December 1998 Issue

Luke 1:39-55

It has been observed that every church in Christendom has three old velour bathrobes, two beat-up jewelry chests, and a large bottle of perfume. Therefore, everyone knows the story of the three wise men. We dress up our children at Christmas pageants and Sunday school gatherings. You find the story of the three wise men in the Gospel according to St. Matthew coming to visit Jesus at the manger. If you read the Christmas story to your family on Christmas Eve or Christmas morning, you probably won't be picking up Matthew's Gospel, you probably will read from the Gospel according to Luke. For it is in Luke that Mary and Joseph go from Nazareth down to Bethlehem and it is Luke where the angels sing in the sky and come to visit.

Luke is the more familiar Christmas story. You can read Luke from cover to cover and never find any, not even a single one, wise man in the Gospel of Luke. In fact, the writer of the Gospel of Luke seems to be particularly interested in the impact of this birth upon the women. And more than that, the writer of the Gospel of Luke has the women as the heroes of the story. Matthew has men heroes. All the speaking lines in Matthew are men, Joseph has speaking lines, the wise men have speaking lines. Read Luke you hardly even notice Joseph is around. The women have all the speaking lines in Luke's telling and it's not stretching it too far, I don't think, to say to you this morning that in his own way Luke has a version of the story that includes three wise women. I want us to take a peek at those women and their wisdom this morning.

The first of the three wise women is Elizabeth. Elizabeth is the mother of John the Baptist. She is, according to traditional lore, also a cousin of Mary's. As Luke tells the story, Elizabeth is carrying John the Baptist and is a little further along with her pregnancy than is Mary. Mary comes to stay with her for a time. Everyone should have a cousin like Elizabeth. Everyone should have a cousin when they are in trouble and things are falling apart in their life; someone that they can go to and be with. In Luke's telling of the story when Mary arrives at Elizabeth's home, she has by the work of the Holy Spirit an insight into the meaning of what is happening to them. Elizabeth says "How happy is she who has faith that the Lord's promise will be fulfilled!" How happy is she who has faith that the Lord's promise will be fulfilled!. You see, Elizabeth didn't have gold or frankincense or myrrh, but Elizabeth had something much more important. Elizabeth brought the gift of Expectation. She expected God's promise to be fulfilled and she saw it.

Expectations are important. I wonder what you are expecting this Christmas season. If the height of your expectation this season is that you will eat, drink and spend a lot of money, that's probably all you will get out of the season. Our expectations often define what we find and I wonder what would happen to us if we, like Elizabeth, had eyes to see and ears to hear the fulfillment of God's promise among us this year. What if our eyes and ears were open so that, at home, in the neighborhood, at work, at the shopping mall, at the school program we would discover Christ's presence in the mundane and the ordinary of our world. What if we expected it. If we had confidence, if we knew it was going to happen--we expected Christ's appearance--what does it say about us as a congregation? What do we expect?

David Gnaegy hung that Christmas tree from the construction crane out there and I know of no better metaphor of Christmas than Christ breaking into something as mundane and ordinary as a construction project. What does it say for our expectations of ourselves as a church and what God is going to be doing through us, in us and among us if we just expected?

The angels sang to the shepherds of peace on earth and good will. In our troubled world do you really expect peace and good will? Elizabeth expected that God's promise would be fulfilled and she saw it in her time and in her way. She was a wise woman--will we share her wisdom this year?

Elizabeth was one of the three. The second one, I'm sure you could guess, is Mary. Mary is a wise woman though to call her a woman might stretch it in some people's mind. We know so little about Mary. We have all this romance and lore and sentiment about Mary but we know very little about the real Mary. We do know that she was a young woman of marriageable age of a peasant family of Galilee. That probably means she was fourteen, fifteen, maybe at most sixteen years of age. That was the normal age of betrothal in Galilee in the first century for poor women. All the romance around the story, all the soft light we shine on Mary--how different that is from the reality she must have experienced. What would it be like to be a young girl in a peasant village community and to be pregnant prematurely--the whispers, the scorn that she faced? This man, this Joseph--many weddings with these young girls in that time were arranged. Tradition has it that Joseph was a good deal older than she. It is possible, we do not know but it's possible, that she did not know him at all. He just was a man that her parents had arranged for her to marry. Then that trip from Nazareth down to Bethlehem--have any of you women traveled during the last week of your pregnancy? You know how much fun that is. With no place to stay, she goes into labor in a stable. She doesn't know a soul and she's young and she's alone. Mary, in that scripture lesson that was sung for us, Mary says of the situation, "All generations will call me blessed." Mary gave a gift. Mary gave a gift more precious than gold or frankincense or myrrh; Mary gave the gift of costly sacrifice, costly service. To bear Jesus cost her dearly. It cost her that first Christmas and it cost her decades later when she and a few others stood at the foot of the cross and saw her son executed publicly. Mary's service to God cost her in more ways than we can imagine. And yet she said, "All generations will see me as blessed." She's wise beyond her years.

It still costs to serve God. It still does. Unless you and I have found ways in which our faith invites us to pay a price, well, we haven't really discovered Christmas yet--because that's what Christmas is about.

Well, there is a third one. You might not be able to guess who that third one was. That third wise woman appears just a little bit later in the story as Luke tells it. Luke says that after Jesus' birth Mary and Joseph, being good obedient Jews, took their newborn child to the Temple to be dedicated and to offer sacrifice at the Temple. There they meet the third woman of the trilogy--her name is Anna. Now we know even less about Anna than we do about the other two. Luke tells us that Anna had been married for seven years and widowed for eighty-four. Luke also says that Anna was always in the Temple. You probably hear that and think, "Oh, what a pious woman!" As a member of the clergy I tend to think, "Oh, what a pest!" This woman never goes home. She's been here forever--she's older than some of the stones in the temple. I imagine her, it's my imagination, I have no proof of this, but I imagine that she's the one that the most innocent rookie priest is always assigned to care for her because the older priests won't have anything to do with her. She knows how everything is supposed to go and she's eager to tell you how you did it wrong. She knows where everything is stored in the whole Temple and she criticizes the custodians for not taking care of things just right; she's always there; she never leaves; been there forever; she's part of the furniture.

But, whoever she was, when Mary and Joseph arrive Luke says Anna said "My eyes have seen the one who will save Israel!" And then Luke says that she goes all over Jerusalem telling people about the baby she has seen. Old Anna gives the gift of witness. She bears witness to what she has seen.

Now the word witness for many United Methodists is a little threatening--we think of Jehovah's Witnesses and pushy people like that. But the word witness really means that you stand for something and people can see it. What do you stand for this season? What do people see in us this season? What is the witness we are making by the way we live and the gifts we give and the customs we keep? At work what is the witness we make to integrity? What is our testimony to Christ?

Three wise women--Elizabeth who gives the gift of expectation; Mary who gives the gift of costly service; Anna who gives the gift of witness--gifts more precious than gold or frankincense or myrrh. They are three very wise women, and they are models for us and the kind of lives we are called to live. May we be so wise this season. Amen.

Carl L. Schenck: