Image: Visitation by Raphael, c. 1517
December 22, 2024: Advent 4C
Luke 1:39-55
Unknown Power
Imagine, for a moment, that you are in Mary’s shoes. You’re a young woman, perhaps as young as twelve, engaged to be married. While you come from a respectable family of priestly stock, no one you know of in Nazareth is particularly well-off, least of all you. And then something shocking happens. An angel appears and tells you that not only are you pregnant, but the child in you will be called the Son of God. He will receive the throne of his ancestor David and will reign forever and ever.
Now, how many people do you think would believe this story? You know it’s real, but it’s likely that no one around you would. People weren’t naïve. They knew how babies were made. Knowing that word gets around quickly, perhaps you make plans to get out of town. Maybe a relative could take you in for a while.
And that relative turns out to be Elizabeth, living in the Judean hill country to the south.
You might be anxious about what to expect when you arrive. But Elizabeth bursts out the door, greeting you in a way even more remarkable than the angel did. “Blessed are you among women and blessed is the fruit of your womb!”
Hearing something once, even from an angel of God, might be hard to believe. After all, we might think such visitation to be a work of bad digestion rather than a work of God. Hearing the same thing from a human, a beloved relative, would be easier. It would confirm the angel’s message. In her own way, Elizabeth is another angel to Mary, bringing God’s good news to her. In fact, Martin Luther called Elizabeth’s exclamation the first sermon on earth. For the first time, the good news of Jesus Christ is proclaimed by a human.
Good news is something of an endangered reality, after all. We are so saturated with bad news that good news gets lost in the shuffle. And we’ve also been primed for zero-sum thinking: what’s good for you is bad for me, and vice versa. We can be tempted to think that God is impossibly distant from this fallen, hurting world. After all, if so much goes wrong in our lives, where is God?
And the answer we hear from Mary and Elizabeth is that God is deeply involved in this world, more deeply than we can dare or dream. The incarnation of the Son of God is, borrowing Paul’s words, a scandal to Jews and foolishness to Gentiles. The idea that the God of the cosmos would take vulnerable, weak human flesh, let alone be born of a peasant girl like Mary, shatters the boundaries of human-powered belief. But God does enter the world in this way for the sake of God’s beloved creation. The infinite, eternal God is carried by the finite, mortal Mary. The incarnation of God the Son as the man Jesus is the power and wisdom of God for those who are called to faith.
But it is a power unknown to the world. The world knows power this way: the power to dominate, exploit, or oppress. Since the time of the pharaohs, humanity has been caught in a power struggle, and often those struggles have caused great devastation to our planet and its inhabitants. The wars in Ukraine and the Middle East have been, at their root, about power: who has the power to impose their will by force? Our politics assumes an adversarial system, where individuals vie for the power to impose within it.
But the power of God is utterly different. God’s power seen in Mary and Elizabeth is a power that begins in the least likely places and people. After all, what kind of power did a young Galilean woman have on her own? Not much! What kind of power did an older Judean lady have, even if her husband was a priest? Not much! In these women, we see the nature of God’s power. God exercises power by bringing new life, not by causing death. God exercises power by invitation, not compulsion. After all, God does not force Mary to do anything. She assents to God’s will.
And as a co-creator with God, she sings further about God’s unknown power, exercising her own God-given power. She sings of how God has done great things for her—for her personally! Whatever troubles and heartbreak she will face—and she will face plenty—she knows that God has done great things for her. She has God-given resilience. And because God has done great things for her, God will do great things for those like her. Those who are on society’s bottom rung. God casts down the mighty from their thrones. No matter how great, how powerful, how invincible a person or a people feels, they are not immune to the fate that awaits all great people and nations. No empire lasts forever. But God lifts up the lowly—the lowly like Mary, exercising a power unknown to the world in them.
And that power—lifting up the lowly—can be seen in many places if we only have the eyes to see. Whenever Minnesota Adult & Teen Challenge visits, we hear about how God lifts up those who have hit rock bottom, who have destroyed their lives and relationships with substances. And many of those people have testimonies of God’s power that astonish and move us because we don’t necessarily see it in our lives. Or we forget.
But God’s power is at work. And despite all the bad news in the world, despite all the loss, tragedy, heartbreak, and trauma, God brings us through. And God does more than make us resilient, God does a new thing. Jesus Christ still comes into the world, as he did 2,000 years ago, through his word. Through the sacraments. And through people. Through you, through me, and especially through those we would never expect. Amen.
© 2024, David M. Fleener. Permission granted to copy and adapt original material herein for non-commercial purposes with appropriate credit given.