cousins in faith-loneliness

 

SERMON PREACHED at St MARY’S, NORTH OAMARU

FOURTH SUNDAY OF ADVENT (19^th December) 2021

 

Readings:

 

Micah 5:2-5a

For the psalm: Luke 1:47-55

Hebrews 10:5-10

Luke 1: 39-45

 

One of the privileges of hosting the Gospel conversations is the access it gives me to a vast range of insights and perspectives. As I entered – several days back now as it happens – into the process of breaking open this scene of Elizabeth and Mary I was amused that we were a panel of three blokes and our own Karen, left to hold her own in a passage that is deeply “gynocentric,” so deeply imbursed with feminine understanding that, if we accept that Dr Luke the author was a bloke, then nevertheless we can surmise that Mrs Dr Luke was standing very close by his shoulder as he composed the Jesus story. As I looked at my randomly chosen confreres, academic Drs John Franklin from Mosgiel, and Gerry Morris from Wisconsin, I breathed a sigh of relief that we had conscripted our own Karen from Kurow, doctor from the school of womanhood and life. For this listener at least it was from Karen that the gems of memorable insight flowed. Praise God for giving us in Luke a champion of women’s perspectives. Praise God for the women in our churches, pews and pulpits, who bring insight into the experiences of Christ-bearer Mary and her cousin – Christ-Aunty if you like – Elizabeth. And if that sounds paternalistic, God forgive our patriarchal church for suppressing those perspectives for so much of its history. For it has.

So it is through a woman’s eyes and ears that the understanding of the kindred spirit relationship between Mary and Elizabeth is brought to us – it’s unsurprising, too, that it was Anne who reminded me of this perspective as I thought about the passage. Neither Mary nor Elizabeth would be heard, I suspect, in their ambivalence about the child within them, the complexity of the shall we say unusual conceptions, about the pregnancy still stretching out ahead of them, about the birth and the and the months and years and decades that lay ahead of their unborn children. Mary sought out her cousin because the older woman would understand – in ways that even Joseph could not – the ambiguities of motherhood. They need each other, and as they turn to each other they matter remind us of the importance of community, of mutual trust and understanding.  “No man is an island,” John Donne reminded us some centuries before inclusive language. No man, no woman, no child is an island, and I don’t think it’s too long a bow for us to draw that we are reminded in this passage of the need for community and mutual outreach that should and can be one of the most powerful essentials of belonging to the body of Christ. Are you okay? Luke shorthands the scene, but we can be certain that the question was at the very heart of the conversation between these two expectant cousin-mothers, the one so young, the other not.

Luke wants us to see the human, but wants us, too, to register the spiritual hand in this scene. Those women who have borne children will know, as men can only by proxy, the mysteries of a human life within, the kicks and wriggles and even hiccups, and the signs of recognition as a growing baby identifies her or his mother’s or sibling’s or father’s voice. In a post-enlightenment world we would do well to recall, too, that there are forms of knowledge that are beyond science: the communication, sometimes, between twins, the second sight that is the experience of many non-Europeanized peoples, the awareness of ancestors that once I would have dismissed as unsophisticated lunacy until I learned to listen to the stories of Australian Indigenous and New Zealand Māori.  (Perhaps I should have learned to recognize the etymological relationship between the words “sophistry” and “sophistication.” All that glitters is not gold). And so Elizabeth feels the child leap in her womb, as a recognition beyond mere science triggers a response of love and admiration between the unborn agents of God

Somewhere out on the unimportant edges of the powerful Roman Empire, surely one of the most powerful in history, two unborn infants recognize the presence of God. Two human beings who will be born and grow up radiating God from the depths of their being, two unborn infants recognize the presence of the Divine in one another. Two mothers notice, ponder and wonder, and remain deeply obedient to the voices of God and God’s messengers. Despite their utter powerlessness these two children on the unimportant outer edge of the Empire will go on to challenge the corruption of exploitative and compassionless leadership, religious and secular alike (for there was no distinction). Both will die in the process. For both – but especially the younger cousin, born in Bethlehem, the story will not end, and death-transforming new life will emerge from a borrowed tomb.

But for now we will leave the latter dimensions of the Christ story, and stay with the mystery of two women birthing the plans of God. Let us stay with the mystery that, as Kendrick didn’t quite put it, hands that once flung stars and quarks and solar systems and black holes into space paused in time and in the womb of the most blessed of women. Let us give thanks that we in all our individual and collective frailty and vulnerability still experience the presence of that Christ child, and through him draw near to God.