This sermon was offered in the context of a Marian Lessons and Carols for the Third Sunday of Advent, 2023. The texts included the Gabriel’s annunciation to Mary, her Visitation to Elizabeth, and her Magnificat in Luke 1.

In some sense the gravity of what Mary heard the angel say to her only really sinks in when she hears her older cousin Elizabeth greet her: “Hail Mary! Blessed are you among women, and blessed is the fruit of your womb, Jesus!” 

As Elizabeth says it, Mary comes to believe it.

And then, since anyone visited by angels could use all the confirmation they could get, Elizabeth’s baby John leaps in her womb, already signaling that the child that Mary is holding is the Great I AM. Mary knew, and Elizabeth confirmed the news. She confirmed it when she called dear Mary “blessed.” 

Here I must take a moment to brag about my own mother. Some of you have met her. My mom is a retired pastor who says she knew long before I did that I’d one day join the family business. 

My mom has always been an amazing pastor, and a bit of a ministry entrepreneur. There are missions and ministries in Virginia thriving today whose origins have her fingerprints on them. The Potato Project, Harvest of Hope, Calling 21, and more. But one in particular is worth mentioning today. It’s called the Elizabeth Project. She started it in response to what she and others saw as a too-high rate of teenaged pregnancy and infant mortality in the 80s and 90s. 

The project, going against the grain of the culture, did not judge young mothers. Far from it. The Elizabeth Project was designed to embrace them. It paired young mothers, who they called “Marys,” with older women, called “Elizabeths,” so that for the duration of their pregnancy and the sleepless days and nights of early motherhood, these “Marys” would not be alone. 

Imagine my surprise when I arrived at Grace five years ago and read through your own church history in “The Red Book.” There was lots of great stuff in there, but when I turned to page 124 I almost lept out of my chair. There it reads “In April 1992, the Genesis Circle of the Grace United Methodist Women launched a chapter of the Elizabeth Project. Grace was the first church in Northern Virginia to participate, working to offer a gracious biblical means of responding to pregnant teens and infant mortality. The friendships this ministry developed had life-changing and even life-saving impacts.” 

I share this with you first because I’m incredibly proud of my mother’s life of ministry. Second, I share it because I am incredibly proud, moved, to serve a church like Grace. But third, (and even more so than the first two) I share this story with you because it illustrates how the story we have read and sung today, a story we tell every year around this time, has, by the grace of God, become our story. 

It was only after Mary heard Elizabeth’s blessing that she could see her own life, and the life growing within her, as a blessing, and then, together, they gave birth to the story of God made flesh. 

We have these stories, and we tell them, because this is what God does. Repeatedly in the Old Testament, and decisively here in the New we see a God who is writing us into God’s own story. 

So much of our lives are lived under the pressure to be the authors of our own story, to do whatever it takes to make sure our character comes out on top. To this the Bible says a resounding “No!” We, together, are mere creatures, vessels, characters in God’s story. And Mary, even here in the earliest weeks of Christ’s first Advent, in no small part because she has Elizabeth by her side, sees this story, her story, as part of God’s story. 

Notice, the song she sings, this Magnificat, it is not a song that is chiefly about her. It is a song about God, what God is doing, what she knows in fact God has already done, already set in motion. Elizabeth and Mary together declare that because of what the angel has told them they know now, beyond their own doubts, that this story, that every story, has not just a happy ending, but a blessed one. 

Mary knows what Christ will show, that God looks not with judgment but with favor on the lowly, that His mercy is for all his children, from generation to generation, that the future of all human pride is to be scattered, the future of all human power is to be torn down, but the future of the downtrodden and forgotten is to be lifted up. The hungry will be filled, and the overfull will be emptied. 

Mary knows, and Elizabeth’s love confirms it, that in her womb and by her labor God is giving birth to a new creation, that the world is being, has been, and will be turned, from sin to forgiveness, from shame to glory, and from death to life. 

And so, in the words of Elizabeth, and the Angel Gabriel, and our mother Church in every generation since, I say, blessed be Mary, full of grace, and blessed be the fruit of her womb Jesus, and blessed be each of you who, by the baptism of his suffering, death, and resurrection, have been given a place in his story, and the hope of its joyful end. 

Thanks be to God.