Online Sermons
The Fourth Sunday in Advent : December 20, Barbara Schlachter
Welcome to our website. You are here: The Word --> Online SermonsPurify our conscience, Almighty God, by your daily visitation, that your Son Jesus Christ, at his coming, may find in us a mansion prepared for himself. Amen.
We are almost there. This fourth Sunday of Advent our readings remind us of what is about to take place: The prophet Micah addresses Bethlehem in the first person and talks about the restoration of Israel. The stage has been set for a child to be born in Bethlehem.
The author of Hebrews reminds us that Jesus having a body, being incarnated, is central to our understanding of God with us. God has become one like us. We sometimes forget that before his body was crucified, the very fact Jesus was embodied was considered a saving miracle.
And in our Gospel we become eye witnesses to the first visitation, the end of the 80 mile journey Mary took on foot to visit her kinswoman Elizabeth in the Judean hill country. At the end of Mary’s encounter with the Angel Gabriel, the event we call the Annunciation, Gabriel told her that her old relative, Elizabeth, long past the age of child bearing, long barren, had conceived a child. This was the way the angel told her that with God nothing is impossible. It was after this revelation and reminder to her that Mary said she would have the holy child. And it was soon after this that she went to visit Elizabeth. Was it for verification of what the angel had told her about both Elizabeth and herself? Or was it for the need to be with someone who understood that God was doing something big and doing it through these two ordinary women in a remote corner of a little, insignificant oppressed country?
For whatever reason, what happens when Mary arrives is one of the most lovely and tender encounters in the entire Bible. We can imagine the great embrace the two women had, how their bellies, one already greatly enlarged from six plus months of pregnancy and other yet still to show but holding a precious cargo, how their bellies touched as they hugged one another. What did Elizabeth know about what Mary was doing before this? We do not know. But we know that when Mary gave her greeting to Elizabeth, the child in her womb, who would become known as John the Baptizer, leapt for joy. John would be the messenger who we know as the one who prepared the way for Jesus. So here the Messenger bearer and the Message himself were having their first encounter. What a moment of shared and sacred joy for these two women.
Elizabeth was filled with the Holy Spirit, we are told, and this is how she knew that Mary was bearing the Christ. Mary, in turn, must also have been filled with the Holy Spirit to utter the words we know as the Magnificat, one of the most loved of all canticles of the church.
Mary knew herself filled with the saving one, and in understanding her role in the salvation history of Israel, borrowed some of the words and sentiment of Hannah, mother of Samuel, one of the earliest prophets of Israel: Here is a translation that says it as a prayer to God rather than a recitation to a listener:My being proclaims your greatness, and my spirit finds joy in you, God my Savior.
For you have looked upon me, your servant, in my lowliness; all ages to come shall call me blessed.
God, you who are mighty, have done great things for me. Holy is your name.
Your mercy is from age to age toward those who fear you.
You have shown might with your arm and confused the proud in their inmost thoughts.
You have deposed the mighty from their thrones and raised the lowly to high places.
The hungry you have given every good thing while the rich you have sent away empty.
You have upheld Israel your servant, ever mindful of your mercy—even as you promised our ancestors; promised Abraham, Sarah, and their descendants forever.
Did you hear all the incredible claims in there?
That she a peasant girl would be remembered and called blessed for all ages to come?
That those who think they own the market on the truth will be perplexed; that the mighty rulers of the earth would be deposed and the lowly of the earth would be given power; that the hungry would be fed, while those who thought they were rich would have their emptiness revealed to them, on their way out.
Did you hear all the reversals here, how reality was being turned upside down?These are indeed bold and mighty claims, and we have seen in history at least some of them already happen, and are to keep praying and working for the realization of the rest. This vision is our hope in dark times.
But there is another incredible claim that I want to call our attention to. It is from the collect, the opening prayer for today, that refers to another visitation. This visitation is not a once and for all historical event. This visitation is not to someone that an Angel appeared to and who ran 80 miles to share her experience with her wise old relative.
This visitation is a daily one and it is to each of us. That is indeed a bold claim, isn’t it? Every day God visits us to prepare us for the divine birth, to make a mansion ready for the holy child of light. Every day, each of us, although we may not realize it. We might want to change the words “purify our conscience” to “prepare, wake up our awareness, our consciousness” by your daily visitation. Every morning we wake up physically, why not spiritually?
This collect reminds us that there is a vast construction process at work within us, so that this mansion prepared by the Holy Spirit for the Christ¸ may be ready for the birth once again.
So here is a question for you: how is your construction process coming? How is that mansion within you being built? This is no lowly stable like the first incarnation. This is a mansion and it is within you.
These days I get asked frequently, how is the construction coming? People are referring to the construction at Trinity Church in Iowa City, where my husband serves as rector and where I have my pastoral counseling office. For the last 8 months, nearly a full term pregnancy, they have been at work, first putting in a new foundation under the church itself and then creating an undercroft where none existed. Then, the entire sanctuary was renovated. It was to have been finished by mid-December, and now they are talking about being in just barely for Christmas Eve. It is an exciting down to the wire finish, or at least finished enough.
But it has made me aware that construction and renovation is a messy business. It is loud and dusty and chaotic. Every time I go to my office on the lower level of Trinity I am amazed that it is still worse. When I think it can’t get any worse, it does. Sometimes I can’t get in the door because there is a truck blocking the entrance. I have given up dusting and just try to remember not to wear black. The final realization that this is totally out of my control came one day last week when I found a pair of workman’s boots in front of my office door. Perhaps he was expecting candy in them?
I share this story because it is a story of chaos and inconvenience on the way to beauty and a new order. I share it because I think it is similar to what happens in our souls every day, whether we are aware of it or not. The construction of the mansion within us happens largely out of our control. We can choose to pay attention to it, help it along, but God is in charge, and all the contradictory feelings and thoughts may be just part of this process. All the Christmas preparations we do in our homes in the way of tree, cookies, presents and Christmas cards, is the tip of the ice berg compared to what God is doing to prepare inner mansions.
The place where this inner mansion resides is in our heart. It is heart work, out of our control, sometimes out of our awareness, but it happens none the less. When we said yes, like Mary, at our baptism, God sent in a construction crew to build, to enlarge, to renovate our inner mansion so that Christ has a place to dwell. And God is always at work, like a caterpillar spinning a womb so that it can become a butterfly.
Did you know that the word for soul in the magnificat is psuche, the same word for butterfly? God is preparing a chrysalis within us so that our souls can become beautiful butterflies, winged creatures of light and praise. There is not a thing we can do about it. We must simply wait.
You have heard about women who have not realized they are pregnant until they give birth? Well, sometimes we are like that. But it is much more fun if we can realize ahead of time that there is a miracle at work within us.
Once a woman becomes pregnant, there is nothing she needs to do except take care of herself. The process occurs without any thought. It is very passive. It calls for no action, except appreciation and awe that we can be bearers of life. We don’t have to think, “oh, today, I need to create a right arm for this baby.”
For those of us who believe that the world depends upon our work, this is a humbling thought. We are asked to wait until the time is right for action. When our hearts have been rightly prepared, when the butterfly is ready, when the babe enters the birth canal, then there is work to do. There is the call to breaking out of the chrysalis, the womb, and attend to the work of justice and mercy in the world.
But now, we are simply to wait and to marvel. It won’t be long now. And of course, the birth that we are waiting for is, not only the baby Jesus’ first coming, but the Christ being birthed in our own souls.
Amen.