Elizabeth: A Faithful Matriarch
Luke 1: 39-45

 I want to begin my sermon today by making some observations. Someone asked me this week why everything was blue in the church.  This person thought that maybe we were trying to match everything to the upholstery on our chairs.  I do want to tell you that about 20 years ago, some churches in England started using blue for the symbol for Advent, because blue is traditionally used on the robe of Mary in paintings.  We figured that since we moved into a new space that we should take the opportunity to get creative.  So that is why we are using blue instead of purple.  That means we are caught up with the times in our Advent colors.  I do want you to notice the star that’s in the Southwest.  You know that the star is supposed to be in the East, but we live in the Southwest, so it gets to be in the Southwest.  Also, the second symbol of our season (last week our focus was John the Baptist) is the symbol for Elizabeth.  If you notice, the symbol looks like a flower.  There is a Maltese cross, which is white.  Every one of the symbols we see with a white banner, as I reminded you last week, is a symbol of the resurrection.  That symbol persists even as we begin Advent.  It’s the white cross that reminds us of the eternal life that comes with Jesus.  Then you see the gold leaves of the plant, which are surrounding a heart, that remind us that Elizabeth had a heart of gold.  So they are the symbols we see in here today.

Well, I want to start off kind of backwards from our scripture today so that I can talk about an issue that comes up this time of year.  After that I want to come back to the wonderful story that Todd read to us from Luke’s Gospel and talk a little bit about Luke in general and about this specific story.  Luke’s story may have a good bit to speak to us today as we go about our lives.

Do any of you have a favorite Christmas song?  Anyone want to share what his or her favorite Christmas song is?  (Answers are provided from congregation.  Examples include “What Child is This,”  “Silent Night,” “O Holy Night,” etc.)

I want to tell you today not my favorite Christmas song, but the one I dislike the most.  Then I will tell you why.  The other day I was driving down the road, and I heard a song that I hear every Christmas and the name of it is, “I’ll be home for Christmas.”  Now what is that song about?  If you listen really closely to the words, it’s about wanting to go back either in time or to certain place so that you can celebrate where you had celebrated it in that time or place.  The only purpose I can see for that song is that it’s meant to depress us.  I can’t figure out what other reason that there happens to be for it.  But it points to something that I think is very important.  We are told that this time of year is a joyous season, and we’ve got “Jingle Bells” and we’ve got carols, and we’ve got candles, and everything is uplifting.  The truth is, this time of year has one of the highest rates of depression than any other time during the year.  And there is a reason for that.  We look back nostalgically to Christmas times of years past.  It is a normal thing that we all do.  When we do that, we look back at the good old days.  By the way, can any of you point out a time in your life when everything was truly perfect?  If you answered “yes,” then you’re in big trouble.  We all have a tendency to look back and remember times more perfectly than they really were. There is a danger in this current Christmas season.  That danger is looking back and trying to remember romantically they way something was, when everything seemed just right.  In reality, maybe that was not truly they way it was.  We even do this as a culture.  I can tell you, if you want to know, when Americans date Christmas: somewhere between 1890 and 1910—during the Victorian era.  And we have pictures in our heads, don’t we?  Our minds’ eyes show us a Norman Rockwell view of Christmas.  The mental picture is probably not in the city but out in the country.  There is a gathered extended family all around us, and of course Grandma is there with a bun on the back of her head.  Now, how many older women have you seen with buns in the back of their heads lately?  I don’t see any today.  When we compare our vision to the world that we actually live in today, what we must remember is that the average American family moves once every four years.  We find ourselves disconnected with our extended families.  Things are not the same way that they were 120 years ago.  If we expect things to be a way other than they are, we set ourselves up for a very interesting sense of melancholy.  Sometimes we do try to recreate something that just isn’t there—and we often do this for most of our lives.  By the way, if you have things the way you have always had them in your life, then that is something to be thankful for.

I want to pull back from that for just a moment, and I want to go back to our text.  Hopefully all of this will pull itself together.  You can be the judge.  I always think that it’s important particularly on holy days (not holidays, but holy days) that we are thinking of important things about our faith.  If we go back to the biblical text, we see some warnings as well as a way to focus in better, healthier ways.  Now I have just a very short Bible lesson, but I want to tell you that out of the four Gospels, only two of them give us stories of Jesus’ birth.  Those two are Matthew and Luke.   Now Matthew paints us grand stories, if we read them.  These stories are of Jesus’ birth the struggle between powerful kings.  There are major, major epic themes.  Come back in January and I will talk to you about that, but what I want to concentrate on are the birth narratives as given to us by Luke’s Gospel.  Now the interesting thing about Luke is that he is the only apostle who can rival Paul for the number of Bible pages, since Luke wrote the Gospel of Luke as well as Acts of the Apostles.  Luke is very good at telling a story.  Luke’s Gospel story of Jesus’ birth is not a story of kings and powers, but it is a story with very earthy and down-to-earth people.  Luke shows us incredible miracles in lives of everyday people.

