Gather Your Ingredients

 

Service of Worship

Eastern Parkway United Methodist Church

December 13, 2020

Rev. Natalie Bowerman, Pastor

 

Let us pray:

My soul magnifies You, Lord,

     and my spirit rejoices in God my Savior.

Thank You for looking on my humble estate!

    Thank You for blessing me and mine through the submission of Mary

            and the incarnation of Jesus.

You have done great things for me,

    and holy is Your name.

Your mercy has been poured out on me,

    and to the next generation, too.

Show Your strength in my life and in the lives of those I love;

    Scatter the proud;

Bring down the mighty from their thrones

    and exalt the humble;

Fill the hungry with good things,

    and turn the hearts of the rich to be generous and kind.

Come to the aid of all Your servants, Lord;

    remember Your great mercy,

and speak as You spoke to our fathers,

    to Abraham and to his offspring. Amen.

 

Luke 1: 26-55

²⁶ In the sixth month of Elizabeth’s pregnancy, God sent the angel Gabriel to Nazareth, a town in Galilee, ²⁷ to a virgin pledged to be married to a man named Joseph, a descendant of David. The virgin’s name was Mary. ²⁸ The angel went to her and said, “Greetings, you who are highly favored! The Lord is with you.”

²⁹ Mary was greatly troubled at his words and wondered what kind of greeting this might be. ³⁰ But the angel said to her, “Do not be afraid, Mary; you have found favor with God. ³¹ You will conceive and give birth to a son, and you are to call him Jesus. ³² He will be great and will be called the Son of the Most High. The Lord God will give him the throne of his father David, ³³ and he will reign over Jacob’s descendants forever; his kingdom will never end.”

³⁴ “How will this be,” Mary asked the angel, “since I am a virgin?”

³⁵ The angel answered, “The Holy Spirit will come on you, and the power of the Most High will overshadow you. So the holy one to be born will be called^[a] the Son of God. ³⁶ Even Elizabeth your relative is going to have a child in her old age, and she who was said to be unable to conceive is in her sixth month. ³⁷ For no word from God will ever fail.”

³⁸ “I am the Lord’s servant,” Mary answered. “May your word to me be fulfilled.” Then the angel left her.

Mary Visits Elizabeth

³⁹ At that time Mary got ready and hurried to a town in the hill country of Judea, ⁴⁰ where she entered Zechariah’s home and greeted Elizabeth. ⁴¹ When Elizabeth heard Mary’s greeting, the baby leaped in her womb, and Elizabeth was filled with the Holy Spirit. ⁴² In a loud voice she exclaimed: “Blessed are you among women, and blessed is the child you will bear! ⁴³ But why am I so favored, that the mother of my Lord should come to me? ⁴⁴ As soon as the sound of your greeting reached my ears, the baby in my womb leaped for joy. ⁴⁵ Blessed is she who has believed that the Lord would fulfill his promises to her!”

Mary’s Song

⁴⁶ And Mary said:

“My soul glorifies the Lord
⁴⁷     and my spirit rejoices in God my Savior,
⁴⁸ for he has been mindful
    of the humble state of his servant.
From now on all generations will call me blessed,
⁴⁹     for the Mighty One has done great things for me—
    holy is his name.
⁵⁰ His mercy extends to those who fear him,
    from generation to generation.
⁵¹ He has performed mighty deeds with his arm;
    he has scattered those who are proud in their inmost thoughts.
⁵² He has brought down rulers from their thrones
    but has lifted up the humble.
⁵³ He has filled the hungry with good things
    but has sent the rich away empty.
⁵⁴ He has helped his servant Israel,
    remembering to be merciful
⁵⁵ to Abraham and his descendants forever,
    just as he promised our ancestors.”

 

A Message

“Gather Your Ingredients”

 

Friends, the last few weeks I’ve had a song stuck in my head. It’s a Christmas song, and a relatively contemporary one. It’s also very popular, and for good reason. It’s beautiful. The lyrics are luscious poetry, the music beneath them is delightfully harmonious, and though the song leans toward “popular contemporary Christmas music”, the words are religious, so in many ways the sing feels like it’s the best of every world. The first verse goes like this:

 

Mary, did you know that your baby boy would one day walk on water?
Mary, did you know that your baby boy would save our sons and daughters?
Did you know that your baby boy has come to make you new?
This child that you've delivered, will soon deliver you

 

Beautiful. It was serenaded to me on Christmas Eve two years ago when I was 8 months pregnant with my own baby boy, and a mama can’t help but swoon sometimes. The only problem with a song like this one is a big one for me: Mary did know. Mary knew it all.

