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This journey we are making to the manger brings us so close to Christmas we can almost taste it!  Those stories we’ve heard possibly all our lives are now so close, we can almost say them by heart.  Seems like everywhere you go, everyone’s having a conversation about Christmas.  And, no matter how hard we might try to be as “Liturgically Correct” as we possibly can, we simply cannot resist singing or humming a Christmas carol.  I hear them everywhere, and you do too—in the mall, in the car, in the St. Vincent Hospital parking lot.  Singing’s everywhere.

(Depicted there on your bulletin cover/on the screen) is a picture of two women—Mary & Elizabeth engaged in a conversation, one I like to call “A Pre-Christmas Conversation.”  Mary Jane Cole snapped this photograph when she was on her memorable post-ordination tour of the Holy Land with Bishop & Mrs. Crutchfield about a year ago.  We might like to engage ourselves in good Christmas stories too and belt out a joyful Christmas Carol at the top of our lungs.

But just before we tune our own voices in joyful praise, we’re given a rare chance to eavesdrop in on a conversation between two women, Mary and Elizabeth, as they talk about a magnificent thing that has now happened to both of them—they’re pregnant!  One, a woman who actually was beyond the years of childbearing, and another who, by all accounts shouldn’t even be pregnant… she’s not married, she’s quite young and things are not quite story-book ready at all.  Yet, they come together and talk anyway, and talk up a storm.  I can imagine that they talked about their curious and preposterous “situation”-they talked about their hopes/dreams.  They even talked to angels!

Let no one can say all this was just “women’s talk” though…no indeed!  They talked about politics & economics; they talked about the haves and the have-nots.  They talked about the way the world could be if people like their very own children they carried in their wombs could get to work and reveal God’s love to a cruel and unforgiving world.  After a while, all the talk turned to singing and this I where Young Mary, the mother of Jesus, takes center stage and here’s the song she sang:

My soul magnifies the Lord,

And my spirit rejoices in God my Savior,

For he has looked with favor on

The lowliness of his servant.

Surely, from now on

All generations will call me blessed;

For the Mighty One has done great tings for me,

And holy is his name.

His mercy is for those who fear him from generation to generation.

He has shown strength with his arm;

He has scattered the proud in the imaginations of their hearts.

He has brought down the powerful from their thrones,

And lifted up the lowly;

He has filled the hungry with good things,

And sent the rich away empty.

He has helped his servant Israel, in remembrance of his mercy,

According to the promise he made to our ancestors, to Abraham and to his decedents forever.

Mary sang a song about a promise that was not broken.  It was a promise that God made a long long time ago and, as she saw it, would be brought it to pass in the birth of her little baby.  Finally, she sings.  And if you look closely enough, you’ll see indeed this is the world’s very first Christmas song, sung months before Mary and Joseph hunker down in a lowly stable in tourist-taxpayer-crowded Bethlehem.  When you actually look at the words to her song, you see why it was never set to music or made it to your top-ten list of your own “Holiday-Favorites.”

For those of you who claim you hate to see politics and religion intermingled in church, this is clearly, then, not your song.  Mary’s song is replete with politics.  It’s laced with history and economics.  It speaks of the haves and the have-nots.  And, it is so bold to claim that God is in the midst of all the upheaval!

Somehow, I thought on this very last Sunday before Christmas, you might want to know what was on Jesus’ mother’s mind in those days and months before his birth.  What was it was she was listening to, what was it that she was singing?  Even today some speculate that you can foster little Beethoven’s & Mozart’s by playing certain songs, while the baby’s still in the womb. And with Mary, singing songs like this,  it kind of makes you wonder, what kind of man this Jesus would grow up to be?  A liberator?  A redeemer?  A Savior?  There’s no doubt about it… you really can learn a lot from your mother.                                                          780