23 December 2012

“Hope from this baby”
HOPE ... from the prophets ... through Jesus ... for US
Micah 5:2-5a / Luke 1:39-55
4 Advent C
23 December 2012


Last week I shared with you how Pastor Gretchen from Luther’s Table regularly puts up some kind of “sermon discussion topic” on her Facebook page ... and for many of us, that’s become a sort of virtual text study to help us in preparation for our messages each week.
Another on-line forum ... one with a larger following than even Pastor Gretchen ... is the ELCA Clergy Group on Facebook, to which about a third of the pastors in the ELCA ... some 4200 of us ... subscribe, and sometimes participate.
A couple of weeks ago, one of my colleagues found an article from the Pew Research Center, pointing out that the number of children being born in the US has been steadily declining for years, a trend which is now carrying over into ethnic groups other than whites. His comment, though, left many of us scratching our heads ... and reaching for our keyboards: “We are so worried about mainline Protestant churches shrinking ... and yet there is one very straightforward solution. Have more babies. That should be our main mission strategy. Have more babies.”
No. I’m not kidding. That’s what he said.
One of his examples? The Duggar family. Yes, they of the reality TV series, “19 Kids and Counting,” they who point out with great pride how God has richly blessed them with each child that has come along and so just trust Jesus and have your own zip code full of children and all will be well.
Well, many, most of us, freely admitted that such talk gives us the creeps. Not because we have anything against kids ... nor that, as the accusation from the ‘other side’ came, that we and many Americans – especially those of us who don’t have kids – that we view children as a liability ... certainly not ... but because this kind of talk echoes the words and actions of some not so savory episodes and characters from world history ... dictators from the past century ... some will recall the Margaret Atwood book “The Handmaid’s Tale” ... and even here in Seattle, the outspoken pastor of a Certain Large Urban Church has said that the way they’re going to "take Seattle back for Jesus is to have more kids than the godless liberals who currently run things around here."
To me, the worst thing about such talk as this, is that it simply washes away the reason that people should have children today ... which is, because they want to have children. Period.
In twenty-first century America, we aren’t in the 1st or 8th or 18th century ... times in human history where having children was a necessity ... where the Genesis 1 mandate of “be fruitful and multiply” had to happen for human survival. That’s the reason why those Bible stories exist, about Abram and Sarai, about Isaac and Rebekah, Jacob and Rachel and Leah. “The Sign of the Child” in those ancient Bible times meant hope, a hope for the future; if, simply, hope that there would be someone around to take care of you in your old age.
Up until about a hundred years ago, people had to have a lot of kids because so many children didn’t make it to adulthood ... and you needed the labor on the farm ... the income in the tenement from child labor ... you needed lots of kids just in order to survive.
And survival was the key word. Because losing a child or children before adulthood was a regular occurrence then. Anyone who does genealogy knows that; look back at your family tree and see how many children died from the flu or measles or pneumonia before the age of 10. Tiny Tim from Dickens’ “A Christmas Carol” wasn’t the exception, but the rule, a relatively short time ago. So having a large family was a visible hope for assurance of future blessing, in a way that is not the case now, since the advent of penicillin and better farming and food production and nutrition habits that have moved the infant mortality rate low, lower, still lower ... most people survive infancy and childhood now ... and families are as a result smaller.
Smaller ... but no less full of hope ... for the sign of a child, a baby born, still brings with it, him or her, hopes, dreams, for a new life started, family together, growing together, raising hope, a future with hope, milestones marked through the years, baptisms, confirmations, graduations, weddings, grandchildren, “the crown of old age.”
And yet ... and yet ... we all know that things don’t always turn out the way we hope. Sometimes just the very coming of children is enough to fill prospective parents with nervousness ... fear ... feelings of unpreparedness ... “how can I, how will I ever do this?” Sometimes people who want to have children never can, never do ... for a myriad of reasons. And sometimes children don’t turn out the way we hope. Parents don’t parent the way we hope. There still is illness ... physical, mental, spiritual ... which changes things ... sometimes, permanently. And we know ... some of us too well; all of us, too recently, that even today, our children sometimes do not outlive us ... sometimes they don’t even make it out of childhood.
Even though children are the oldest sign of hope among us humans ... we know all too well that hope is not the only emotion they bring us. Sometimes, it’s sadness ... loss ... and fear.

