Raising Nain

A sermon for Provoking Faith in a Time of Isolation,

the online gathering of Bloomsbury Central Baptist Church

7th February 2021

Resurrection of the Widow's son from Nain,
altar panel by Lucas Cranach the Younger,
c. 1569, in the Stadtkirche Wittenberg.

1 Kings 17:17-24  

Luke 7:11-17   

Listen to this sermon here: https://soundcloud.com/bloomsbury-1/raising-nain

You may not know the term, but the word ‘Theodicy’ is used 

to describe the problem of how to believe 

in the goodness and justice of God in the face of evil.

It’s an argument that is often cited

by people who want to discredit the idea of faith.

You know the way this goes:

‘How can you believe in God when this kind of awful thing

happens to this kind of innocent person.’

Interestingly, for me this has never proved a problem,

because I’ve never had a faith that believes God rewards faithfulness 

with health or prosperity, 

or that God responds to prayer by ‘fixing’ our difficulties in life. 

For me, a belief in resurrection is not a conviction that God cheats death,

or that those who follow Christ get to do the same.

But a belief in resurrection is still at the heart of my faith. 

The capacity for new life to emerge from the destructive efforts of death, 

whether that be physical, spiritual, or emotional death, 

is for me a revelation of the nature of God. 

I don’t find my faith challenged by nature red in tooth and claw, 

rather I see God’s resurrecting nature at work 

in the constant rebirth of goodness, love and hope, 

despite and in the face of suffering.

Which brings me to our two passages for this morning, 

one from the first book of Kings,

and the other from Luke’s gospel,

which tell very similar stories.

 

Both narratives feature a widow;
            a woman who has lost her husband, and along with her husband,
                        her financial security and her status within society
 
In both stories, the widow’s only hope for the future
            rests with her only son.
 
These, you understand, were patriarchal days…
            women didn’t normally work for money, at least not honourably,
            and so they relied on their husbands or sons to provide for them.
 
The life of a widow with no son was no life at all;
            she would be at the mercy of the charity of others,
                        alone in a hostile world.
 
And in both our stories, the only son of the lonely widow
            falls sick and dies.
 
The death of a child is always a terrible tragedy,
            but for a widow in ancient Israel,
                        it meant more than personal grief,
            it meant economic destitution, and social rejection.
 
Both these stories, tragic though they are,
            were also stories of normality.
 
Widows were not uncommon,
            childhood illnesses were not uncommon,
            lack of food was not uncommon
            teenage death was not uncommon.
A widow whose son dies was not uncommon.
            Tragic? Yes. Heartbreaking? Yes. Uncommon? No.
 
And yet, in both these stories,
            the unexpected happens.
The oh-so-predictable outcome of the story is subverted,
            the future is re-written,
            the certainty of death is confronted
                        with the unforeseen intervention of resurrection,
            and suddenly everything is different.
 
Let’s start with Elijah and the Widow of Zarephath.
 
The context here was Elijah’s lone struggle
            against the Baal cult
            which king Ahab had introduced into Israel.
 
At Elijah’s proclamation, the Lord had sent a drought on the land,
            to provoke Ahab into repentance.
But the drought was affecting everyone;
            from the King, to Elijah himself, to the poor widow and her son.
 
By rights, they should all have been at death’s door,
            and Elijah had only survived this far
                        because he had been miraculously fed by ravens.
 
He then turned up at the house of the widow,
            who was about to prepare her final meal for herself and her son
            so that they could eat one last time before dying together.
 
But of course, it wasn’t their last meal,
            because God intervened again in the story,
                        to bring unexpected life from a situation of certain death,
            miraculously sustaining them
                        through what I can only think of as
                                    the ninth century BC equivalent
                                    of a bottomless cup of coffee!
 
This story clearly has something of the tone of folkloric myth about it,
            and it’s probably best not to get too hung up on the historical questions
            relating to being fed by birds,
                        or poor widows doing Jamie Oliver style cooking
                        using jars of food that had gone all ‘magic-porridge-pot’.
 
