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Luke 1:46-56 · Mary’s Song
Two Blessings for an Unwed Mother
Luke 1:46-56, Luke 1:39-45
Sermon
by William G. Carter
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By Christmas vacation of my first year in college, I had become an expert on the birds and the bees. Biology was my major, and after a semester in the freshman class, I was certain that I knew more biology than most adults did in my hometown ... including my minister. A few days before Christmas, I stopped in to see him. He received me warmly and asked how I had fared in my first semester. “Okay,” I replied, skillfully avoiding the subject of my mediocre grades. “But I’ve come home with some questions.”

“Really?” he replied. “Like what?”

“Like the virgin birth,” I said. “I’ve taken a lot of biology, as you know,” skillfully avoiding that “a lot” constituted a single course where I received a B-. “And I think this whole business of a virgin birth doesn’t make much sense to me. It doesn’t fit with what I have learned in biology class.”

“What’s the problem?” he asked.

“There had to be a father,” I announced. “Either it was Joseph or somebody else.”

My pastor looked at me with a coy smile and said, “How can you be so sure?”

“Oh, come on,” I replied, with all of my newfound expertise. “That’s not the way it works. There had to be a father.”

My pastor didn’t back down. Instead he said something I’ll never forget: “So — why not God?”

Why not, indeed? The more we learn, the harder it is to swallow a lot of things that once seemed so palatable. Advent is a season of wonder and mystery. We tell our children stories at this time of year that we would never dare tell when it is warmer and there is more sunlight. The really wise child is the kid who knows how to shut his mouth even when he has a few doubts. But sometimes it is hard to do, especially when you have a whole four months of college behind you.

Doubts can linger with us. These days I find it questionable, for instance, that the child in Elizabeth’s tummy “leaped with joy” when the mother of Jesus walked in the room. Elizabeth was six months along in her pregnancy. Pediatricians say that’s when Junior starts kicking like a soccer player. No need to make a theological claim about that kick; it seems like it was only a kick.

What’s more, I have learned that when two pregnant women find one another, they usually do not talk theology. The conversation turns instead to swollen ankles, stretch marks, morning sickness, or those other unmentionable details which pregnant women discuss when men aren’t listening. Ask any pregnant woman and she will probably tell you that a man wrote this story of Elizabeth and Mary. And she would be right.

But when Luke tells this story, he wants to make it clear that God is at work. These are not two typical pregnancies. One woman is as ancient as the Old Testament; the other is a young girl. One is married to a sterile priest, the other — well, she’s not actually married yet. The old married woman has a husband who did not believe something like this could actually happen, even though he is a professional guardian of the story of Abraham and Sarah. The young girl, on the other hand, would never make it to college biology class. So she says to the messenger, “Let it happen, just like you say.” Her words make all the difference in the world.

We have heard the story of Mary many times. As I hear it this time, it strikes me that perhaps the first person who had a hard time believing the virgin birth was the virgin herself. Biblically speaking, Mary was minding her own business when the angel Gabriel appeared. I don’t believe for a minute that she took the news without swallowing really hard.

Consider her circumstances. Historians tell us the average age of a first-time mother in first century Palestine was about thirteen years old. That means Mary was a teenage mother. Few teenagers are ready to become mothers. Most of them are still children themselves. According to the marital customs of the time, Mary was betrothed to a man named Joseph. The relationship was not a simple engagement that could be made with a ring and a kiss; neither could it be easily broken. By all intents and purposes, Mary already “belonged” to Joseph, even if they weren’t quite married. If she told him she was pregnant, it would look like she was admitting to adultery. With an admission like that, he was legally entitled to walk away from her.

From her own lips, she was a “handmaid,” a term signifying a peasant of the working lower class. There was no obvious feature to dignify her, no special privilege to set her apart. Luke doesn’t say if she was cute with dimples or if she had a 200 I.Q. There is no reason to think that, to the people around her, she was anything more than a poor teenager. In every respect she was an ordinary young woman, until an angel appeared to say, “Congratulations, Mary! You are going to be the mother of the Messiah.”

In the story from the first chapter of Luke, her relative Elizabeth responds to that announcement by blessing Mary two different times. The first time Elizabeth exclaimed, “Blessed are you among women!” To this day, Protestants are still trying to figure out the implications of those words. Ever since Elizabeth uttered them, a lot of Christian people have honored Mary. By the third century, theologians were referring to her as “theotokos,” that is, “the Mother of God.” The woman who gave birth to the Holy Child was, in their thinking, the one who brought God into the world. That’s a staggering claim!

