“A (Very) Young Mother To Be” based on Luke 1:26-45

December 24, 2017February 15, 2020
by Sara Baron

The Christmas stories function as gospels in miniature: establishing themes, offering foreshadowing, and even telling parts of the story in smaller but parallel ways.¹ One of the little connections I first noticed this year is that in the Gospel of Luke, Jesus travels several times between the seat of his ministry in Galilee and the seat of Jewish power in Judea. This text has his mother Mary traveling from Galilee, to Judea, back to Galilee, and then BACK to Judea all while pregnant!

Luke’s themes – in both the Gospel as a whole and in the Christmas story – include a value of women, a focus on the marginalized, and attention to the Holy Spirit. Luke chapter 1 spends a lot of time on Zechariah, Elizabeth, and John the Baptist. Luke is the only gospel to claim that Elizabeth and Mary are kin, as well as the only one to focus on the experiences of Elizabeth and Mary. Scholars have pointed out that Luke is intentionality setting up a rather enormous proposition.

Namely, Elizabeth’s pregnancy story sounds like a common Hebrew Bible story. According to Genesis none of the patriarchs and matriarchs were about to procreate without an exceptionally long wait and Divine intervention. Elizabeth and Zechariah are an older couple, without children, who have gone past childbearing age. Elizabeth and Zechariah’s story sounds most like Abraham and Sarah’s, although it also connotes the birth of Samuel. God intervenes, and the VERY unexpected happen, or at least it would be VERY unexpected if it weren’t so common in the Bible.

Mary’s pregnancy story, on the other hand, is novel in the Bible. It hasn’t been told before. The ancient Greeks and Romans may have hand virgin birth stories as commonly as we have superhero movies, but this wasn’t part of the Jewish tradition.

Elizabeth is an old woman, thought to be barren, who has a child because of Divine intervention. Her story resounds with Hebrew Bible echoes. Mary is a young woman, thought to be pre-pubescent, who is ALSO said to have a child because of Divine intervention. Her story has an entirely new tune and tone.

Scholars think that Luke is intending for Elizabeth’s son, John the Baptist, to represent the end of an age; while Mary’s son, Jesus, represents the beginning of another age.² In that case, having the two pregnant mothers residing in the same home in the Judean hills for three months, having Mary present for Elizabeth’s birth, having Elizabeth’s pregnancy function as proof for Mary’s experience, and having the women related to each other and spending time sharing their experiences, is potent with meaning.

Now, it does turn out that the idea of one age ending and another beginning with the births (and deaths) of those men does have some truth to it. After all, a miscalculation of the date of the Birth of Christ was the original premise of our Western Calendar. Time has been calculated since that moment. And, since Luke was writing about 60 years after the death of Jesus³, but the time these stories were written down, the sense of an era ending another beginning was presumably felt deeply. Setting up these two main characters as the icons of change indicates how important the early Christian community thought their lives were.

Now, there is a reasonably high level of certainty that Jesus was a disciple of John the Baptist AND that there were people who had wondered if John the Baptist was the Messiah. This means that the followers of Jesus – both during his life and after his death – had to explain why they thought THEIR guy was THE guy, and the OTHER guy wasn’t. I suspect some of the reason for the story we read today is to clarify that stance. It also serves acknowledge how closely tied their lives were and how closely tied their message were. Today, I think it functions well to remind us that the “end of an era” and the “beginning of an era” still operated in continuity – with a shared understanding of God and of God’s vision for the world.

Luke 1 is a chapter of waiting. It runs for 80 verses, and yet it isn’t until chapter 2 that Jesus arrives. Luke 1 is a little bit of Advent and of Christmas Eve – the waiting and the not-yet. Luke 1 gets us ready and hungry, and anticipating the arrival of the Christ-child. It makes us wait from the annunciation, through travels and songs of praise, through John the Baptist’s birth and circumcision, through the faith struggles of his father, and even through the start of John the Baptist’s ministry before the chapter ends and we get to turn to the birth of Jesus.

It feels a bit like we are waiting with Mary, aware of the changes that are about to happen, seeing the changes in her body, wondering about the impact (she’s said to ponder a lot), but without yet holding the baby nor forming him in his faith. Luke sets up Mary to be the sort of woman you can believe could raise a son like Jesus. She is named for Miriam, a wise and faithful leader, the sister of Moses.

(Mary is the Greek-i-fied version of the Hebrew Miriam. It isn’t clear to me if she would have been called Miriam, but it was written down in Greek as Mary or if the Greek influence was strong enough that she lived in that tension of being named for a Hebrew heroine, but with the itself Greek-i-fied. By the way, the word for that is “grecized” but I didn’t think we all knew that. Or, rather, I didn’t previously know that.)

