Carrying Jesus [Advent 4C - Luke 1:39-55]

 The Rev. Jeremiah Williamson

Luke 1:39-55

 

Carrying Jesus

 

Some women crave pickles, at least that is what I am told – mostly by sitcoms – and so I suppose it must be true.

My wife craved chocolate milk – a glass a day, assuming there was milk and chocolate syrup in the house.

Mary craved revolution, which is one of those pregnancy cravings one does not hear about often.

 

When she was with child, the young Mary, before Jesus stretched her body far enough to leave marks, before Jesus carved lines of grief into her angelic face, composed her timeless, prophetic song while running through the hill country – in the space between home and the future.  Perhaps rehearsing the lines, over and over again, praying and struggling to find the right words and then shouting them out to the wild beasts when they finally came. 

 

Or maybe not.  Maybe she had no words on account of being so overwhelmed.  And maybe simply fell into a trance while Elizabeth was still praising her faith – the God within in her coming out through her lips in a burst of desperate hope.

 

Perhaps it was the Jesus in her – or maybe it was simply that there was a child in her, and she wanted that child to grow up in a better world – that cried out for revolution.  But when Elizabeth opened her front door, there was Mary, young and pregnant, unmarried and pregnant, alone and pregnant, ready to burn the world to the ground, ready to tear kings from their thrones, ready to empty the rich and send them packing.  Her pregnancy glow was a raging fire.

 

And all spoken in the past tense.  As if these things that had not happened had already happened.  The powerful were still on their thrones and the Messiah was still in her belly.  And there was still pregnancy and labor and infancy to worry about.  And this was two-thousand years ago and so there wasn’t even pre-natal vitamins or Lamaze class or baby gates.  Not to mention, that birth was to take place in, what Christmas cards suggest, was not the most sanitary of settings.  Past tense seems presumptuous. 

 

But the faith that invited conception, must not have wavered, even when the whispers around the village started or when her belly got tight or when she caught glimpses of doubt in Joseph’s face or even as her mind had precious moments to wander, like in the wilderness as she scampered over the hills and through the woods.  It was as if she knew, in the treasure chest of her heart, the ending before the story was completely written.

 

This year I am struck by the detail that opens this morning’s Gospel reading: “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.”  And maybe I am making too much of it.  Maybe Luke just needed a good transition, a sentence between here and there.  But also I wonder if Luke it telling us that there was something in between home and Elizabeth that Mary needed – like her own wilderness time – a quiet place between the Annunciation and the Magnificat – a place to find herself or maybe a place not to lose herself.  A lonely place, perhaps, but lonely with Jesus, if that makes sense. 

 

And it reminds me, Mary walking the hills, in between home and the future, in between life and whatever life was about to become, in between her childhood and her broken heart, of this poem by another Mary, Mary Oliver, called The Beautiful, Striped Sparrow.

 

In the afternoons,
in the almost empty fields,
I hum the hymns
I used to sing

in church.
They could not tame me,
so they would not keep me,
alas,

and how that feels,
the weight of it,
I will not tell
any of you,

not ever.
Still, as they promised,
God, once [God] is in your heart,
is everywhere—

so even here
among the weeds
and the brisk trees.
How long does it take

to hum a hymn? Strolling
one or two acres
of the sweetness
of the world,

not counting
a lapse, now and again,
of sheer emptiness.
Once a deer

stood quietly at my side.
And sometimes the wind
has touched my cheek
like a spirit.

Am I lonely?
The beautiful, striped sparrow,
serenely, on the tallest weed in his kingdom,
also sings without words.[1]

What does it even mean to carry Jesus?  What does it do to one’s body, to one’s soul, to one’s prayers?  I’ve heard that a mother carries her child’s DNA in her body long after the birth.  Maybe it is for that that Advent prepares us.

---

[1] Thirst, Mary Oliver, 29-30.