I try to read the lectionary passage early in the week.
I almost never write anything down until much later in the week – but this early-in-the-week encounter with the passage is an important part of my sermon writing process.
I want to give the passage a chance to rattle around in my head for a day or two…
Then, with luck, it may sink into my gut.
Eventually, hopefully, the passage may settle into my unconscious.
This is what I’m after.
I’m not all that interested in what my brain tells me about the passage. That’s been done. I want my gut to have a say. I want my dreams to sneak up on it.
In other words, I want to go deep.
The basic plot of this week’s story is comforting.
A young woman named Mary is in a crisis of sorts. Everything in her life has suddenly and irrevocably changed. In response she does something that feels proper and rather touching. She seeks out the wisdom and solace of Elizabeth, her older relative.
The love of family is deeply embedded in this story.
But when Mary comes into Elizabeth’s presence, a peculiar thing happens.
The text says that
When Elizabeth heard Mary’s greeting, the child leaped in her womb.
This is the unique moment in the story – the event that distinguishes this story from a similar tale that might be told about two women meeting during their pregnancies.
But what is going on here?
How shall we understand this detail of the story?
One way to explain it is to say that it was just a coincidence – it just so happened that the child in Elizabeth’s womb moved when Mary spoke.
An explanation is a logical response to a story. Sadly, since many people today depend entirely on their rational mind to understand the things that happen to them, this may be as far as they get – which is a pity, because this interpretation is bland and entirely lacking in nutritional value.
To be nourished by a story –any story–one must avoid explanation altogether. To explain is to focus on what is there in front of you, and in the process entirely miss out on where the story is going, or why we started out on the journey together in the first place.
And so we say about the leap in Elizabeth’s womb, that it is not a physical event that needs to be accounted for. It is a metaphor. It does not have historic value – it has symbolic value. For this reason, it should not be explained – it should be responded to.
This, incidentally, is an important difference between Biblical literature and modern books. We live in a scientific age that is comfortable with explanation. The Bible was written in a pre-scientific age when meaning was expressed primarily through metaphor and symbol. To explain the Bible is to do violence to it. The Bible wants to be responded to. And response is something that we do more with our bodies than with our minds.
Ruminating about the story in this way, it occurred to me that the leap in Elizabeth’s womb might be an expression of Elizabeth’s intuition. Since the leap happens inside her body, Elizabeth’s response to Mary’s voice an internal experience. In modern language, we might say that Elizabeth was having a “gut reaction” about Mary.
Mary’s voice puts Elizabeth’s intuition on high alert.
This is a deeper, more meaningful reading of the story. Elizabeth knows something. She is not quite sure how she knows it… but she knows. Each of us has had this experience – we know what it feels like to be certain about something or someone, even though no specific evidence is conveniently at hand to prove that we should feel that way. This is a non-rational, instinctual response. It is located in the body… and it is, oftentimes, a much more reliable predictor of truth than any conclusion based on hard fact.
What does Elizabeth know?
What is her intuition telling her?
“Blessed are you among women, [she says to Mary] and blessed is the fruit of your womb.
Though she may not be able to put her finger on how she knows it, Elizabeth has a deep, internal certainty that Mary, her younger relative who has come to her for comfort, is blessed. And since she, Mary, is blessed, Elizabeth is convinced that the child in Mary’s womb is also blessed.
In our speculations about the leap in Elizabeth’s womb we have moved through two different ways of knowing. First we talked about a logical explanation, which was shallow and rather dull. Then we moved to a deeper, more intuitive, physical response.
Can we go still deeper?
Can we imagine a spiritual response to the leap in Elizabeth’s womb?
**
I’ve been cleaning the basement.
When I say that I’ve been cleaning my basement, I don’t mean that I’ve been sweeping the steps or vacuuming up dust bunnies – though I have certainly done a lot of both of those things.
Cleaning my basement means that I have spent the last month having a prolonged and intimate encounter with the lives of my mother and father.
As you know, my mother and father spent the last years of their lives with me. My father died in the spring of 2009 and my mother lived two years as his widow before following him in April of 2011.
When they were gone, I did what any faithful loving son would do. I moved all of their stuff down into the basement.
I tried to do it carefully. I bought a massive number of banker’s boxes and filled them and stacked them up carefully, keeping them up off the floor so their contents wouldn’t get moldy.