Mary is also BRAVE and FIERCE. If you remember a later story of Jesus, the one with the woman who had been accused on adultery, the one they wanted to stone – because that was the prescribed punishment for such an act – then you may note why an engaged woman agreeing to a pregnancy from not-her-fiance was so brave!! An engaged woman was seen as fully the “property” of her husband, and adultery was defined as someone sleeping with someone else’s property, and a pregnancy when the couple hadn’t engaged in procreative activities would generally serve as good proof of adultery. Yet, in Luke, this isn’t a problem!!! For Luke, Mary speaks and is believed, and there isn’t any issue at all. I like Luke. He trusts women, and he gives them voice!

In many ways this presentation of Mary becoming pregnant by God reflects the Greek and Roman influence over that region as much as her name does. This was a fairly common story in Greek and Roman myths, although, I gotta give it to Luke, this is the only story in which the woman is asked for CONSENT before getting pregnant.

Mary DOES give consent. She knows what it could cost, but she is willing. As the story goes on, she sings God’s praises for being willing to lift her up by giving her this task (#tomorrowsSermon)

Now, much later in the Gospel, Jesus will be put to death because of his faithfulness to God’s message and the building of God’s kindom. However, in this very early passage in Luke 1, we see that his mother was also willing to take those risks in order to serve God and build the kindom. She was likely very young (on the cusp of puberty), very poor, and rather profoundly disempowered, but she is given a choice about her life and she chooses to take a risk for God’s sake.

Elizabeth is also named for a Hebrew heroine, Aaron’s wife (Aaron was brother to Moses and Miriam), whose Hebrew name has been translated into Greek. I choose to interpret from this story that Elizabeth was a mentor figure to Mary, a safe place Mary could go and ponder. It has already been said in Luke 1 that John the Baptist was going to be gifted with the Holy Spirit, and in this scene it is clear that the gift is so strong as to move his mother too! Elizabeth is presented as speaking a truth that much of the world will never see, and it is presented as if God’s own wisdom is able to move through her.

Elizabeth praises Mary BOTH for the wonder of having Jesus in her womb AND for faithfulness in believing God when she was told what would happen. I appreciate that this praise comes in two parts, too much of Christianity has only praised Mary for being the mother of Jesus, and missed that the story presents her as one of his teachers and mentors as well. Elizabeth expresses shock that she could receive the gift of a visit from such an important woman, and that the baby in her womb recognized the wonder of what was happening.

Luke 1 reminds us why the birth itself even matters! Luke 1 sets us up to notice that when God is up to something, God doesn’t tend to pick the already powerful and noteworthy figures to do the work! Luke notes that God works with and through women, and the marginalized, through that unable to be controlled Holy Spirit. Luke sets us up to notice that something BIG is about to happen and it will change the world.

Which perhaps leaves us with a very important question: how has the birth of Christ changed the world FOR US, and how are our lives and actions different because of it? The era we live in has been formed by these stories, and they are ours to ponder. Are we ready, like Mary, to answer the call for radical change with “let it be with me according to your word.”? May we be. Amen

1John Dominic Crossan and Marcus Borg point this out in The First Christmas: What the Gospels Really Teach about Jesus’ Birth (USA: HarperOne, 2007)

2Fred B. Craddock, Luke in the series Interpretation: A Bible Commentary for Teaching and Preaching (Louisville: John Knox Press, 1990) p. 29. This is one of several times this theory has been written, but he said it in a particularly accessible way.

3I’m taking this from the estimate that Luke was written in about 85 CE, while Jesus was born in about 5 BCE, and lived about 31 years. The “mid eighties” guess comes from R. Alan Culpepper, “Luke” in Leadner Keck, ed. , The New Interpreter’s Bible (Nashville: Abingdon Press: 1995) p. 8.

–

Rev. Sara E. Baron

First United Methodist Church of Schenectady

603 State St. Schenectady, NY 12305

Pronouns: she/her/hers

http://fumcschenectady.org/

https://www.facebook.com/FUMCSchenectady

Sermons

“Generous Gifts of Poor Women” based on Ruth 3:1-5; 4:13-17…

November 8, 2015February 15, 2020
by Sara Baron

Usually, the educated elite of a society receive more praise an attention than society’s impoverished widows, but usually doesn’t apply to the Bible. The scribes were religious scholars, but they were also more. By Jesus’ day, the Temple high priest was appointed by Rome and the priests and scribes were benefiting from the Empire’s system of taking the wealth of the poor and giving it to the already wealthy. Many of them, I suspect, meant well. They thought they were keeping the peace. They were doing the best they could with what they had. But they were participating in a system of oppression.

