“Journey to Bethlehem: The Paradox of Blessedness”
Luke 1:39-55
Last week we started our Advent journey to Bethlehem by reading about how the angel Gabriel visited Mary and told her that she would become pregnant by the Holy Spirit and bear a son, and He will be holy and be called the “Son of God.”
And even though she said, “Here am I, the servant of the Lord; let it be with me according to your word,” it doesn’t mean Mary wasn’t confused and terrified.
I don’t know about you, but when I am confused and terrified, I need to talk about it with someone.
I need to tell someone who will listen with a sympathetic ear; someone who is wise and can hopefully give me some advice on how I can best cope with what I’m facing.
Can you relate?
Gabriel had mentioned that Mary’s relative Elizabeth was expecting a child, which was itself a miracle given that Elizabeth was thought to be beyond her childbearing years.
Mary and Elizabeth must have had a tight bond, and Mary must have trusted and maybe even looked up to her older relative.
So, most likely, before Mary even told her own parents about her pregnancy, she went to find Elizabeth knowing that if there was one person who would understand, it would be Elizabeth.
After, what scholars suggest would have been nine days of difficult travel, Mary finally got to Elizabeth’s house.
She went on in and said, “Elizabeth, it’s me, Mary!”
And when Elizabeth heard Mary’s voice, the child she was carrying leaped in her womb.
“And Elizabeth was filled with the Holy Spirit and exclaimed with a loud cry, ‘Blessed are you among women, and blessed is the fruit of your womb.’”
Elizabeth continued, “Why has this happened to me, that the mother of my Lord comes to me?
For as soon as I heard the sound of your greeting, the child in my womb leaped for joy.
And blessed is she who believed that there would be a fulfillment of what was spoken to her by the Lord.”
Elizabeth, right off, recognized that the child developing in Mary’s womb was none other than her “Lord.”
John the Baptist, Jesus’ cousin leapt at the sound of Mary’s voice and bore his first witness to the identity of Jesus as the Messiah, the Son of God.
It’s interesting that the first person in all the Gospels to call Jesus “Lord” was Elizabeth, and she proclaimed it even before Jesus was born.
The Apostle Paul wrote in his letter to the Romans, “If you confess with your lips that Jesus is Lord and believe in your heart that God raised him from the dead, you will be saved.”
Can you imagine how relieved Mary must have felt when she was greeted like this by Elizabeth?
She didn’t even have to tell Elizabeth what happened, the Holy Spirit took care of that part for her.
Mary had spent the last nine days traveling with her secret, uncertain, afraid, and wondering how any of this could be true.
She was also, probably a bit nervous about whether Elizabeth would believe her story.
I mean it was a bit out of the ordinary.
But before she could even say a word about it, Elizabeth showed that she knew and was so filled with joy she could hardly contain herself.
Not only was she happy Mary had come to her house, she felt privileged by her visit.
Elizabeth said to Mary, in essence, “Listen, Mary. You don’t have to be afraid.
You’ve been blessed.
Blessed!
Don’t you see it?
You are going to be the mother of the Messiah.
God has chosen you.
You are so blessed.
And blessed is the child you will have.
In the short passage from Luke 1:42-45, Elizabeth used the word blessed three times.
“Mary, don’t you see it? You are really blessed!”
With Elizabeth’s excitement and her insistence on driving home the point Mary saw what William Barclay called “the paradox of blessedness.”
Sometimes we might think God’s blessing involves becoming rich and powerful.
Being blessed is often associated with a life of comfort and ease.
When we describe our blessings they often include our homes, our jobs, our health and wealth.
But Mary’s blessing didn’t have anything to do with those kinds of things.
It wasn’t the blessedness of security or physical well-being.
Mary’s blessedness came from being a part of God’s plan—to be used by God for God’s purposes.
Have you ever experienced that kind of blessing?
It brings with it a peace and joy that the world can’t provide, only God can give us this.
It transcends understanding.
It’s beyond description.
And it has nothing to do with ease or comfort or security that comes from possessions, from stuff!
Far from living on “Easy Street” Mary was going to face the whispers of those who would know she became pregnant out of wedlock.
She still had to tell Joseph, and she had no idea what he would do.
She would face the struggles that would come from being the mother of Jesus—fleeing to Egypt because Herod wanted to murder her child, watching helplessly when the religious leaders tried to destroy His ministry, and finally standing by with a heart so broken as He was mocked and crucified.
This is what blessedness looked like for Mary.
“The piercing truth,” says Barclay in a wonderful line from his commentary on Luke, “is that God does not choose a person for ease and comfort and selfish joy but for a task that will take all that head and heart and hand can bring to it.”
Abraham is a perfect example of this.
God told him, “I want you to leave behind everything you’ve ever known and go to a land you’ve never seen before.
You’re blessed, by the way!
Now go and be a blessing to all the nations of the earth.”
It’s seems upside down and all mixed up…
…but that is because we seem to have things upside down and all mixed up.