This morning we gather together many of the key players in the birth narrative of Jesus, or the “key ingredients” if you were to bake the “bread of life”: Jesus. And immediately we fill with joy upon reading who God chooses to deliver salvation through. Our first ingredient is someone who is not even related to Jesus by blood: Zechariah. Someone who we would expect to dominate most Bible stories, Zechariah is an old man, and a respected priest in the Temple community. He has long since concluded that he will not raise children because his wife is infertile, and at their advanced ages the chances that she could still conceive seem extraordinarily slim. Zechariah seems relatively unbothered by this fate. After all, he has so much clout and respect in his community that he can contentedly spend his days in service to his faith without shouldering any of the burdens faced almost exclusively by infertile women—what will people think of him in his childless state? Will people look down on him for never having kids? Who will take care of him when he gets older? Who will speak for him in public? Zechariah, however, the highly respected old man, has no speaking lines here. Gabriel shut him up for doubting the work of God.

That brings us to our next key ingredient: Elizabeth. A cousin of Mary, Elizabeth is so important because she bears the miraculous child who will pave the way for the next one: baby John the Baptist. Someday John will grow up to be the eccentric man who lives outside, eats bugs, and shouts at strangers. In today’s story he is a fetus in Elizabeth’s womb, who rolls around and jumps with joy when he senses he is in the presence of the Good News, even if that Good News is still an embryo.

The only vocal man in this story is Gabriel, the angel who tells Mary to get ready to become a Mom. If we’re baking bread, Mary is the flour. The most important base ingredient. We forget how courageous Mary was, because we’ve heard her story so many times, and famous artwork so frequently depicts her as a 30 year old white woman. This is not who Gabriel finds. In a small house in a little hole in the wall town called Nazareth lives a young lady who has been betrothed to a local carpenter. The young lady’s name is Mary. She is nearly a child herself, since women in her day were betrothed shortly after puberty. And she’s pregnant. We need to put aside our images of this prim and proper holy woman in the blue shawl, if only to see Mary through the lens of the world she lived in: she was a lower class, rural, Middle Eastern, pregnant, unmarried teenage girl.

How did Mary’s family and neighbors view her? We learn precious little about her background, so we never hear how her parents reacted to the news that they would become grandparents before there was a wedding. But a different evangelist, Matthew, tells us that her fiancé, Joseph, worried that Mary would be publicly shamed, assumed she had committed adultery, and planned to dump her. What terrifying shoes Mary must have stood in.

How would we view Mary? It’s so easy for us to wax poetic about how wonderful it would have been to kneel down in the manger and meet the Holy Family on that first Christmas, but without knowing the whole story, would we really feel that way? If we saw Mary walking down the street, brown skin, young face, a round tummy, stretched out maternity clothes and no ring on her finger, would we see the Mother of our Lord? I sure hope so. I would want to be such a prophetic person. Because I’ve met people who would shame her, just like Joseph feared, assuming things about her sex life that they couldn’t know of a stranger, and then call her a “drain on the system”. Mary’s First Century world was crueler still. She was lucky she lived to give birth, as she could have been stoned.

So often we want to paint Mary as passive. Gabriel told her she was having God’s baby, and she said yes. She hugged her cousin, then spent months at home knitting booties and diapers. She meekly sat on a donkey while Joseph pulled her along to Bethlehem, and the animals in the barn prepared Jesus’ birth scene (at least if you read the lyrics to “The Friendly Beasts”). She sat and pondered while visitors showered her with odd gifts—gold, smelly stuff, and embalming oil—and did little more than smile throughout the whole process, while some man two millennia later wrote a song assuming she was ignorant of her baby’s future.

Feminist Natalie will go ahead and smash that image with Rosie the Riveter’s hammer in favor of an image dearer to my heart: Mary the warrior. Mary heard Gabriel tell her of the miracle Messiah that she would raise, and rather than running and screaming in the opposite direction she said yes. She encouraged her pregnant cousin with her own miracle baby, and gave these two future rabbis a chance to fist bump from their mothers’ wombs. And after that holy fist bump, she sang what we call the Magnificat, her own prophecy, a song we may retitle “Mary knew”, a song that exalted pregnant Middle Eastern teenage girls named Mary and brought down all of those who would dare to shame Jesus’ Mom.

In exalting Mary, we exalt every voice that our society, and even our church, relegates all to often to the margins. We need to ask ourselves this and every Advent: who is hiding in plain sight right in front of us, burning with desire to tell us about their miracle, and we haven’t listened because we deem their voice unimportant? Who are the unmarried Middle Eastern pregnant teenagers near us? Are we listening to the testimonies of the women in our lives, the children, our BIPOC friends, our neighbors living with disabilities and chronic illnesses, our LGBTQIA+ siblings, the prisoners, the refugees, the immigrants?

The most important thing we may learn from Mary’s powerful song is this: the mouthpiece of God is never where you’re looking for it. God always speaks from just beyond the horizon of your imagination, because God is always stretching this world, one miracle at a time, to be big enough to put Mary and all of her friends at the head of the table, while Zechariah quietly listens to her sing. May we listen with wiser ears this week.

Amen.

Friends, I invite you to receive a benediction: Our God, our Creator, Redeemer, and Sustainer, will guard our going out and coming in, from this time on and forevermore. As all of God’s people we say together: Amen.