Love

Scripture Lessons: Micah 5: 2-5a and Luke 1: 39-45 Sermon Title: Love Preached on December 19, 2021 The Bible is full of unlikely friendships. This time of year, we often remember the way the Prophet Isaiah described the coming Kingdom, and he described it this way: The wolf shall live with the lamb, The leopard shall lie down with the kid, The calf and the lion and the fatling together… One prominent theologian once said, “now, the lamb probably won’t get much sleep that first night with the wolf by her side,” but just as in this prophecy, the Bible is full of unlikely friendship and the power of God is often on display through relationships that bridge the divisions in our natural world or human society. Thinking of another unlikely friendship, many a daughter in-law struggling with a house full of her husband’s family might be shocked to hear that when Ruth had the chance to get away from Naomi, she didn’t take it, but the Bible is full of relationships that defy our habits and expectations. Consider the disciples. Several were fishermen. Were they happy fishermen? I’ve never met a happy fisherman. Were they like the crabby old renegade fisherman who hunted down Jaws? He didn’t seem very easy to get along with. Then one was a tax collector. Everyone hated tax collectors. Another was a zealot and zealots hated most everyone, so how did this group made up of fishermen, tax collectors, a zealot, and the son of God get along? I don’t know, but the Bible is full of unlikely friendships. So is life. I’ve been reading about Aunt Fanny’s Cabin with considerable interest. What will happen to that old building in Smyrna? Some look at it and remember a restaurant with really good food, and we might say that the combination of good southern food they served and the bric-a-brac they nailed to the wall made it the precursor to Po’ Folks and Cracker Barrell. You could see it that way. You could also see it as a restaurant who preserved antebellum racism for out of towners to come and see. What I’ve just learned from reading about Aunt Fanny’s Cabin in the Marietta Daily Journal as well as the Atlanta Journal Constitution is that the name points to an unlikely friendship between two women: Isoline Campbell, who named the place after Fanny Williams, longtime servant of the Campbell family. I feel sure that Campbell intended the name of this restaurant to be an honor for Williams, but here’s the rub: in her spare time when she wasn’t feeding the Campbell family, Fanny Williams was a civil rights activist who spoke out passionately against the KKK and helped raise money to build the state’s first all-Black hospital in Marietta, and the restaurant reduced her to just another mamy in a head wrap. Have you ever had a “friendship” that reduced you like that? Have you ever been in a relationship where you ended up feeling less than? That happens in the world. Sometimes relationships in the world wind up with one person getting rich and the other getting used. And like the world, the Bible is full of unlikely friendships, only when God is at work, the individual is lifted by the power of love. The Bible is full of unlikely friendships in which two people from different worlds are transformed for they see each other. That’s what’s happening in today’s Gospel Lesson from Luke. Two women from different worlds offer to each other something sacred in what was surely the most unusual time of their lives. On the one hand is Mary. She’s too young, she’s pregnant, she’s unmarried, she’s powerless, and she’s all alone in the world. We’ve been watching a TV series called MAID on Netflix. It’s a series about a young mother who’s trying to make it all on her own. She seems to have no idea what she’s going to do, and yet she possesses this relentless determination to provide for her daughter no matter the obstacles. A lot of people want to help her, but no one seems to understand her. If only she’d had an Elizabeth. Mary and Elizabeth are not alike. While Mary is too young, Elizabeth is too old. She’s been married for years but after getting her hopes up for a baby year after year has given up and sold the bassinette and the stroller in a yard sale or something. She’s the wife of a priest, so she has means, as well as respect and power. Unlike Mary, there’s a community around Elizabeth, but who really can understand the woman who will surely get mistaken for the grandmother every time she drops her son off at preschool? So, she is unlike Mary in a sense, while she is just like Mary in the since that she is also all alone. Who can understand what it’s like to be them? Who really gets it? Their husbands? I don’t think so. That’s why this passage from the Gospel of Luke is so beautiful. The power of God brings them together and they see each other. They form a friendship. When they see each other, the baby didn’t just kick but leapt in the womb, and Elizabeth, nudged by the Holy Spirit, exclaims with a loud cry, “Blessed are you, Mary, and blessed is the fruit of your womb.” Do you know how good that must have felt to Mary? I imagine it was something like how it feels for a bride to tell her sister she’s engaged. Or how it feels for a young mother to be hugged by her mother. Men give each other high-fives sometimes, but women touch each other’s souls, don’t they? Of course, I’ve had friendships that made a difference. I remember graduating seminary and searching for a church who wanted me to be their pastor. I started to feel like none of them did. Now, plenty of people told me that everything would work out. Have faith. But it was when my professor, Dr. Erskine Clarke told me the same thing everyone else had been telling me that I really felt the words. When he encouraged me I cried, because I knew he really meant it. I knew his words weren’t just words. This is the beauty of friendship. A friendship that makes you feel understood and valued. A relationship that builds you up. Do you have a friend like that? Mary did. And when she felt Elizabeth’s love, 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 things for me, And holy is his name. We call that song the Magnificat. It’s even more well-known than Mary did you know. But have you ever before noticed that Mary doesn’t sing after the angel tells her that she’ll bear a child or when she feels a stirring in her womb? No, Mary only sings when she’s safe in Elizabeth’s arms. Why? Because there is good news that we won’t let sink in until we tell someone who will understand. There is brokenness we can’t release from our hearts until we know it’s safe to let it out. That’s the power of friendship. That’s the power of love. And today, we must give thanks to God for Elizabeth, because she is the friend who helped Mary, not just make it through, but rejoice, to see for herself that she was not who those judgmental old bitties back in the village said she was. No! She was “blessed among women” for she was making possible the most unlikely friendship of all. More unlikely than an older woman befriending a young woman in the Gospel of Luke is the Son of God coming down to earth from heaven to us mortals. A book I’ve been reading that Carol Thomas gave me was written by a theologian named Robert Farrar Capon. In it he writes that God coming down to earth in Jesus Christ to us is as unlikely a pairing as a ballerina being friends with an oyster… and we’re not the ballerina in this metaphor. No, but what this relationship does: Is lifts us up from the seafloor of sin and death to the heights of heaven. It frees us to live beyond our shells or wounds or circumstance. It makes us, not snot on the half-shell or whatever else disgusting you’ve called an oyster, but heirs to the Kingdom of God. Therefore, the Apostle Paul says, “we are more than conquerors.” How? “Through him who loved us.” For God’s love, like real love, like true friendship, transforms us and transforms the world. Therefore, Mary sang of how God’s powerful love of us is enough to Scatter the proud Bring down the powerful Lift up the lowly Fill the hungry with good things And send the rich away empty Because those who know they are loved by God are unstoppable. Those who know they are worthy of something more cannot be conquered. A people who walks in the light can stand up against any power, even the power of death. Remembering Christ who came to earth, dwelling among us, let us do for each other what God has done for each of us, that they may know we are Christians by our love. Amen.