From Humble Beginnings

Sunday, December 22, 2024, Fourth Advent – Micah 5:2-5a, Luke 1:46b-55, Hebrews 10:5-10, Luke 1:39-45 [46-55]

I’ll never forget the experience of watching the chubby, frumpy middle-aged woman with an unflattering hairdo walk onto the big stage with the microphone in her hand. She had shared with the offstage hosts that she was 47, lived alone with her cat, Pebbles, was unemployed, and had never been kissed.

She spoke with a cheeky attitude. And because her Scottish-brogue-laced quips came from a humble and nondescript outer package, she unfortunately drew only eye rolls and laughter from the audience and cynical sneers from the three judges.

But a minute later, Susan Boyle wiped all those sneers off their faces with a voice that brought the house down. The tears in the judges’ eyes and the lumps in their throats were unmistakable.

She sang “I Dreamed a Dream” from the musical Les Miserables – one of my all-time favorite shows – and her rendition of the song was gorgeous and powerful. And even though I’ve seen the video many times, I still cry, even as I’m grinning.

Sometimes really amazing things come from humble beginnings.

The most satisfying moment of Boyle’s 2009 audition on Britain’s Got Talent was watching judge Simon Cowell’s eyebrows fly up and his jaw drop to the floor in shocked surprise as he comprehended what he was hearing. The crowd moved from dismissive laughter to standing ovation long before she was finished.

In a recent revisiting on the the Today show of that audition, Cowell recalls,

I’ll never forget this. I was having a terrible, terrible day and I remember saying, ‘I really, really hope she’s not gonna sing,’ because there were so many bad singers that day and I thought, ‘I just can’t take another one.’

Our expectations were quite low, but she is the perfect example of ‘never judge a book by its cover.’” Then he added, “She came on this show and everything changed because up until that point, you know, there was a perception that you had to look this way or be this age. And she just changed the rule book, full stop.”

We could say the same thing about Bethlehem, Mary, and Elizabeth. They, too, changed the rule book.

Though today Bethlehem is an urban metropolis with a constant flow of visitors, at the time of Jesus’ birth it was probably a small and rather inconsequential place. But greatness was born in those humble beginnings in the trough used to feed animals, surrounded by dung and hay.
Elizabeth was a post-menopausal wife, past her child-bearing years, and would therefore have had little status or power. But a powerful prophet was born from that previously barren womb.

Mary was a young and unmarried pregnant girl who would have been a candidate for stoning. This was probably the reason she traveled from her home to stay with her extended family members, Elizabeth and Zechariah. And yet the divine healing of the world was born from this inconsequential woman.

In today’s gospel reading, we hear Luke’s story of how Elizabeth’s baby leapt in her womb when Mary – who was carrying Jesus – visited her. And I want to share with you some of the thoughts on this story that I spoke about in our final Advent service on Wednesday.

I pointed out how what we have here are two pregnant women who have been blessed – and maybe also burdened – with the task of carrying God’s prophets and healers.

You may not have realized that the pregnancies of both women were considered miraculous. Elizabeth had not been able to bear any children and was now physically past that possibility, but the angel Gabriel visited her and said she would conceive. She responded with happy willingness.
Mary’s conception of Jesus is also described as due to a miraculous visitation by Gabriel, and her response was to give herself and her body in willingness to God’s purposes.

As we consider these miraculous circumstances, it’s easy to think only about the glory, the angels singing, and the light from heaven coming down at Christmas. But we also know that Elizabeth’s child, John the Baptist, would go on to be horrifically executed by Herod, and Mary’s child, Jesus, would go on to be executed by the Roman state and religious power brokers of his day. That’s why I talk about blessing and burden.

In Advent, it’s tempting to ignore the burden, and only focus on the blessing but our reading from the letter to the Hebrews makes the connection between cradle and cross perfectly clear. Jesus, too, willingly gives himself to God’s purposes.

It’s the willingness to be a vessel for God’s purposes that turns what is humble into world-changing greatness. But that willingness can also include dark depths of grief and loss.

Yesterday was the Winter Solstice, the point in the calendar year when the darkness begins to recede and the light begins to emerge. It’s tempting to quickly say “good riddance” to the dark and only focus on the coming light. But as author Cole Arthur Riley reminds us in his book “Black Liturgies,”

In Advent, we put all our hope in the sacred blackness of a womb. As we wait, we remind ourselves that darkness, which is far too often reduced to a trite symbol for sin and death, in fact has the unique capacity to bear the divine. In Advent, we reclaim the holy dark.”

It’s in the winter’s darkness that the growth begins, but we can’t see anything from above and so we dismiss it as a “dead” season. It’s in the darkness of the womb where life is conceived, but we can’t see all that’s going on in there, and so the ancients dismissed the woman’s womb as just the meaningless vessel for everything important that came from the man.

But just like the stunning surprise that came out of Susan Boyle’s mouth, world-shaking Truth emerged from Bethlehem, from Elizabeth, and from Mary. The world may have judged all of them as inconsequential, as past their prime, or as too old to be relevant, but that’s not how God saw them.

How does God see us here in this place? Are we too old, too small, too inconsequential to make a difference in our world? Or can something great emerge from our humble beginnings? To what greatness can our willingness lead us? And what might that require of us?