Provoking Faith in a Time of Isolation
Bloomsbury Central Baptist Church
20th December 2020
Well, I guess maybe they’re like buses…
You don’t get any miraculous pregnancies for centuries,
and then
suddenly two come along at once!
Our reading for this morning skipped over the story of
Elizabeth and Zechariah,
of how they
had got to old age without having children,
and then suddenly the Angel Gabriel appeared
to say that
God had heard their prayers,
and that Elizabeth was pregnant with the child
who would
grow up to be John the Baptist.
Instead, we picked up the very similar story of Elizabeth’s
cousin Mary
and her
visit from the Angel Gabriel,
giving her
news of her own miraculous pregnancy.
These two stories,
of women
unexpectedly ‘with child’, as they say,
are part of a long tradition within the Hebrew Bible,
of God
giving miraculous children
to women
who shouldn’t by rights be pregnant.
And in each of these stories, the point is fairly
consistently the same,
which is
that God can do what is impossible for humans.
So Sarah, wife to Abraham,
laughed
when she was told that she was going to bear a child,
because she
knew that age was against her.
But, nonetheless, Isaac was born (Genesis 21).
A generation later, Rebekah, wife to Isaac, wasn’t too old,
she just didn’t
seem to be able to conceive,
until Isaac prayed to God,
and then she
became pregnant,
and in due time, Jacob and Esau the twins were born (Genesis
25).
And then a generation further down the line,
Jacob’s
wives, the sisters Rachel and Leah, competed for his love,
and whilst Leah bore him children,
he loved
Rachel more - but she remained childless;
until, after a massive row
which led
to Jacob having children by both his wives’ slaves,
God remembered Rachel
and she became
pregnant with Joseph (Genesis 30).
And then, some while later in the Old Testament story,
we get to
Hannah, one of two wives of Elkanah
who, like
Rachel, was the preferred but barren wife.
After promising God that, if she became pregnant with a son,
she would
dedicate the child back to God,
sure enough she gave birth to Samuel, who became the prophet
who anointed
both King Saul and King David (1 Sam 1)
And then there’s Samson’s mother, unnamed,
and
childless until she was visited by an angel,
who told
her she would conceive and bear a child (Judges 13).
And then there’s that other unnamed childless wife,
known only
as the Shunammite Woman,
offering hospitality to the prophet Elisha,
who, in
return, prophesied that she would become pregnant,
which, of
course, she did. (2 Kings 4)
Now, forgive me, but today I’m going to note, but not
explore in depth,
the deeply problematic
attitudes in these stories towards women,
and the
value that society placed, and often still places, on childbearing.
But I will say, and say very clearly,
that the
stigma of childlessness, often perpetuated in Christian circles,
is
something that we need to challenge.
A woman’s value is not found in her reproductive ability,
and neither
is marriage predicated on procreation.
After all, the emphasis in Luke’s gospel is not on Mary’s virginity
per-se,
with all
the ‘body is bad’ connotations
that have preoccupied so many
who have wrestled with this passage
down the centuries.
Rather, it is on the power of God to bring life
where life
has no right to be found.
So whilst I firmly believe that children are a blessing to
be celebrated,
a lack of
children does not equate to a lack of God’s love or favour,
and those who long for children but are unable to conceive
are not in
some way being punished by God.
So whilst we should certainly bring our hurts and concerns
to God in prayer,
the
solution to infertility, in our world of modern medicine, is not in prayer
alone.
And neither am I going to delve into the murky waters
of whether
these stories are historically accurate.
If you want to hear me waxing lyrical
about the
scientific improbability of a virgin birth,
check out
my sermon from last year,
which
is on our Bloomsbury sermon webpage
and
the Christmas.org.uk website
Instead, I want to focus today on where God sits in these
stories,
to see if
we can hear something from them
to help us explore for ourselves the significance of Luke’s
story
of the
miraculous pregnancies of Mary and Elizabeth.
And, as I said a moment ago,
the key
point seems to be, fairly consistently,
that God is
able to do what humans cannot do.
So I want to suggest that we take a step away from the literal,
and instead
engage these stories
at the
level of their literary meaning.