Rodger Nishioka is a contributor to Feasting on the Word, and a professor of Christian Education at Columbia Theological Seminary in Decatur, GA. He writes regarding the gospel:

Together, these two sections read as a lament for and an indictment upon any religious system that results in a poor widow giving all she has so the system’s leaders may continue to live lives of wealth and comfort. The attack is not on Jewish religious practice. The attack is on any religious practice that masks egotism and greed. The scribes are like leeches on the faithful, benefiting from a religious system that allows poor widows to sacrifice what little they have.¹

The little narrative is ripe for interpretation, despite its brevity. As a child I always imagined this widow to be an old woman, a connotation associated with widowhood that often makes life very hard for young women who are widows. But many artists have portrayed this scene, and more often then not they show her as young, sometimes even holding a baby. Then, instead of an older woman sacrificing her own food, that suggests a young mother sacrificing her family’s food.

We don’t know her age, we do know that the “collection plates” of the temple were metal. Since all money was coins, and the bigger coins were worth more, this particular set up insured that people could HEAR how large the donations were. This meant that the big givers got big praise, and the small givers – got shamed.

Jesus upset that system. He didn’t sit there praising the big givers for their big gifts. He noticed the woman giving small gift, a shameful gift, a gift so small it would be tempting not to show up and give it, and he noticed. He noticed that her gift was big IN COMPARISON to what she had, and that the other gifts had been small IN COMPARISION. He took the person most likely to be ignored, disregarded, unimportant, and shamed (because, after all, the MAN of the family should have been giving the gift), and he praised HER. He saw.

Poverty can make people feel invisible. Being a woman in a patriarchy can feel invisible. Being a widow without support can easily feel invisible. But Jesus saw her in the midst of all that was going on in the temple. And he used her as an example of abundant giving.

The Torah sets up a system that is meant to care for widows, orphans and foreigners AND for the Levites who cared for the religious well being of the community. The Levites didn’t get a portion of the land allotted to them. Instead, one of the purposes of tithes was to feed them. They took care of the cultic rituals, and the rest of the tribes took care of them. They didn’t get all of the tithes though, because some of them went back to people’s hometowns to throw feasts for EVERYONE, which was one of the ways of feeding widows, orphans, and foreigners. Widows, orphans, and foreigners were cared for in other ways as well: there were laws about leaving the edges of fields and the second pickings for those who had no land, there was an expectation of levirate marriage which tried to keep family lines alive and widows cared for, and there were laws against the sale of family property and against interest which meant that poverty could exist but didn’t become an inherently downward spiral.

The Torah set up a system to care for the vulnerable AND to allow a set aside group of people to be able to devote themselves to religious practice by being given gifts by the rest. The issue in this passage is that those devoted to religious practice are not simply surviving, they’re thriving, and they’re doing it by taking away the livelihoods of the vulnerable. And Jesus was NOT happy.

The widow may have been paying her expected tithe to the Temple, or she may have been giving of her own expectations of herself. We aren’t told that, but we are told that she has given all that she has to the Temple. What sort of religious organization takes the last money of a poor widow?

Is this story told to praise the widow or to condemn the Temple? The widow’s generous gift is an indictment of the Temple system, and an even bigger one in the context of the scribe’s greed and egotism. Perhaps it is OK to take a poor widow’s last coins, because there is a human need to GIVE, and because contributing to something larger than ourselves matters, and because a person has a right to give whether they have a lot or a little. But it isn’t OK to take a poor widow’s last coins if the system in place isn’t going to take care of the widow. The system is making the clergy wealthy at the expense of the already poor. Or, to make it more simple, the Temple was functioning to take the meager wealth of the poor and redistribute it to the rich. No wonder Jesus was angry.

The widow gives an extraordinary gift that the Temple is not worthy to receive. A friend of mine asked a great question this week: what would it take to make the Temple worthy of such a gift, and what would it take to make our churches worthy of such gifts? That is worth pondering.

