What a wonderful image the lectionary text gives us for the fourth Sunday in Advent. Two women, cousins, greeting each other belly to belly, feeling the movement of their babies within their own bodies:
In those days Mary set out and went with haste to a Judean town in the hill country, where she entered the house of Zechariah and greeted Elizabeth. When Elizabeth heard Mary’s greeting, the child leaped in her womb. And Elizabeth was filled with the Holy Spirit (Luke 1:39-41).
Belly to belly, Elizabeth and Mary greet one another in the hill country, and Elizabeth’s baby leaps within. What kind of meeting is this, between the mother of John the Baptist and the mother of Jesus of Nazareth? I would give a lot to have been a fly on the wall in that house at that moment. Mary enters, the baby leaps, and Elizabeth is filled with the Holy Spirit. I suppose the idea is that Mary was so filled with the divine Spirit that when their bellies bumped, Elizabeth was somehow electrified by the power of the Spirit as well. It was a holy transfer of energy, baby bump to baby bump.
Maya Angelou’s poem, “Love’s Exquisite Freedom,” speaks to the electricity of love as it draws us into liberative life:
We, unaccustomed to courage
exiles from delight
live coiled in shells of loneliness
until love leaves its high holy temple
and comes into our sight
to liberate us into life.
Love arrives
and in its train come ecstasies
old memories of pleasure
ancient histories of pain.
Yet if we are bold,
love strikes away the chains of fear
from our souls.
We are weaned from our timidity
In the flush of love’s light
we dare be brave
And suddenly we see
that love costs all we are
and will ever be.
Yet it is only love
which sets us free.
Though not all of us have had the experience of being pregnant or of belly bumping other pregnant people, I would venture to say that all of us – at some time or another – have been sitting in the hill country, perhaps only metaphorically. We’ve been sitting in exile, in loneliness, before love arrives to “liberate us into life.”
Love arrives in various forms. In the form of a baby. In the form of a cousin. Love comes in the form of a friend who knows our “old memories of pleasure and ancient histories of pain.” Love comes in the form of a community that emboldens us to speak, “to strike away the chains of fear from our souls.”
With Kate Bowler and Jessica Richie, we therefore pray: “God, we are waiting for love, not the simple kind or the sweep-you-off-your-feet kind, but the absurd kind. The kind wrapped in rags, resting in a bucket of animal feed.”1
This Christmas, love is given. It is given in processes that are outside of our control. As a baby leaps in our bodies, as a belly bump electrifies our spirits, we know that this love is not one whose creation is up to us. Love may grow within us, it may be nourished by us and knit together from our very bodies. But love grows by the power of the Holy Spirit, by the power of the Source of Life. Love is given. It is an absurd surprise, a mystery beyond all mysteries.
This Christmas, may we “look for love, deeper, fuller, truer—than we have ever known, than we could have ever hoped for.”2
Holy One, may we seek you. May we know the love you give. And may we receive that love.
With Angelou, “we are weaned from our timidity, in the flush of love’s light, we dare be brave. And suddenly we see that love costs all we are and will ever be. Yet it is only love which sets us free.”
“Receive now this gift, dear one. Love has come for you.”3 Amen.
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- Kate Bowler and Jessica Richie, The Lives we Actually Have, p. 216.
- Ibid.
- Ibid., p. 217.
WIT 