 25 and 50 years of age to marry his daughter.  Such was Joseph.  

Mary and Joseph were only betrothed and not yet married when she was discovered to be with child.  Archaeologists tell us that the wee town she lived in, Nazareth, appears to have been very law-of-Moses-abiding Jewish.  A pregnancy out of wedlock there would have been horribly scandalous.  Nobody but Cousin Elizabeth and Joseph believed Mary that the child in her was the Son of God conceived by the Holy Spirit.  

Then, after Jesus was born Joseph and Mary had to become refugees in Egypt. Jealous King Herod wanted to kill the baby.  That meant Joseph had to leave his job as a respected carpenter.  They would have struggled financially as strangers in a foreign land.  

Add to it all that, the difficult reality that as Jesus progressed through childhood, he apparently wasn’t your "normal" child and people knew it.  So, Mary had to bear the stigma of having a child who appeared mentally unstable.  And after finally leaving home at age 30, Jesus started his “Kingdom of God” ministry on the coattails of crazy cousin John - John the Baptizer...locusts, honey, camel hair…that John.  Then, Jesus appeared to be dealing with his paternity issue by claiming God as his Father and seemed to prove by doing and saying things that only God could do and say.  

Then, Jesus, her son, was arrested and tried for treason.  Mary had to watch her son die a public execution by crucifixion and as she stood there utterly heartbroken people certainly would have mocked her for being the mother of this humiliated false Messiah.  Whatever she felt when she encountered Jesus raised from the dead would have certainly been tempered with what we know today as Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder.

Mary said people would call her blessed but when you consider what she went through because of Jesus, you have to ask: How was that a blessing? Mary is called blessed not because she was a good, hardworking person, a good mother and all that and so God rewarded her with health, wealth, and a respected family name.  Mary is called blessed because God was working through her and she remained faithful through all that she suffered for being the mother of Jesus, the Son of God, the Messiah. 

Blessing always comes in the face of suffering.  In this fallen world full of evil, God’s workings, his mission to save and heal it will always meet with adversity.  Yet, the blessing one receives for being a disciple of Jesus and living according to him who is the light of the world is, well, him; the assurance of his presence, the Holy Spirit, being personally with us.  It’s the blessing of enjoying God’s favour, God’s faithfulness to us.  Health, wealth, and a good name are quite often distractions that keep us from being faithful and enjoying the fullness of life that Jesus has for us.   

If blessedness comes in the face of suffering, what does this say about joy?  We live in a culture that sees the pursuit of happiness as a basic human right.  But we also live in a culture in which corporate advertisers tell us we can’t be happy unless we have this or have that and there’s never enough.  True happiness in this broken world is not found in wealth and security.  It’s when your whole being rejoices from saying “I know my Jesus is with me and that he is working through me and that my dis-ease at not having the “good life” that so many around me enjoy is not in vain.  God…yes, God is working through me.  I am blessed!”   There’s a joy in God’s blessing.  It’s when all Hell has broken forth against you trying to break your faith and you somehow find yourself singing, “When peace, like a river, attendeth my way, When sorrows like sea billows roll;

Whatever my lot, Thou hast taught me to say,
It is well, it is well with my soul.

At the end of the day when we are alone with ourselves, what do we come back to?  Is it joy?  Do we lift our hearts in the wonder that we belong to Jesus, that he is with us and we are a part of his reign in this hurting world?  At the end of the day what do we come back to?  Is it joy?  Amen.

 

Ponder This Picture

 Luke 1:39-55

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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.

Blessing and Joy

Luke 1:39-56

Many years ago I had a conversation with a good friend and she coined a phrase I had never heard before and it sounded strange to me.  She said, “I’ve lost my joy.”  She was a Christian of a more charismatic variety than me.  She had been taught that joy is one of the fruits of the spirit that Christians receive through the workings of the Holy Spirit: love, joy, peace, patience, kindness, goodness, faithfulness, gentleness, and self-control (Gal. 5:22,23).  These spiritual fruits like fruit on a tree develop and ripen over time in followers of Jesus as a result of a deepening devotional life. 