The point is clear: death does not have the last word
            when God gets involved in the story.
 
But death does still have some cards to play,
            and the good news of the miraculous food
quickly gave way to the tragedy of illness
            as the young man succumbed to a sudden sickness.
 
The widow-mother’s response was typically human,
            as she blamed Elijah, God, and herself in quick succession.
 
But then, again, God intervened,
            this time through the direct actions of Elijah,
And the child who had died was restored to life, and to his mother,
            giving her back not only her son,
            but also her hope for the future.
 
And again, the point is clear:
            death does not have the last word,
            when God gets involved in the story.
 
Which brings us to the gospel of Luke,
            and to his account of Jesus’ visit to the Widow of Nain and her son
 
The set-up for this story actually occurs a few chapters earlier,
            in the passage we looked at a couple of weeks ago,
when Jesus was invited to preach in the synagogue at Nazareth,
            and took the opportunity to deliver
            his now famous exposition on the Isaiah scroll.
 
To start with he read from Isaiah:
 
Luke 4:18-19  "The Spirit of the Lord is upon me, because he has anointed me to bring good news to the poor. He has sent me to proclaim release to the captives and recovery of sight to the blind, to let the oppressed go free,  ¹⁹ to proclaim the year of the Lord's favor."
 
And then, in his sermon on this passage, Jesus said the following:
 
Luke 4:25-26   the truth is, there were many widows in Israel in the time of Elijah, when the heaven was shut up three years and six months, and there was a severe famine over all the land;  ²⁶ yet Elijah was sent to none of them except to a widow at Zarephath in Sidon.
 
In his sermon, Jesus took the words of Isaiah,
            which the Jews of his day had interpreted as applying to them,
                        and to them alone,
            and he re-interpreted them
                        as applying to anyone who was in need,
                        whatever their ethnicity, class, or gender.
 
He pointed out that Elijah, the great prophet of Israel,
            was sent not to the aid of Israel,
            but to the aid of an impoverished gentile widow.
 
And through this and other examples,
            Jesus’ sermon directly challenged the dominant protectionist mind-set
                        that sought to preserve the privileges of history
                        for the heirs of the powerful.
 
Jesus provocatively pointed to examples from Israel’s history
            which demonstrated that God’s concern had always been
                        for those beyond the boundaries of the chosen nation,
            and never simply and exclusively for those in Israel.
 
His sermon was, in effect, a manifesto for the overturning of the old order,
            and his visit to the widow of Nain’s house,
                        which Luke narrates in language
                        that deliberately echoes the visit of Elijah to the Widow of Zarephath,
            was a visible enactment of the point he was making.
 
The old order decreed that women could not work,
            the old order decreed that widows would be impoverished,
                        the old order decreed that the sick would die,
 
And to a world where the old order had reigned unchallenged,
            Jesus brought the challenge to end all challenges.
 
This wasn’t some idealistic preacher,
            exchanging his pulpit for a soapbox
                        whilst expounding a utopian vision of equality.
 
Rather, this was a man of God who lived the message he proclaimed,
            and went to the widow of Nain,
            just as Elijah had gone to the widow of Zarephath.
 
And the point, again, is clear:
            When God gets involved in the story,
            death does not get the last word.
 
The boy had died, and should have stayed dead.
            The widow’s world had ended, and should have stayed ended.
But Jesus disrupts the old order,
            bringing new life, new hope, new beginnings…
 
The message of resurrection is here and it is clear:
            When God gets involved in the story,
            death does not get the last word.
 
So, back to the story…
 
Did you notice the crowds?
            No? How could you miss them?
 
There are two large crowds in Luke’s story!
            Listen to the first couple of verses again,
            and see if you spot them this time…
 
Luke 7:11-12  Soon afterwards he went to a town called Nain, and his disciples and a large crowd went with him.  ¹² As he approached the gate of the town, a man who had died was being carried out. He was his mother's only son, and she was a widow; and with her was a large crowd from the town.
 