Sadness ... loss ... and fear. Likely the three emotions which Mary carried with her as she ran cross country to her cousin Elizabeth’s house.
This is the part of the Mary story we often ignore. After Mary got the unexpected and mysterious news that she was to bear the Son of God ... she ran. She ran, ran away from home, away from her parents and her family and her friends ... those around her who she thought wouldn’t understand ... she was young, she was not married, and now what was going to happen to her????
So she ran. She ran to one who she believed would understand her. Elizabeth. Her old cousin. Well, yes, if you want to do dates and times, human measurements of things, Elizabeth was likely an old woman of 40 or 45 while Mary was probably still in her early teens ... but that isn’t as important a part of the story as some would make it out to be.
What is important is how Mary felt about what was going to happen to her. Because she “went with haste.” Gotta love the Bible and its euphemisms. She ran away from everything she knew so well because she was scared ... she was afraid she would lose everything ... her family (they’d kick her out) ... her life (she could be stoned for adultery ... girls were usually promised in marriage to a man ... though we don’t hear about Joseph here, yet, we’ve read the story and know he’s out there, looming, in the future ... and he’d dump her fast, because she’d been messing around with another man, that was for sure.)
Mary was scared ... fearful of the looming losses in her life ... probably sad to leave it all behind too ... as she ran, ran like the wind, ran to her old cousin’s house. The only one who would understand her. The one who could most tangibly, help her make some sense out of all this confusion which had descended upon her. The one who could bring her a word of hope.
Because Mary and Elizabeth shared a secret, a secret unexpected and mysterious ... God had intervened in both their lives and the result was children.
In Elizabeth’s case, a woman probably well into menopause, with an equally old husband living before the times of current ahem medicinal helps ... to them was going to come a child, the one who was to make ready a people prepared for the Lord ... John, who we call The Baptist.
Mary had heard from the angel who announced her pregnancy, that her relative Elizabeth was going to bear this miracle-child, “for nothing will be impossible with God.” And so off to Elizabeth Mary ran. In search of understanding ... calming of her fears ... HOPE ... and a HOME.
And HOPE ... and HOME ... is precisely what Elizabeth ... her words, her welcome, inspired by, given by God’s Spirit ... HOPE and HOME are what Elizabeth gives to Mary.

Blessed are you among women, and blessed is the fruit of your womb.
And why has this happened to me, that the mother of my Lord comes to me?
For as soon as I heard the sound of your greeting, the child in my womb leaped for joy.
And blessed is she who believed that there would be a fulfillment of what was spoken to her by the Lord.

Blessed is she who believed. A word ... a word of HOME and HOPE, of wholeness and healing if ever there was. For Elizabeth knows ... knows, deep in her heart, that she has been brought into, she is part of the everlasting heart of love and life, forgiveness and peace that is the will and the work of her God and our God, forever. She has experienced this deep in her very being. And so she is uniquely gifted as the one who brings this Good News to Mary ... Good News to this one who has until now, been dwelling in sadness and loss and fear ... now, Elizabeth says, NOW, it is time to put all that off forever. For Mary, you are blessed, and more, this child you are to bear, he is the ONE for whom we have waited so, so long. The ONE who will deliver us, who will save us, who will bring all the world into the everlasting heart of God forever.
It is no mistake that Mary has come here, to Elizabeth, this day. Like seeks out like, for comfort, for love, for hope, for home. And Elizabeth has The Word, deep within herself, which turns Mary around, turns Mary around so that she can sing, sing those beloved words of hope which we know as the Magnificat:

My soul magnifies the Lord, and my spirit rejoices in God my Savior.

Why does Mary rejoice? Because she is a sign, a sign that God is about to do something Very New. She – Mary – is the last of the Old Testament prophets – for, like the prophets ... like Jeremiah and Malachi, Zephaniah and Isaiah and Micah, she has been called to bring forth, to bear forth, to make God present to his people ... but she is the only one who has been given the special duty to bring God forth bodily, in flesh and blood, as a baby ... to rescue, to redeem, to turn the world around for all the babies of God’s good creation ... to give us all the first, best, most wondrous child-sign of HOPE, the way God will call us all HOME ... through Jesus.
Yes, earthly powers and principalities will be turned topsy-turvy. Watch out, pride! Move over, power! Be gone, wealth! Come into God’s fullness, meekness and weakness, poverty and despair! But that’s the point, isn’t it? Into a world where God’s good and gracious will is thwarted again and again, where it’s all been turned upside down by human sinfulness,where it always looks like the good loses and the bad triumphs ... into this, God himself needs to come to set it all right ... and so God is going to come, and so God comes, and so God has come, and comes, and will come ... to do just that.
What we have done with God’s good gifts of love, and life, this good earth itself ... the mess that has become of them through the web of sin and suffering we have spun through the ages ... Mary sings ... God, you are coming to set it all right once again.
Sadness, loss, and fear, yes, you are real, quite real, and we suffer because of you ... but mark my words, Mary sings, your days are numbered.
HOPE is coming ... from, through, THIS baby. Come to save all the babies of the world ... three months, three years, three decades or three score years and more ... to us, to all, in sorrow and fear, this baby will come ... has come ... is come ... Jesus, the Christ ... born as us, living as us, through all the joys and sorrows of this life ... suffering, dying FOR US when we couldn’t handle such pure love among us ... rising again, because “nothing is impossible with God” ... and God’s love can, will overcome even death itself ... to bring us all HOME, to that ultimate place of HOPE ... the everlasting heart of God, the place of love and life, forever.
That news made Mary sing the greatest song of joy and hope ever composed.
And the Good News for us today is that God is still speaking ... still calling forth the same song in, from us, calling us, like Mary, to bring forth, to bear forth, to make God present to all people. Sung in whichever way we are called to bring it forth, the music of our love, the cantata of our gifts and talents shared with a world lost in sadness, loss and fear ... the symphony of our voices, lifted together, bringing light and life, HOPE and HOME into this world, this world with so much wrong and awful, yes, but it is still the world God loves. That God loves so much that he would come as one of us, and live and die for it, so that we would have that HOPE and HOME restored for us, and for all, forever.
HOPE ... from this child ... for all of US ...
Starting through those small signs ... ever growing on the horizon ... bringing joy, and love, and peace to all.
Christ is born for this.
Amen.