The poor widow, however, is not the only generous widow in our scriptures today. We also have Ruth and Naomi. This is a story worth knowing, here is a brief summary of the first two chapters:

Naomi and her husband and two sons left the holy land of Israel to live in in the hated neighboring country of Moab because of a famine. The famine lasted a long time, and both sons grew up and married Moabite women. Then both sons and Naomi’s husband died. She decided it was time to go back to Israel, to live as poor widow on other people’s generosity. As was expected at the time, her daughters in law went with her, but before they had gone far she turned to them and freed them from their bond to her. Custom said they were to stay with the family they married into. She urged them back to their own mothers to start their lives anew. One went, the other was Ruth, who pledged her life in a vow of commitment to Naomi’s. When they get back to Naomi’s village Ruth goes to glean the leftovers of the harvest and the owner of the fields instructs her to be treated with kindness.

That brings us up to the part of the story we read today, which is HIGHLY suggestive in a sexual way. As one scholar put it, “The word for ‘lie down’ in Hebrew often implies sexual intercourse. Moreover, feet are used as euphemism for genitalia in the Bible. Though the word translated as ‘feet’ in this passage is not the usual term, Naomi’s instruction to ‘uncover’ the lower extremities of Boaz is provocative. That this encounter happens at night makes the meeting even more suggestive.”² I generally enjoy it when I’m in on the joke, and I know it when the Bible is making sexual innuendos.

This, however, is not one of those times. The story is thought to end well. Ruth and Naomi are cared for by Boaz, Naomi’s line continues, and eventually King David well be born. Theologically it is magnificent, since the Israelites and Moabites were historic enemies and the Israelites were often vehemently anti-marriage with foreigners. The mere existence of this story is pretty remarkable. You’d think they wouldn’t want to say that their most beloved (no, I don’t know why) king was the great-grandson of Moabite woman, but they DO. And it seems to suggest that God’s ways are bigger than human ways, and God’s inclusion extends to even one’s enemies.

AND YET, I’m a really enormously big fan of the concept of sexual consent, and I’m not sure that Ruth had any of that in this story. I grant that she is said to have gone willingly to Boaz, but her economic circumstances called for desperate measures and she was willing to take them in order to ensure that both she and Naomi would survive. Is it consent when you and your loved one(s) would die if you didn’t? Was Naomi appropriate and wise in finding a way forward, or did she use Ruth’s young and sensually pleasing body for their gain? Who actually had power in this situation and why?

In some ways, and I don’t like of the the ways, holding the Bible up to the standard of sexual consent is unreasonable. Women didn’t often have the power to say “no,” and if you can’t say “no,” then your “yes” doesn’t count. But when a whole society fails to give women the right to say “no” then it becomes odd to call out the lack of consent in any particular story. But I’m doing it anyway, because I think it is wrong every single time.

At best, in this story, Ruth and Naomi choose to use Ruth’s sexual capacity to gain the means of survival. It is a gift much like the widow’s mite – one that is generous in the extreme and an indictment when it is necessary that it be given. Ruth is not alone, by any means, in the history of women, in becoming so poor that they only thing they have left to use towards survival is their own bodies. This is a story with nearly universal undertones, at least in market economies. It is proof yet again that the Bible is not naive about humanity, including the struggles of very poor women. At the same time, every retelling of this story should be a condemnation the society in which it happens.

The story provides evidence that Boaz was a very honorable man, likely even a good man. I like to think that despite all that happened out of necessity that Ruth may even have been quite happy with him, but that’s likely just wishful thinking. Ruth gave what she had, both for herself and for the woman dependent on her and unable to provide anything for herself.

Some generosity is too much.

One poor widow gave her last coins to the Temple.

Another poor widow gave her sexual capacity for the sake of male protection and therefore survival.

May these stop being common stories.

May we build a religious system that is worthy of the widow’s mite.

May we build a world where sex is ONLY mutual, consensual, and NEVER necessary for survival.

May we hear the stories of women and men who have given such gifts, and honor them.

And when we receive gifts of excessive generosity (of any size or type) may our receiving honor the givers. May God help us. Amen

____

1 Rodger Y Nishioka “Pastoral Perspective on Mark 12:38-44” in Feasting on the Word Year B Volume 4 edited by Barbara Brown Taylor and David Bartlett (Westminster John Knox Press: Louisville Kentucky, 2009), page 286.

2 Frank M. Yamada “Exegetical Perspective on Ruth 3:1-5; 4:13-17” in Feasting on the Word Year B Volume 4 edited by Barbara Brown Taylor and David Bartlett (Westminster John Knox Press: Louisville Kentucky, 2009), page 269.

–

Rev. Sara E. Baron

First United Methodist Church of Schenectady

603 State St. Schenectady, NY 12305

http://fumcschenectady.org/

https://www.facebook.com/FUMCSchenectady

November 8, 2015