One crowd are following Jesus and his disciples,
            and the other crowd are following the dead body of a young man.
 
One crowd are following life,
            and the other crowd are following death.
 
There is no doubt, death attracts a crowd.
            And the sudden and tragic death of a young person can attract a very big crowd.
 
It was ever thus, and the media frenzies of our own day,
            which feast on the memory of recently deceased celebrities,
are merely the latest manifestation
            of the common desire to gaze on death
to experience vicariously the grief of the bereaved,
            and to begin the process of collectively immortalising and appropriating
            the memory of any person taken by cruel fate.
 
But life attracts a crowd as well.
            The overturning of the old order is compelling,
            the good news for the poor,
                        the release of those held captive,
                                    the restoration of sight to the blind,
            these are good news if you are poor, captive, and living in darkness.
 
The promise of new life where death appears to reign supreme
            is good news for those facing death,
but it is challenging news
            for those who stand to benefit from the on-going regime of death.
 
It pulls the rug from under the feet of those
            who might seek to control the narrative of death.
 
It deconstructs those who might find it expedient
            to take the story of a recently departed person
            and re-tell it to their own ends.
 
The new life to the widows of Zarapheth and Nain
            was good news for them
but it was profoundly disturbing news
            to those who had a vested interest in creating a history
                        which maintains the belief that the God-given privileges of society
                        were for a small group defined by those who were inside that group.
 
The crowd surrounding Jesus when he preached his sermon in Nazareth understood this;
            and tried to kill him by taking him to the top of a cliff and throwing him off it.
 
It’s that crowd again, you notice?
 
And which crowd are we in, I wonder?
 
            Are we in the crowd that follows the dead boy,
                        feeling oh-so-sorry for the victims of tragedy,
                                    whilst remaining thankful that it’s not us, that the tragedy affects?
                        Re-telling history to our own advantage
                                    where the survivors are the winners
                                    and the winners take it all?
 
            Or are we in the crowd that follows life?
                        The crowd that confronts death head-on
                        and refuses to allow the narrative of death to have the final word.
 
Because if we are in the second crowd,
            if we are in the crowd that follows life,
then we are part of the crowd that is called to challenge the dominant order of the world;
 
            we are part of the crowd that refuses to accept the status quo
                        where the poor, the destitute, the sick, and the dying
                                    are simply to be pitied;
 
            we are part of the crowd that is committed to joining with Jesus and Elijah
                        in going beyond the boundaries of the acceptable
                        as we seek to bring new life
                                    to those whose life-stories are dominated by death;
 
            we are part of the crowd that knows that when God gets involved in the story,
                        death does not have the final word;
 
            we are part of the crowd that sees the importance of benefits for the poor,
                        of help for the destitute,
                                    of healthcare for the sick;
 
And if we are part of the crowd that follows life,
            then we are ourselves called to become agents of resurrection
            in a world that continues to believe and invest in the narratives of death.
 
To a world that says one death must be punished by another,
            we say that forgiveness and restoration are more important than retribution.
 
To a world that says the poor deserve their lot,
            we say that the poor are dearly loved children of God.
 
To a world that says those who are not like us
                        do not deserve equal rights in our society
            we say that Jesus has called us to go beyond the barriers of ethnicity and culture
                        with messages of hope and new life.
 
To a world that says equitable distribution of global resources
                        is an unrealistic objective
            we say that it is not acceptable that 1 in 8 are dying of starvation
                        whilst many in the Western world are dying of obesity.
 
To a world that wrings its hands at the suffering caused by climate chaos
                        whilst continuing to plunder the planet for profit
            we say that there is a different way of being human
                        which rejects the dominant narratives of consumption unto death.
 
To a world that says death is the end,
            we say that it is not the end when God is part of the story.
 
To a world that fears death,
            we say that death is not to be feared
            because life itself finds meaning in the resurrection of Christ.
 