Being raised your typical Presbyterian I had hardly heard of the Holy Spirit let alone that the Spirit works in us and brings forth these fruits.  I thought being a Christian simply meant being good and sticking to God’s rules all on your own efforts because that’s the deal if you want God on your side. 

My friend was the most committed and devout Christian I knew at the time and always seemed so joyful.  She was the first person I met who went to church and actually worshipped.  She said she lost her joy, that at the end of the day she wasn’t feeling joy anymore, but rather profound disappointment.  People she loved had let her down and hurt her.  These people wouldn’t give her the space to sort things out.  On top of all that she didn’t feel close to God anymore.  She lost her joy.  It even came to the point that this worship-filled person pulled away from church.  For a couple of years, she couldn’t worship.  She lost her joy.

Thankfully, her story is not tragic.  In time her joy returned.  God brought her life together in the way she felt he promised he would.  She married, became an elementary teacher, and had children.  She had hit a period where she just needed to walk alone, a period of time for God to heal some deeper hurts in her than just her present ones.

This friend is one of those people I think of when I hear Mary’s Song.  Let me give a rather expanded translation.  “My soul, the entirety of my being, worships the Lord and my spirit, that within me that makes me feel alive, rejoices greatly in the God of my salvation.  For, He has looked with favour on his overwhelmed servant.  From now on people will call me blessed!  God has done great things for me that only God can do.  His mercy is for all those who trust their whole lives to him.”  Mary sang that song the moment she realized that God truly did have his hand in her troubling circumstances.  The angel had told her that her elderly relative Elizabeth was pregnant and so she was.

There is great joy in Mary’s Song, in Mary, but it leaves me with a few questions.  I don’t think that what she means by joy and by being blessed is what we think they mean.  Let me start with what it is to be blessed.

These are holiday times and most of us gather together with our families and have a big meal.  Usually someone will say grace and then begin to count the many blessings the family enjoys.  Everybody is reasonably healthy.  Everybody enjoys a comfortable life.  The family has a good name.  We give thanks that God has blessed us in so many ways.  Gratitude is a good thing to feel towards God, but I don’t think this sort of “count your many blessings” is what Mary meant when she said people would call her blessed.

For Mary, being blessed meant God had included her in his mission to bring salvation to the world.  This blessing came by means of an unexpected pregnancy that would have blemished the family name.  Not to mention the health risks to her for she was somewhere between 13-15 years old.  Nobody but Elizabeth and Joseph believed her that the child in her was the Son of God conceived by the Holy Spirit.  Then, when Jesus was born Joseph and Mary had to become refugees in Egypt because jealous King Herod wanted to kill the baby.  That meant Joseph had to leave his job as a respected carpenter.  Then, as Jesus progressed through childhood, he apparently wasn’t your "normal" child and people knew it.  So, Mary had to bear the stigma of having a child who appeared mentally unstable.  Then, Jesus started his “Kingdom of God” ministry on the coattails of crazy cousin John - John the Baptizer...locusts, honey, camel hair.  Then, Jesus was arrested and tried for treason.  Then, she had to watch her son die a public execution by crucifixion and as she stood there utterly heartbroken people certainly would have mocked her for being the mother of this humiliated false Messiah.  Whatever she felt when she encountered Jesus raised from the dead would have certainly been tempered with what we know today as Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder.

Mary is called blessed not because she was a good, hardworking person and so God rewarded her with health, wealth, and a respected family name.  Mary is called blessed because God was working through her and she remained faithful through all that she suffered for being the mother of Jesus. 

Blessedness always comes in the face of suffering.  In this fallen world full of evil, God’s workings, his mission to save and heal it will always meet with adversity.  Yet, the blessing one receives for being a disciple of Jesus and living according to him who is the light of the world is, well, him; the assurance of his presence personally with us and God’s favour, his faithfulness to us.  Health, wealth, and a good name are quite often distractions that keep us from being faithful and enjoying the fullness of life that Jesus has for us.  