But the story seems to give more weight to the second beatitude that Elizabeth uttered. For Elizabeth said, “Blessed is she who believed that there would be a fulfillment of what was spoken to her by the Lord.”

“Blessed is she who believed.” All the more remarkable, given all the fact that faith doesn’t come easy. Most of the time we look for evidence. Where is the evidence that God is alive? The prophet Isaiah says, “I saw an old dead stump the other day, and a shoot was growing out of it.” That’s all that he saw. The prophet Micah says, “In the dusty little town of Bethlehem, a shepherd will be born.” That’s it — a new shepherd? Centuries passed without much evidence. As one of my teachers once said, sometimes faith has to survive on one calorie per day.

“Blessed is she who believed.” Of course, it’s God who makes her faith possible. God sent a baby to Mary. She did not ask for it, did not expect it, or did not know what to do with it. And the baby came anyway. There were days — you know there had to be days — when she wondered why she ever said, “Yes,” to an angel. There must have been days when she doubted her own ability as a mother. And there were painful moments when “a sword would pierce her soul.” Yet she hung on, because she believed.

That is helpful for me. When I have my doubts, I hang on too, if only because Mary once believed on my behalf. Even when we smugly think we have learned it all, even when we see plenty of evidence to the contrary, Mary is the one who asks us, “So — why not God?”

As someone puts it:

We recall Thomas as the exemplar of those who doubt. We see in Peter’s denial of Jesus our own weakness and in his reinstatement hope for ourselves. We openly celebrate another Mary (the sister of Martha) for her attentiveness to Jesus’ teaching, and we similarly regard the Syrophoenician woman for her persistence. If we can see these people as our predecessors in faith, then perhaps we can also see Mary as the Mother of all Believers.1

Luke underscores the point. Later on in the story, he tells about a woman in a crowd who was taken with the words and deeds of Jesus. When Jesus passed by, she cried out, “Blessed is the womb that bore you and the breasts that nursed you!” Jesus responds to her, “Blessed rather are those who hear the word of God and obey it!” (Luke 11:27-28). Jesus was talking, I think, about his mother. Mary heard the word and kept it. She remembered the promises that God made to Israel, and she believed that God remembered them, too. It wasn’t enough for her to believe a baby was coming. It wasn’t marvelous enough to ponder her pregnancy. No, because of that particular child, she believed in a whole new world. Remember what she sings?

The proud are scattered in the thoughts of their hearts. The powerful brought down from their thrones, the lowly lifted up. The hungry are filled with good things, and the rich are sent away empty. God will remember the promises made to our mothers and fathers.

Her faith was like looking through a telescope. Through the lens she could see things that seem far-off, yet she believed in a God who brings them close at hand. Mary’s faith is so confident in the goodness of God that all these merciful deeds sound like a done deal. And in the infinity and eternity of God, they are. Can you believe it? That’s the question posed each Christmas. Can you believe that this particular child, born of this particular woman, can turn this particular world upside down?

Or to put it another way: “So — why not God?”

In a sermon, Martin Luther once said that three miracles happened when Jesus was born in Bethlehem: God became a human being, a virgin conceived, Mary believed. Of these, said Luther, the greatest Christmas miracle was this: Mary believed.2 Regardless of her low estate as a female in that culture, her virtual anonymity, her human fears and uncertainties, Mary believed. That’s why Elizabeth called her “blessed.”

Of all the gifts I wish you for Christmas, the one gift I wish more than anything else is the gift of faith. It is the gift of believing that, not only is God able to do wonders out there in the universe somewhere, but that God is able to perform wonders right here — among you and me. It’s the hope that was voiced in the prayer of Phillips Brooks:

O holy Child of Bethlehem, descend to us, we pray;

Cast out our sin and enter in, be born in us today.3

Blessed is the one who believes it can happen ... right here.

1. Beverly Roberts Gaventa, “ ‘All Generations Will Call Me Blessed’: Mary in Biblical and Ecumenical Perspective,” Princeton Seminary Bulletin 18.3 (November 1997), pp. 260-261.

2. Quoted by William H. Willimon, Pulpit Resource 22.4, p. 49.

3. “O Little Town Of Bethlehem,” verse 4.

CSS Publishing Company, Praying for a Whole New World, by William G. Carter