We are those who have died with Christ and been raised with Christ,
            we have been baptised into Christ’s death and resurrection,
and we are those who live and proclaim this message of life,
            we are those who live and proclaim the gospel good news of new life.
 
Resurrection is not about where we go when we die,
            it is about so much more than this.
 
It is about discovering life in the midst of death,
            it is about plundering hell and bringing the lost to new life,
it is the good news of the gospel of Christ,
            who calls us to follow him
and to share in the establishment
            of his in-breaking revolutionary kingdom.

Jesus’ Inaugural Speech

 Provoking Faith in a Time of Isolation

Bloomsbury Central Baptist Church

17^th January 2021

Synagogue Church, Nazareth

Luke 4.14-30

Listen to the sermon here: https://soundcloud.com/bloomsbury-1/jesus_inaugural_speech

I can’t actually remember my first sermon, but I can clearly remember the first time I was asked to lead a Bible study, in my mid-teens, for the youth group at my church. I couldn’t believe the youth leader trusted me enough to allow me to do this! My first sermon was probably a similarly nervous presentation, given as part of my discernment process for Baptist Ministry in my early 20s. But what I do know is that, firstly no written record of it now remains; and secondly no-one tried to kill me afterwards.

Jesus, on the other hand, at the beginning of his public ministry, decisively put the cat amongst the proverbial pigeons, with the congregation turning on him at the end of his sermon, and trying to throw him off a cliff! And you might be forgiven for asking, having just heard the passage, what was it he said that controversial enough for people to want to kill him???

I mean, what’s so problematic about helping the poor, releasing the imprisoned, healing the sick, and declaring the dawning of a new age of God’s?

Unless, of course, you’re a newly elected president of the United States of America! In which case using your inaugural address to speak of a new deal for the poor, sweeping prison reform, widening access to healthcare, and proclaiming a new era of God’s blessing for your country, might just be the most controversial things you could say in 2021, at least to a certain demographic of your audience.

I will be keeping an eye on Joe Biden’s inaugural address this week with interest, and it wouldn’t surprise me if some of these topics are exactly what he chooses to speak on. In our world, as in the first century, issues of poverty and disempowerment, law and order, health and wellbeing, and the transformation of society, are still at the top of the agenda for most politicians.

And so we might ask ourselves, today, how are we going to hear and respond to Jesus’ inaugural sermon in Nazareth, as he set the vision for his ministry, and charted his course into the future? How is this going to challenge us, in our time and context?

"The Spirit of the Lord is upon me, because he has anointed me to bring good news to the poor. He has sent me to proclaim release to the captives and recovery of sight to the blind, to let the oppressed go free, to proclaim the year of the Lord's favour."

Of course, this passage that Jesus quotes from Isaiah isn’t the sermon itself, it’s just the text that he preaches his sermon on, and in actual fact Jesus does something here that preachers are usually taught not to do (but which we all do anyway). He stops reading before it gets to the difficult bit. You may remember this passage from Isaiah, as we had it as our reading a few weeks ago in the run up to Christmas: Listen to the passage as it is originally found in Isaiah.

Isaiah 61.1-2

The spirit of the Lord GOD is upon me, because the LORD has anointed me; he has sent me to bring good news to the oppressed, to bind up the brokenhearted, to proclaim liberty to the captives, and release to the prisoners; to proclaim the year of the LORD's favor, and the day of vengeance of our God.

The people listening to Jesus in the synagogue would have known this text well, and they would have known that, according to Isaiah, the proclamation of the year of the Lord was accompanied by a proclamation of God’s vengeance on God’s enemies. They would have been used to hearing this passage as an affirmation of their special, privileged status as God’s chosen people, alongside God’s repudiation and condemnation of those who were their traditional enemies.

In short, they would have been used to hearing this passage as an ‘us and them’ proof-text; where we are God’s chosen, and they are God’s rejected

And yet Jesus stops before the end of the sentence, deliberately and strategically undermining the usual way in which this text was heard.