If blessedness comes in the face of suffering, what does this say about joy?  We live in a culture that sees the pursuit of happiness as a basic human right.  But, we also live in a culture in which corporate advertisers tell us we can’t be happy unless we have this or have that and there’s never enough.  True happiness in this broken world is not found in wealth and security.  It’s when your whole being rejoices from saying “I know my Jesus is with me and that he is working through me and that my dis-ease at not having the “good life” that so many around me enjoy is not in vain.  Yes, God is working through me.  I am blessed!”

At the end of the day when we are alone with ourselves, what do we come back to?  Is it joy?  Do we lift our hearts in the wonder that we belong to Jesus, that he is with us and we are a part of his reign in this hurting world?  At the end of the day what do we come back to?  Is it joy?  Amen.

Leaping in the Womb

Luke 1:39-55

A baby leaping in the womb…being a man I am speaking a bit out of line here I’m afraid.  I have no idea what it would be like to feel the sensation of a baby kicking around in my belly.  I got to feel and see my two children kicking around inside of Dana, and see them born and all that.  But, I was just a very scared and inept observer.  I asked Dana about this but all she said was you mostly just go about the day to day stuff and you marvel a lot.  That wasn’t much help I was looking for some deeper thought because I had this sermon to write.  Anyway, if memory serves what I saw her thinking and doing was more like: “What will this child be like?  Is it healthy?  Can I do this?  Can I eat that?  I really want to eat that?  My hormones are out of wack, look out?  I feel like barfing could you get me some crackers.  Heartburrrrnnnnn!  Pull over, I need to pee again, now!  Can I do this?  Why God?  Wow God!  Umph, this baby must be Chuck Norris.  Wow God!”  A new human life growing inside of you, a part of you but not, that bond…it’s a marvel…a wonderful mystery.  But, it’s not for me to know.  That’s a special gift God gave to women.

With that in mind, think of Elizabeth.  Imagine your child not just kicking inside you, but leaping, and leaping for a reason.  Here’s Elizabeth pregnant way past her safe childbearing years.  She had suffered the label of “barren” nearly all her life.  In her day they believed a woman’s main purpose was bearing and rearing children.  She would have had to deal with a lot of scorn.  And here she was pregnant, just like the angel told her husband Zechariah she would become that day he went into the Holy of Holies to offer incense and then the angel struck him mute when he didn’t believe the good news.

In comes her cousin’s daughter, Mary, probably fifteen coming for that extended visit that young daughter’s of cousins sometimes used to have to make when they got pregnant (said with a whisper).  The baby in Elizabeth’s womb leaps and she is filled with the Holy Spirit and instead of saying, “You poor child.  Everything’s going to be just fine.  You look beautiful.”  All the while thinking, “Mercy me, child.  What were you thinking?”  Instead of all that sappy, Southern politeness she loudly exclaims, “Woman, you are blessed.  Your baby is blessed.  And who am I that the mother of my Lord has come to see me.  Even my baby’s leaping.  Believe that angel, Honey.  You are blessed.”

Now there’s something deeper going on here that we would be remiss not to note.  Both Elizabeth and Mary stand as representatives of two phases of God’s people.  Elizabeth represents the faithful people of Israel.  She has the new life of the greatest of the prophets growing in her womb.  She’s married to a priest and herself of a priestly family, indeed the chief priests, a descendent of Aaron.  Yet, she was barren and shamed.  Elizabeth stands for the people of Israel who sang the lament of Psalm 80. 

Psalm 80 was written somewhere between 701 BC when the Assyrians destroyed northern Israel to sometime just after 586 BC when the Babylonians destroyed Jerusalem and the Temple and carried the Israelites away into exile.  It was Yahweh’s doings to kick his people off the Land because of their idolatry and wanton abuse of the poor.  Yet, in the midst of all this wickedness there always was a faithful remnant of Israelites who had had to suffer the fate of their wicked kin without cause.  These faithful innocents are the people who are crying out in Psalm 80: “Restore us, O LORD God of hosts, let your face shine, that we may be saved.”

