Listening to the Women--December 20, 2024

Listening to the Women--December 20, 2024

"In those days Mary set out and went with haste to a Judean town in the hill country, where she entered the house of Zechariah and greeted Elizabeth. When Elizabeth heard Mary's greeting, the child leaped in her womb. And Elizabeth was filled with the Holy Spirit, and exclaimed with a loud cry, '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'." (Luke 1:39-45)

The women in this story know what they are talking about. The men are struck silent.

The untrained and unschooled turn out to understand the ways of the Divine in these scenes. It is the Respectable Religious Professionals who are dumbfounded.

The people in positions of power, prestige, and privilege are skipped right over as God breaks into history. The anybodies (who are more often than not treated as nobodies by the world) are the ones whom God seeks out and works through.  In fact, given the identity of the child forming in Mary's womb, I suppose you could say that they are the ones God comes to dwell inside of.

This is one of those patterns in the Christmas story that is there just shouting from the pages of the Gospels, and yet it is so easy to miss staring us in the face.  As Luke tells it to us, the story of Jesus' birth has the women speak and the men quiet--Zechariah is struck mute during Elizabeth's pregnancy, and Joseph doesn't get a speaking line at all.  Meanwhile, Mary and Elizabeth are open to trusting what God has told them, and they understand how their children will be a part of God's great sweeping new movement in history.  Zechariah is a trained, ordained, and pedigreed priest--a supposed expert on the way God is "supposed" to operate, and yet he can't bring himself to believe what the angel tells him. And at the same time, Mary and Elizabeth dare to believe that God is moving in their lives and through them in ways that will change the whole world. Over and over again, it's the ones who have been regarded as less-than who end up having the greatest awareness of what God is really doing--and the greatest openness to letting God do it.

In this scene from Luke, Mary and Elizabeth meet and embrace, both in awe and amazement at how God is working in their lives. Even the child in Elizabeth's womb seems to know what's going on, kicking at the presence of Mary and her unborn son, Jesus. These are not the ones you expect to be "in the know," so to speak.  Women often had much less formal education, and neither of them would have had the status or social standing of someone like Zechariah, a priest. And of course nobody expects a baby still in utero to know anything going on in the world beyond the womb! And yet, that's part of how God operates, isn't it? God is always finding the people on the margins, seeking the folks who have been disregarded, and showing divine power and wisdom through the ones counted as "weak" or "foolish."

The very fact that it's Mary and Elizabeth who are reflecting on the meaning of their pregnancies, rather than a conclave of learned priests, public officials, and religion scholars, is the dead giveaway that God is behind the scenes.  Lifting up the lowly and claiming the ones who have been overlooked for special purposes turns out to be God's calling card--this is precisely the sort of thing we should be looking for as the mark of divine fingerprints.  Mary and Elizabeth, it turns out, are attuned to the way God works and can see their place within the bigger picture of God's design, because they know that God is the sort of character who, as Mary will sing it, "fills the hungry with good things and sends the rich away empty."

If this seems strange to our ears, maybe it's time for us to sit silently with Zechariah and listen to the wisdom Mary and Elizabeth have to share with us.  If God's choice to bypass the Big Deals and to silence the pompous Guardians of Respectable Religion makes us squirm, perhaps we need to let these women speak and allow ourselves to learn from these mothers who were the first teachers of Jesus and John the Baptizer. And once we do, we'll start to see the recurring pattern everywhere--we'll see signs of the God who finds the forgotten and bypasses the Big Deals all around us.  Maybe it will even start to rub off on us and the choices we make, too.

Let's dare to listen to these women... and see how it changes our perspective of God and the world.

Lord God, we give you thanks for your ways of choosing unlikely people to work through, for raising up the lowly, and for breaking beyond the boxes that the experts would put you in. Allow us to see your way of moving through the world in our lives, too.