And, without knowing what Joe Biden will say in his Inauguration Speech this week, I am fairly sure that he won’t be saying ‘Build the wall’, or ‘Lock her up’. I pray that he will refrain from any language of ‘us’ and ‘them’, because such language always leads to the fracturing of humanity and stokes the flames of violence.

But those who are addicted to being right, at the expense of other people’s wrongness; those whose identity is built on being ‘in’ at the expense of other people being ‘out’; don’t take well, either in the first or the twenty-first centuries, to being denied their moment of self-righteous judgment. After all, the logic runs, if ‘they’ aren’t ‘out’, then how can we know that ‘we’ are truly ‘in’?

Well, Jesus subverts that logic. He fails to proclaim the word of judgment. And that’s just what he doesn’t say. What comes next rams the point home in no uncertain terms. He provokes a response.

By omitting the judgment on God’s enemies, Jesus has implied that God’s blessings, the forgiveness, liberation, and healing of God’s favour, are no longer restricted to one chosen nation. Those who were used to hearing this as being about them, and them alone, are suddenly challenged to hear it as being about others too. And as with anyone whose privilege is challenged, the raising up of others can feel like a threat. The removal of oppression from some can feel to others like a removal of privilege.

The proverb ‘Doctor cure yourself’ is a challenge to Jesus to stop focussing on proclaiming healing for others, and to return instead to bringing God’s blessings to himself and those like him. They challenge him to stop focussing on them, over there, and instead to turn his attention to his home town, to his family, his friends, his community, his tribe.

But Jesus’ repudiation of the call to tribalism, and his insistent refocussing of his message on those who are not yet privileged with God’s blessing, is deeply problematic for those in the congregation in the synagogue in Nazareth. They had come expecting their hometown-boy to preach a storming message of comfort and optimism, a kind of ‘Make Nazareth Great Again’ message. But what they got was a challenge to look beyond themselves, and see that God’s intent and interest is far wider than their narrow circle.

To make the point still further, Jesus recalls two Old Testament prophets, Elijah and Elisha, both of whom took God’s blessing to the needy of other countries, despite the fact that there were still those in need of care back home in Israel.

If you remember, last autumn the British Chancellor announced that the International Aid Budget would be reduced from 0.7% of gross national income, to 0.5%, with effect from 2021, releasing 4 billion pounds of overseas aid to be spent in the UK instead, on recovering from the pandemic.[1]

Well, ‘the truth is, there were many widows in Israel in the time of Elijah, and there was a severe famine over all the land; yet Elijah was sent to none of them except to a widow at Zarephath in Sidon’.

And, ‘There were many lepers in Israel in the time of the prophet Elisha, and none of them was cleansed except Naaman the Syrian’.

And doubtless you will quote to me this proverb, that ‘charity begins at home’…

But Jesus’ proclamation of the kingdom is very clear: charity does not begin at home, and the best doctors do not, in fact, focus first on their own wellbeing, as those who have caught COVID and died treating others over the last year have demonstrated.

Jesus’ call is to a new way of living, that challenges to the core those ideologies of protectionism, nationalism, and xenophobia.

And if we are to proclaim this message in our world, we can expect a response. The congregation tried to kill Jesus for his proclamation of God’s blessing that cut across barriers, and transcended their precious narratives of us and them. Jesus inspired hope, but what followed was conflict. Jesus signalled a new direction, offering a vision of a better, more equal future for humanity, but the forces of tribalism wouldn’t give up without a fight.

And in the face of such conflict, whether on the other side of the Atlantic or here on our doorstep, the call to Jesus’ vision becomes all the more important.

So let us not be timid in the Christ-inspired challenge that we bring in his name, to a world still addicted to division and partition. We will challenge the narratives of exclusion, and call society to attend to the other, to the poor, to the disabled, to those we shut off from ourselves, to proclaim the year of the Lord’s favour.