It is to Luke that we owe the accounts of the visitations by the angels.  Luke tells us that the angels visited Mary and Elizabeth as well as Joseph and the most common of people—the shepherds.  But I want to concentrate today upon the passage that Todd has read to us.  I had a woman call me a few weeks ago to ask if I would come and do a lecture on humor and the Bible in one of her classes at one of the local colleges.  She said to me that she didn’t know much about the Bible.  She asked if there was any humor in the Bible.  I told her that there is quite a bit, but we don’t quite know how to catch it, because we are not living in that time period.  I want to tell you a humorous story, and let’s see if I can pull you into it today.

Elizabeth and Zechariah have been very faithful to God.  All their lives they waited for God to bring a messiah.  They lived according to the way that God intended for them to live.  But they did not have children.  Now, in those days, it was a pretty big deal not to have any children.  Now, I want all of you women today sitting here today to imagine, for a moment, that you’re 80 years old and God comes and says to you, “I have a gift for you; you’re going to be pregnant.”  Now, for those women in here who are 80, would that be a huge thrill?  Does God have a sense of humor?  I want you to contemplate that.

But as we look at this story, it is remarkable that Elizabeth doesn’t miss a beat.  She continued to do what she had done all along.  That was to put her trust in God.  She waited patiently for what was going to come. One of the things I want to say to you regarding Christmas is that we can live in the present, trusting God.  I already told you how we can mess Christmas up—by going back in time to a supposedly perfect memory.

The modern secular world can often be explained by demographics.  And demographics say that we have our 18-30 year olds here, and we have our 30-45 year olds here, and we have our 46-60 group here, and we have our really old people here.   Everything is focused on trying somehow to keep those focus groups separate so that we can figure out how we can sell things to them.  If we are churches, then how can we draw a particular age group unto ourselves?  What I want to say to you is this: Christmas reminds us of something that the Bible has always known.  We aren’t separate demographic groups. The early church exploded with a diversity of people. There were Roman soldiers alongside of cloth merchants who were alongside of poor people.  There were Jews sitting next to gentiles in worship.  This was something unheard of before the advent of Christianity.  The early explosion of the Gospel, as revealed through Jesus, did away with those divisions that somehow marked Jesus’ day as well as our own.  What do I like about the Normal Rockwell pictures?  I like that generations cross over to one another in those paintings.  This reminds us of the different generations’ being together.  But as we look back at the story of Elizabeth and Mary, we may discover something that may be helpful to us in what is left of the year as well as the next.  That something is that Elizabeth was not Mary’s mother.  We are told that she was her cousin.  We need in our society today the wisdom of older generations.  The older generations can gently and lovingly share with the generations that come after them.  We need the wisdom of those old matriarchs, or should I say those older matriarchs (it sounds less harsh).  We need the wisdom of people like Elizabeth, who was around a few times in life.  She was bumped and pushed, but she also saw that even in the midst of crisis, that somehow God came  through for her. Elizabeth was able to put her arms around her Cousin Mary, this young woman who was probably scared to death, to give her the strength of her own generation and experience to get her through her own pregnancy.  Todd read us probably one of the most beautiful passages of scripture.  When Elizabeth met Mary, the baby leapt in her womb.  The joy was the expectation of what was to come.  If Elizabeth had been like me or like you, then she might have been upset—after all, Mary’s baby was going to be the star, and Elizabeth’s baby was now going to be second fiddle.  You don’t see in Luke’s story one bit of hesitancy about Elizabeth’s child’s playing second fiddle to Jesus.  You see only the joy in her life as she is able to participate in the plan of divine salvation.  And she plays the role the God has taught her to play.  So what does Elizabeth have to teach us today in the modern world?  If we reach across the generations, we can all offer the humility, love, and faith that we have learned in our lives to the younger generations.  The other thing we must remember is to have a sense of humor about what God places in our lives.  When those surprises come, we must see them as gifts and opportunities for God’s divine plan—not only in our lives but also in how God will play that divine plan out in the greater world.  And like that baby in Elizabeth’s womb, may we all leap with joy as we prepare for the coming of God in our lives.  Let’s bow our heads now for a word of prayer.