But our lives kept going. The kids started messing around down there. Nevermind the kids – I did too. What is better than messing around in a basement? But since I still couldn’t handle the emotional work of actually getting rid of any of parent’s stuff, I just started moving it around.
And, as you can imagine, things got out of hand.
People in my life said “Mark, you have to get rid of all your parent’s junk.”
But I couldn’t.
I loved them too much.
I would hold each of their things in my hand, inspect it, and my heart would reach out to them.
Each piece of junk was a little piece of them.
A memory.
Since I could not say goodbye to my parents, I couldn’t get rid of all their stuff.
Love.
It sure can make things difficult!
**
This morning is the fourth Sunday of Advent.
Brenda and Rikki and Liesie just lit the candle of Love for us.
So this morning we turn our attention to Love.
Love.
As with the other Sundays of Advent – the Sundays of Hope, Peace, and Joy – we acknowledge that Love is not so much a thing as it is a feeling.
Like Hope and Peace and Joy – Love is a hard working word. It may be the hardest working of them all, because it has so many meanings.
But I don’t want to preach about kinds of love this morning. I want to preach about ways of loving.
Earlier, when we were talking about the leap in Elizabeth’s womb, we were talking about ways of knowing.
One way of knowing was the way of logical explanation. Another way of knowing was the physical response.
We also left the door ajar to the possibility of a spiritual way of knowing.
So how about it? Would it be interesting to see if we can find corresponding logical, physical and spiritual ways of loving?
Jesus may have been history’s greatest proponent of love. Most of us are content to love those who we are close too, but Jesus was not content with that.
“You have heard that it was said, ‘Love your neighbor and hate your enemy.’ [he says in the 5th chapter of Matthew] But I tell you, love your enemies and pray for those who persecute you…[This, Jesus says, will make you]
children of your Father in heaven…. [after all, he says] God causes the sun to rise on the evil and the good, and sends rain on the righteous and the unrighteous. If you love those who love you, what reward will you get? Are not even the tax collectors doing that? And if you greet only your own people, what are you doing more than others? Do not even pagans do that? Be perfect, therefore, as your heavenly Father is perfect. – Matthew 5:43-48
When it comes to love, Jesus was an unapologetic radical. I can never read these verses without feeling that Jesus is just being a bit unreasonable about love.
But do you notice something about the way Jesus is talking about love in this passage? This way of loving that Jesus is advocating, has a logical feel to it. He uses a series of rhetorical questions to convince us:
If you love those who love you, what reward will you get? Are not even the tax collectors doing that? And if you greet only your own people, what are you doing more than others? Do not even pagans do that?
This way of loving has a kind of expansive, general feeling. And when Jesus further describes this way of love by using the metaphor of the rain, again, the feeling that is created is wide and sweeping. This sounds like a way of loving that has an almost theoretical application. This is a kind of moral rule.
It doesn’t feel personal.
When I look through my father’s books, and observe the ideas that he underlined, the way of loving that I experience is not at all theoretical. It is not general. It is deeply personal. I can see him sitting at the kitchen table or on the living room couch reading with a pen in his hand…
This personal love is something I feel, in my body.
When I mourned his death, I wept.
Weeping is about as physical as it gets.
There is certainly a way of loving that is physical, and I submit to you that while both the theoretical and the physical ways of loving are real… they couldn’t be more different.
One is shallow, and the other is deep.
When I hear Jess playing a piece by Grieg or Debussy, I am transported back to my earliest childhood, when I would hear my mother playing the piano in the other room.
Though a mere child, I knew that it was a rare thing to have such a mother – whose hands conjured something that, in its frail claim to existence somehow contained all longing and beauty. She seemed to be teasing the darkness with scraps of red velvet… wrapping the edge of the moon in silk…
Remembering my mother playing the piano, I sense an even deeper way of loving.
The spiritual way of loving.
The spiritual way of loving, I think, occurs when we recognize that we are woven into each other’s story.
It is not theoretical. It is not just personal.
It is interconnected.
I love someone with the deepest spiritual love when our lives share the same story.
This, I believe, is the spiritual way of knowing the story of Elizabeth and Mary.
The child in Elizabeth’s womb would become John the Baptist, and the child in Mary’s womb would become Jesus.
So their stories would become one story.
The leap was the recognition of this deepest way of knowing…
This deepest, spiritual way of loving.
Amen.