Again consider pairing some of your sermon with clips of art work for the passages.
Maybe consider using clips of the ways Mary is portrayed in movies.
I continue to detect a skittishness with Protestants dealing with Mary, even though we seem to love having her in manger scenes. Perhaps look at Gaventa's work on Mary,
Luke crosscuts here as in a movie. He starts with the annunciation to Zechariah. Now we go to Mary and tie Mary with Elizabeth and the Holy Spirit. Mary’s song is then paired with Zechariah’s song. After the scene of Jesus growing up, we shift to a grown John the Baptist, as it has been since 1:80 that he grew and lived in the desert wilderness.
V.28 Hail, hello,Greetings to the gifted, graced, favored lady-no wonder Mary is taken aback.
V. 29 diatarasso different than Zehcariah’s similar position (v. 12) utterly confused/perplexed/thrown off kilter, even terrified
V.32 Luke uses Most High perhaps as Isaiah uses Holy One. If you are interest in intertextual material, Most High appears around 20 times in the Pslams, and El Elyon in Genesis is translated as Most High, see Mechizedek in Gen. 14 in particular.
v35 overshadow/fall over you
Nice balance here-Mary -now two women-then Zechariah speaks
V.41 infant leaping skirtao may relate to the jostling in Rachel’s womb see also Mal. 4:2
V. 43 my Lord alerts the reader to the identity of Jesus early
44 gladness agalliasis was used by Gabriel to Marty
V.45 typical word for blessed makarios , see v. 42 eulogomene to be spoken well of (now and future) fame in the older sense v. infamous
46 soul magnifies/extols see Hannah’s prayer but Luke seems to be drawing from a variety of biblical materials
48 servant/slave doule lowliness=state of humilation/under another’s thumb tapeinoso
51- right as side of power-arrogant in understanding of their hearts
Two women make this scene, with two new lives within them. Two expectant relatives meet for the first time since their startling news of being with child. Churches like to have what they term living nativity scenes (Nativity means birth, of course). Here are two living manger scenes talking to each other. I wonder how clear it was to them that the new lives they carried would create a vast change for generations to come. When I was little, one of the first prayers we learned was the Hail Mary. Its first words are drawn from Elizabeth's inspired greeting. Even early, religious language confused me. What did fruit of the womb mean? Elizabeth is certainly not blinded by pride with her miraculous conception, but she is able to see Mary as carrying a very special child as well. Their words carry the narrative here; no male speaks. Of course, Zechariah is still mute, and Joseph is nowhere to be seen. God notices a lowly pair of women. God favors them both with a miracle. God hears the words of two women, often silenced in their day and time. One of the newer Christmas songs is "Mary Did You Know" with some thoughtful lyrics. Two spring to mind: "when you kissed your baby boy you kissed the face of God, and the one you delivered would soon deliver us."
In her burst of praise for God, Mary doesn't express fears and doubts about being the mother of Messiah. Now she may well have done so over the years, but we are not privy to it. Mary slides from the personal to social. Like Hannah on the birth of Samuel, she sees herself as a representative of a people. She is the chosen instrument of a new future. Mary imagines a generous social realm, where Scrooge is transformed but so is the system that makes and rewards Scrooge. Mary imagines a world where the rich get a taste of their own medicine, but the poor, whom she terms the lowly, get more than their share for once. God sees an invisible one, oppressed by invisible forces, the idea that human beings have some sort of right to violence and exploitation of those a rung below them on the social ladder. She sees mercy as an act of God to life people hope; the rich and well-born don't need much material help; they are already filled with good things./.
The words, to take Israel by the hand, imagines a people still in childhood.. As their children grow, they will take them by the hand, to help, to guide, to lead, to protect. It has the sense of course that this old ethnic and religious group is still like a child.Even in the womb, the future John the Baptist has a connection to the arrival of Jesus. A major moment in expecting a child is when the baby kicks, but to say the child leaped in womb leaped for joy is a special connection. In its ancient roots, the word gladness refers to shining. That fits this season of craving light at the time when the days are so short.
Every generation faces a time pregnant with meaning and change, where we are expectant for something. With the election of President Obama, we take a new direction as a country. Christmas, though, is intensely personal for us, and we anticipate what it means and brings. Mary, did you know that people would be gathered in church over 2,000 years later, in a country you did not knew existed, would gather together and read of you? Mary did you know that the fruit of your womb would continue to bear fruit for all of these years. Mary did you know, that we would celebrate the birthday of your baby boy as Christmas all of these years later?
Sermon Lk. 1:26-55
Mary was an ordinary woman. Taken aback, but only for a while, by Gabriel’s announcement, Mary found her voice. While women had private voice, they could not often speak publicly. She found a voice that spoke for social life. She goes beyond the charity of Scrooge in a Christmas Carol. She sees the selection of her as a sign of big things to come, a new game in town, when the old ways would not cut it any more. The ways things are cannot be the way things should be, could be, or would be.
Jesus would be with us in ordinary life God did not put the divine hopes on angels, or power, but in the hands of a young, possibly quite young, woman. How can this be? After all of this time, God would pick an ordinary family to raise the one to be called Jesus. She knows of the promises of God all the way back to Abraham and David. Messianic reading of promise to David She starts to see that she will be the vehicle for promises that were thousands of years old coming into being in a way as new as the child within her womb. That dream was half forgotten, said as much as out of the realm of possibility, but now it was alive in her.
It was appropriate for Gabriel to deliver the message. First, we have a little joke. The name means a mighty one for God, as in the army of the heavenly host, but here the general is a mere delivery service for the prince of peace. Second, Gabriel was associated with ripening fruit, and he announces that the fruit of Mary will be Jesus of Nazareth. (By the way, I have to throw this in. The followers of George Rapp in New Harmony believed that Gabriel spoke with him, and one can see the footprint of the angel there.) Finally, Gabriel was a figure of the end times. Gabriel announces the beginning of the end of the old order and the start of the new way of God with the announcement of the impending birth of Jesus.
The announcement was only the beginning, of course. Mary waited nine full months to have her baby. I wonder if nine months seemed long enough to start to grasp what the future could hold for her and Joseph. Luke has her doing a lot o travel in her expectant months, to Elizabeth and then a hard journey to Bethlehem. Even now, many of us wait a while to even announce a pregnancy, as we hope everything will be all right. With ultrasound we get to hear the fast beat of the heart, a holy moment as we hear the sound of a new life. Advent is only four weeks. It is time for us to learn to listen for the heartbeat of Jesus in the ordinary. Can we spot a Gabriel making a birth announcement of a new turn in life? Every day, we give birth to the new future, or maybe the hand of God helps bring us to new birth in the future.
Christmas is almost here. In these few remaining days, I pray that all of us set aside some time.to seek the spirit of the new life of Christmas. It may be in listening to old songs, or finding some new Christmas stories, to watch a Christmas movie, to read once again, the biblical story of the Nativity. Mary would never have another firstborn. We will never have another Christmas of this year. It would be a shame to enter into another Christmas dispirited, never giving the story of the Incarnation some time to take hold and grow within us. We have a third Advent.As the hymn says (O Little Child), “where meek souls will receive Him still/ the dear Christ enters in/ be born in us today/we hear the Christmas angels/the great glad tidings tell/o come to us, abide with us/ O Lord Emmanuel.
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