Last week my mother-in-law sent me an article entitled: “How much more money buys happiness?”
“Imagine you lived in a house a third smaller than the one you currently own,” the author begins, “didn’t have air conditioning, ate less than one restaurant meal a month, didn’t have television and your entire family shared a single phone—which was mounted on a kitchen wall and could only be used when your neighbors were on the line.
That was the median household in the 1950s, a time when 58% of Americans self-reported being very satisfied with their financial situation a striking contrast to the 37% reported in 2022.”
He went on to describe a study that explored the relationship between happiness and income levels.
It turns out that across 2,000 survey respondents, the average pay increase participants indicated they needed to be happy was almost 50 Percent.
People with an annual income of $65,000 said they would need to make $95,000 to be happy.
Yet the highest income group in the survey—those earning an average of $250,000 annually—said they would need $350,000 to be happy.
The conclusion was that it “may be impossible to produce happiness with income increases.”
And so, perhaps we have things mixed up.
Look at the people Jesus called blessed.
In Luke, He said, “Blessed are the poor,” and Luke’s Gospel doesn’t use the phrase “the poor in spirit” like Matthew’s Gospel does; it simply says “the poor.”
Jesus said, “Blessed are those who are hungry now.
Blessed are those who weep now.
Blessed are you when people revile you and say bad things about you and hurt you.
Blessed are you, because great is your reward in the kingdom of heaven.”
Wow.
That’s radical stuff.
Jesus seems to have been saying, “You are blessed and you can’t see it right now.
But God is going to use your present circumstance for something good.”
“God will be with you.”
So, when we are facing difficult times, we are to pray, “God, I trust that somehow you can take this and bring good out of it.
I trust you are walking with me in this and that is all that matters.”
Again, God’s blessings aren’t about ease and comfort, but rather about the joy of being part of God’s work, being used by God for God’s good purposes, and being aware of God’s presence with us—especially in the face of troubling times.
That is the paradox of blessedness, and it’s what we see when the young, pregnant, and unmarried Mary is told by Elizabeth that she is blessed.
You know when I feel the most blessed?
It’s when I am volunteering at the food pantry.
In the past, it has been when I have taken sandwiches to prostitutes and drug addicts in some of the hotels in East Ridge.
I used to tell people that I needed to do this.
It was what fed me spiritually.
And it’s true.
Mary breaks into song after Elizabeth proclaims how blessed she is.
And one line in Mary’s song should trouble those of us who are predominantly middle and upper-middle-income folks.
She sings, “He has filled the hungry with good things, and sent the rich away empty.”
I love the first part of that line; that’s exactly what I’m counting on God to do—care for the hungry.
But it’s the second half that troubles me, in which God sends the rich away empty.
Let’s face it: relative to the rest of the world, most of us are “the rich.”
I don’t want to be sent away empty, do you?
So what does Mary’s song mean for the rich?
I see her words as in invitation.
It’s an invitation for us to humble ourselves before God and to be used by God to fulfill the first words of that line—to help the poor walk away full.
I am called to share my resources and to pass along the blessings I’ve received.
In seeking to bless and encourage and lift up other people, I am sent away full and I too discover what it means to be blessed.
The paradox of blessedness.
Money can’t buy happiness.
But being used by God to help others, that brings with it a happiness that nothing can take away.
Having God in our lives.
Knowing that God loves us, cares for us and is with us at all times—even when we are going through the toughest of times—that is blessedness.
Emptiness is not experiencing God’s love and presence—even if we have all the money and creature comforts in the world.
Emptiness is not helping those in need when we could so easily do so.
I was helping to serve breakfast at the Community Kitchen last Sunday morning.
The people who come and eat breakfast at the Community Kitchen are the people who have been sleeping outside all night.
They are the homeless.
And it would make sense that they would be the most unhappy, the most un-blessed.
One woman in particular caught my attention.
We had Christmas hymns playing from a Bluetooth device.
And she came in, heard the song and began to sing along with the words that were expressing a love for and a thankfulness to God—I can’t remember which song it was.
All I remember was my astonishment.
Here I was, tired and not sure I wanted to be downtown on 11th street at 6 O’clock in the morning when I could be home in bed, and that woman, the expression on her face was pure delight.
She felt blessed.
And that helped me to feel blessed.
In a world obsessed with material possessions.
In a world where people kill each other, send their young people to war over the lust for money, land, and power…
…we must remind ourselves that this is not God’s way.
This is the mixed up upside down way of a lost and dying world.
And as followers of Christ, we must look for ways we can be used by God to “send the hungry away full.”
We must look for ways to bless others and thus be blessed by the presence, the peace, and the love of God no matter how much we own, no matter our physical condition, no matter what!
Because being used by God is what this life is all about!
It was Mary’s secret that Elizabeth learned through the leaping of John the Baptist in her womb.
And it’s a secret we must share with our world.
(pause)
Be blessed.
And I don’t mean what you might think I mean.
In Jesus’ name.
Amen.