Which leads me to ask the question of myself, and each of
us:
What is it,
in your life, in our community, or in this world,
that seems impossible for humans to
achieve?
Where do we see or experience a stubborn unwillingness
for new
life, and new hope, to blossom and come into being?
Sometimes it can seem as if God’s promises have failed,
and that some
other, more malign, force
is writing
the narrative of our lives and our world.
Certainly this was the experience of Israel of old.
If you remember our journey with Israel over the last few
weeks,
we’ve been
hearing from the prophets of the exilic period,
and we’ve seen how their hope for a king who would restore
David’s throne
had dissolved
into the tragedies of war and exile.
And then we’ve seen how their bright hopes for a return from
Babylon,
became a disappointment
of infighting and continued oppression.
So, as we come to Luke’s account of Elizabeth and Mary,
written some
six centuries after the return from exile,
we find that he is still wrestling with this issue
of whether
God’s promises had failed.
This means that when Luke says that Joseph, Mary’s
husband-to-be,
is ‘of the
house of David’ (v.27),
and that Mary’s son will be called ‘the Son of the Most High’,
and the
Lord God will give to him the throne of his ancestor David (v.32),
and that his
kingdom will have no end (v.32),
Luke is telling his readers
that God’s
promises have not failed;
rather they
are coming to fulfilment, fully and finally, in the person of Jesus.
And Luke’s story of Mary and Elizabeth
can help
interpret these promises for us too,
as we, with Luke’s first readers,
are invited
to grapple with the significance
of God’s unexpected, life-giving,
life-affirming,
intervention in human history.
And do you know what? Mary gets it!
She
understands that the God who is faithful
is still working in unexpected ways
to bring
about the fulfilment of ancient promises
and the dawn of a new, hopeful,
peaceful way of being human.
She sings of it, in the passage now often called the
Magnificat,
which
includes the following lines
speaking of
a world turned upside down by the intervention of God
52 [The Mighty One] has brought down the powerful from their
thrones, and lifted up the lowly;
53 he has filled the
hungry with good things, and sent the rich away empty.
54 He has helped his
servant Israel, in remembrance of his mercy,
55 according to the
promise he made to our ancestors, to Abraham and to his descendants
forever."
This is the new life that God is bringing to birth in the world,
it is the
kingdom of God, on earth as it is in heaven,
coming into
being through the birth, life, death, and resurrection of Jesus.
It is the new life of justice for the oppressed,
of food for
the hungry,
of a new world being made
and brought
to birth in the lives of those
who have
already had it born in them.
So, for us this morning,
I return to
my question:
What new thing is God bringing to birth in your life,
in our
church, in our community,
and how can we play our part,
in the
coming of God’s kingdom
on earth,
as it is in heaven.
Many of us have a tendency to see ourselves
as those
who are active in the service of God,
and Bloomsbury has been blessed over the years
with a talented,
hardworking, motivated congregation,
who gladly give
their time and resources.
However, this can generate a context,
where we
also see ourselves
as those
who are, how can I put this? ‘God’s fixers’.
We see a problem, an injustice, a need,
and we move
quickly to a solution
which
inevitably comes from our own position of strength.
And I wonder if Luke’s story of Mary and Elizabeth
can challenge
this way of understanding our role
as those
who participate in the coming of God’s kingdom.
You see, the significance of God bringing life where it has no
right to be,
is that God
does this, not us.
And so I wonder if there is an invitation here for us
to re-think
the way we see ourselves.
What if we aren’t ‘God’s fixers’ after all, but ‘God’s
midwives’.
If a new life is coming into being,
you want a
good midwife on hand to make sure it all happens safely.
There is a place here, for competence, and skill, and
training,
but it’s always
God who gives the gift of life.
So as we consider our lives, our community, and our world,
and as we
look for those places where life and hope have no right to be,
we will, I
am sure, see God at work bringing new life and hope into being.
This is the message of the Nativity,
it is the
good news of Jesus coming to our world.
And our role, maybe, is to be those,
whose
calling is to ensure that new life doesn’t die prematurely,
that it is safely brought to the
world,
and carefully nurtured to maturity.
It’s not all down to us,
in fact it’s
never really down to us at all.
It always begins with God,
through
whom the impossible becomes possible.
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