---

[1] https://www.gov.uk/government/news/changes-to-the-uks-aid-budget-in-the-spending-review

The hope of new life

Provoking Faith in a Time of Isolation

Bloomsbury Central Baptist Church

25^th December 2020

Christmas Day

Reading: Luke 2:1-20   

The virus that has dominated global affairs this year,

            reminds us of our physicality;

we are born, we live, and we die.

 

And there is a truth in this notion of physicality

            that we often miss or even deny.

We are not disembodied minds, nor are we trapped souls.

            We’re not ‘passing through’ this life

                        on our way from somewhere to somewhere else,

            and neither are we able to transcend the messiness of our mortality

                        by escaping to our higher minds.

 

We are embodied beings, and despite the fantasies of science fiction,

            there is no way to separate us into our component pieces

            of mind, soul, and body.

 

We are holistic beings.

 

The incarnation, the story of God becoming fully human

            in Bethlehem two thousand years ago,

speak to us of a God who enters into the experience

            of what it means to be human;

embracing the fullness of humanity, with nothing held back.

 

This, of course, is why the early explorations in theology

            that came to be labelled ‘heresy’,

            in the end, failed to convince.

 

This is not God pretending to be human, or a human aspiring to divinity;

            the baby-in-the-manger, God-made-flesh,

                        speaks to us of God’s utter, total, and complete commitment to humanity,

                        from birth to death, with all that this entails.

 

So, why does this matter?

            What’s it to you? Or to me?

 

I was talking with David Shapton this week,

            and those of you who remember David will know

            that he has the ability to go deep, and go there quickly.

This is still true, despite him now being 94 years old!

 

And he said to me that, for all the familiarity we have with the Nativity story,

            a lot of people miss an aspect of its significance that gives us hope in our lives,

            and this is the message that there is always new life coming into being.

 

There is always new life coming into being.

 

I’ve said before that my favourite carol is In The Bleak Midwinter,

            and I’m always surprised that some people struggle with it

            on the grounds that it isn’t historically realistic!

Which, of course, it isn’t… but then it’s not supposed to be.

 

I mean, yes, we all know that Jesus wasn’t actually born

            in the middle of a deep snowy winter in Palestine;

for starters it rarely snows in Bethlehem, and when it does, it melts in a few hours.

            Snow doesn’t fall snow on snow in Bethlehem.

 

But this isn’t the point of the Carol.

            Christina Rossetti was using the Victorian ideal

                        of a snowy wintry English December

            as a metaphor for the world into which the Christ-child was born,

                        offering a beautiful and hopeful image

            that even in the depths of winter-darkness,

                        when all life and light seems to have left the world,

            nonetheless God is still at work

                        bringing new life into being.

 

And this God-given gift of new life

            is still at work in our world, in our lives.

 

The second  verse of the carol captures something of this conviction

            that God still comes to our world:

 

‘Heaven cannot hold him’ - God comes to us today, and every day,

            bringing new life to birth in our lives and our world.

 

God may be the almighty,

            attended by angels and archangels,

            serenaded by cherubim and seraphim,

but God is also found in the cry of a tiny baby, in a stable in Bethlehem,

            fully embracing humanity in all its diversity of creed, colour, and status.

 

And, as the carol finishes,

            it asks each of us what our response will be?

 

Our reading gave us the story of the shepherds,

            and how they brought their gifts to the stable,

and it asks us to consider how we will respond

            to the good news of God coming to us,

            bringing the spark of hope and the promise of new life.

 

I’m sure that today isn’t what any of us

            would have planned and hoped for, for this year.

‘Life’ sometimes just gets in the way, doesn’t it?

 

And the image of a dark snowy winter

            may seem particularly appropriate for Christmas 2020,

as we find ourselves confined to our homes

            by our common biology and the forces of nature and evolution.

 

But it is to a world in lockdown that Christ comes,

            again and again and again,

bringing to each of us the hope, the promise, of new life.

God's Midwives

  Provoking Faith in a Time of Isolation

Bloomsbury Central Baptist Church
20^th December 2020

Luke 1.26-56 

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.