Dear Luke,
I’m afraid I must chuckle at the
tone of your last letter. If you think
that what you’ve heard now is challenging to the mind, you will be amazed by
what comes later. By the time we reach
the climax of the story, a miraculous birth or two will seem almost
commonplace!
But I readily agree that it is a
lot to try and wrap your mind around.
Having a background in faith that you do not, I was prepared for God to
be doing miraculous things. For me,
miracles are merely reminders of God’s powers over the earth God created. For others, such as yourself, who know about
God but do not readily attribute creation to him, it is a larger leap of the
mind and senses to accept that things like miraculous births happen. I have been hearing about miraculous births
since I was a child, listening to my father recount the tale of Abraham, the
father of our faith, receive the news from angels that his wife Sarah would
bear a child in her advanced age. To me,
these tales merely affirm God’s wondrous joy in doing the unexpected. To you, I can understand that your mind is
being stretched beyond its comfort level.
Perhaps that is a good thing—it will prepare you for what is to come.
To accept Jesus as Lord is not an
easy task. Many believe that it is
simply about saying the right prayer and then moving on with life, but the Lord
I have heard about and believe in demands more than that. He demands a faith that is seated deeply
within the heart and radiates out into every aspect of life. If you are going to undertake this
investigation with thoroughness and integrity, you have to be ready to set
everything on the table and offer it to him.
I do not expect you to do this before the story is complete, but you
should not be expecting this to be easy.
I believe God asks a lot of us.
God certainly asked a lot of
Mary! While having God’s baby sounds
exciting, the reality of getting pregnant outside of marriage must have been
terrifying. I doubt she fully realized
this when she accepted the angel’s proposal, but surely the danger of such a
thing came home to roost before long.
While I can’t imagine Joseph’s reaction, I can say that, as a father, I
would have been furious with her. I wish
I could say that I would have accepted her story and trusted God, but I know myself
too well for that! It is not a surprise
that Mary went to visit the only person who would understand her story—she went
to see her cousin Elizabeth in the hill country.
It must have been a strange
scene—two women, both pregnant, neither one should be pregnant, each having
been visited by an angel. I am sure they
wondered what God had in store for them and their children, but when Mary
arrived, it is said that Elizabeth’s child jumped in her womb, as though it
knew precisely who was there. Elizabeth
herself felt the presence of the Holy Spirit overtake her and she proclaimed
that Mary was blessed among women, as is the fruit of her womb. She wondered aloud why the mother of the Lord
had come to visit her, for she knew by the leaping of her own child that this
was a spectacular thing. She also
pronounced a blessing upon Mary for believing that what the Lord spoke would be
fulfilled.
It was quite a greeting, and Mary,
in response, poured out her soul to her cousin Elizabeth:
My
soul magnifies the Lord, and my spirit rejoices in my Savior, my God. This low servant was looked upon with favor
by him, and I will be called blessed by the generations that follow. The Holy God has done great things for me,
and the mercy he pours out is for those who fear him. His strong arm scatters those whose hearts
are filled with pride, and the powerful are brought down while the low are
lifted up. The hungry are filled and the
rich sent away empty. Out of mercy he
has helped Israel, being faithful to the promise he made to our ancestors, to
Abraham and all his descendants.
Can you believe that prayer? It should cast away any doubt that Mary is
some simple-minded girl who didn’t know what she was getting into! Clearly, she was a woman of faith who took
seriously what she had been asked to do—carry the child of God! I have read that prayer time and time again,
and I am sure it will settle upon your heart, too. God clearly is working with a different
agenda than simply magnifying the rich and those in power—God has a different
idea of who is blessed and who is not.
I’m still trying to figure out what effect this has on my life, and on
the life of our faithful community.
Mary apparently stayed with
Elizabeth for about three months. What I
would give to have been a fly on the wall, to hear the stories they told! Perhaps they talked about the appearance of
the angel Gabriel, or maybe he came back and gave them more instructions on how
to raise these special children. I don’t
have any idea, and I have asked around to see if anyone else does, but it seems
that these two pronouncements are the only information we have from that
meeting.
May your search keep you up at
night, Luke. I say this not out of
meanness, but I hope that these tales get under your skin and destabilize you,
that they become more than just tales, but something real that changes the way
you live. I will be with you on the
journey, and we shall take each step together.
Perhaps you will notice that by the end of this journey the way you see
the landscape will have changed.
Sincerely,
Theophilus
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