Elizabeth and Zechariah were such people.  Luke says at 1:6, “Both of them were righteous before God, living blamelessly according to all the commandments and ethical requirements of the Lord.  Yet, they had no children, since Elizabeth was barren, and they both were getting on in years.”  They were faithful among the priesthood; a priesthood who in that day were largely either politically corrupt, hypocritical, or devoutly legalistic.  Yet, though they were faithful it appeared as though God had cursed them and cut them off from having a future generation.

Mary was a young woman still really just a child, maybe just fifteen.  She was innocent in her own right yet about to be scorned for a scandal that was God’s doing.  Mary, this child, was to be the mother of the God/man, the mother of the new humanity.  Her baby will be Yeshua, Joshua, salvation if you remember last week’s sermon.  Israel’s faithful remnant prayed for restoration, for salvation, and Mary’s child Jesus (Yeshua or Joshua) is that salvation.  He is the one at God’s right hand come not just to save God’s people, but to save God’s whole creation from sin, and evil, and death.

I look around at churches today.  The majority of them grown small, aged, nearly barren of children and I think of Elizabeth and her baby, John – John the Baptist – leaping in her womb.  We are like this faithful remnant that she represents.  The culture around us that we used to could call Christian started going secular in the 60’s and now has largely gone pagan.  People with spiritual experiences and ideas about God abound.  “Spiritual but not religious” is a predominant attitude.  We can’t call our culture Christian anymore.  Indeed, anything that looks like institutional Christianity is suspect or scorned.  There are big forms of Christianity out there, the mega-church phenomena, but you have to watch them and ask where the mega-money coming in goes.  Are they really doing anything to eradicate poverty, clean-up neighbourhoods, or get people back on their feet.  Or, are they just getting filthy rich offering spiritual opium to a multitude that suffers existential angst for having gotten lost and grown obese from worshipping the false gods of money, sex, and power.  We, the remnant, may look old and barren but we still got Jesus and the voice of the prophet leaping in our bellies that points to him.  We’ve got Truth.

I want to tell you something about Mary, the fifteen-year-old young woman standing outside our doors pregnant with what’s coming.  Let’s not write her off, amen?  Who is she?  How about a little family history?  The Baby Boomers left the church in the 60’s.   Those that stayed gave the church its last 1950’s–style heyday in the 80’s.  A good many of the Boomers wanted their children to be able to decide for themselves about matters of faith so they dropped them off at church programs for children.  When those children reached their teens they did not stay with the church because it wasn’t a family thing for them and, let’s face it, we only segregated them inside these walls with our children and youth programs. and didn't get to know them.  Then these children of the Boomers started to have children in the late 80’s and early 90’s and saw no need to take them to church.  A generation more or less lost?  Now these very un-churched, secularized, well-gadgetted, social media addicted grandchildren of the Boomers are having children.  The oldest of which would be the 15-year-old young woman outside our door pregnant with what’s coming. 

So what is coming?  Well, whatever it is won’t be coming here.  It just won’t and we have got to accept that and change.  We have to go out there and really be like Jesus whom we know and worship in the power and presence of the Holy Spirit.  We have to get out there and really be the family of God.  I emphasize family here because a lot to most of these young folks are wanting for family, family like Elizabeth and Mary.  Elizabeth didn’t judge Mary for her predicament.  She called Mary blessed and herself blessed to be in Mary’s presence because Jesus was there growing in her.  So also with the children and youth who are out there.  We need to be calling them blessed and counting ourselves blessed to be in their lives. 
            One of the most astonishing social realities happening right now is young people awakening to and responding to Jesus and even taking spiritual leadership in their homes.  “and a little child shall lead them” so goes the Scripture.  Let me give you an example.  A couple of weeks ago I was up at the hospital and I went into the chaplain’s office to get my free-parking-clergy-perk-ticket.  While I was talking to Patti, the hub-meistress, a young boy maybe fifteen came in.  He asked for a rosary.  He said his friend told him he could get one their.  Patti got him one and asked if he knew what it was for and if not she’d help.  He thanked her and left.  Friends, I hope you’re feeling a leaping in your bellies.  Something really wonderful is going on out there.  Go find it and bless them and be blessed.  Amen.