Wasatch Prebyterian Church Sermons
December 18, 2011
Sermon: "Stirrings"
Scripture: Luke 1:39-56
Preaching: Rev. Scott Dalgarno
Description : Think of teenage Mary meeting old Elizabeth, both having babies at the wrong time, but when is the right time? Then think of Mary linking herself up with someone her mother would probably have thought bad news, Joseph who, in one tradition, is an old widower. This Christmas thing is a cockamamie story any way you slice it, and it works because our lives are all cockamamie too. Just as God, apparently designed.
STIRRINGS
A sermon delivered by the Rev. Scott Dalgarno on Dec 18, 2011
based on Luke 1:39-56.
I want to begin with a true story told in the words of Cheryl Clark of Mill Valley, California.
My mother, a school-teacher, is lying in a hospital bed, explaining to me over the phone about her pending heart operation as if I were one of her third-grade students.
I can tell that beneath her surface confidence she is frightened, maybe even terrified. I assure her that I will fly out in the morning and arrive at the cardiac care unit just about the time she is being wheeled out of the operating room. She reminds me to drive safely from the airport.
The next morning my flight is delayed. As it finally sets out cross country,
I imagine the nurse preparing my mother for surgery, the team of cardiac surgeons scrubbing underneath her trimmed fingernails.
I run only one stop sign on the way to the hospital. I haphazardly park the rental car and dash into the building. A man in green scrubs gives me directions, and I climb the stairs two at a time, weaving my way through a the maze of sterile hallways. The sign outside the cardiac care unit tells visitors to wait in the lounge area, but I punch through the swinging doors anyway.
In the hallway, an unattended patient lies on a gurney, head wrapped in something like a turban. I can’t tell whether the person is a male or a female.
I inch closer and see a woman’s nose. Her face is swollen and her eyes are dark and puffy.
“Mother?” My voice quavers.
Her eyelids flutter, and a hand reaches out for mine.
“How are you mother?” I ask.
“I’m so glad you are here,” she rasps, slowly opening her eyes.
But my mother’s eyes are blue, not brown. This is someone else’s mother.
I look around for help. Where are all the doctor and nurses?
The woman clutches my hand tightly. “You’re a good daughter,” she says.
The world is so full of lonely. The world is so full of need because our relationships are so complicated, and our families can be so complex.
And yet, even when we have no emotional resources at all, we continue to reach out to find a hand to hold. You can always find a daughter, or a mother, for that matter, if you need one. They’re everywhere.
The gospel lesson this morning speaks of two other women— one considered old by 1st century standards. Hr name is Elizabeth and she is like the patriarch Abraham's wife Sarah -- way beyond the age for having children The other, Mary, is too young (12, 13, maybe).
The pregnancies of the two have a beautiful, if fearful, symmetry about them. Both are untimely, out of sync with life as it is supposed to be lived. Mary isn’t even married.
Who and what do you trust in those moments when life becomes more complicated than we ever knew and we find ourselves more needy than we could imagine?
Barbara Lundblad, tells a story about a good friend who got in over her head and learned a lesson about trust:
Many years ago, before such things as ultrasound and amniocentesis, pregnancy was not so different from the days of Elizabeth and Mary.
It was the 1930's and a friend of mine had a hard time being born. Her mother had given birth to two children and thought she might be expecting her third. So she went to the doctor. The doctor was uncertain and the woman was rather large so a pregnancy could go undetected, at least for a while. Weeks passed. She went back again and the doctor examined her again, listening for a fetal heart beat. Then, he made his diagnosis: "You have a tumor," he told her, "a fast
growing tumor."
"Are you sure?" she asked, hoping for some percentage of error. "So sure," he said, "that I want to schedule surgery for next week."
She left his office trying to believe things would be alright, thinking of her two children at home, relieved that her own mother had come to stay for a few days, But then, her mother refused to believe the doctor.
"You're pregnant!" she kept saying. "I don't care what that doctor says, you're pregnant. Some things, I know. I just know."
The weekend passed. Surgery was scheduled for Thursday, Her mother helped with the children and the meals, saying every chance she got, "I wouldn't let any doctor cut into me! Don't you feel pregnant?" Yes, she did, she thought she did anyway. But she couldn't remember exactly how she had felt the times before.. . and there wasn't any heart beat and she could easily discount her own feelings
in the doctor's office. And there was laundry to do — three loads, at least, then, ironing. She put the irons onto the stove to heat up.
Then, as she lifted the heavy iron from the stove, she felt it. "Mama! The baby kicked me!" (Now her mother didn't say, "What baby, dear?" She simply called the doctor and cancelled the surgery.)
A month later, my friend was born ... two months premature and very tiny. Her grandmother put her in a shoebox and kept watch over her near the kitchen
stove. She has grown up to be a very big woman, this friend of mine... and she continues to be grateful that they had heavy irons (and grandmothers) in those
days.
Much in this life exists in the mists. Two roads diverge in a yellow wood, or maybe 3. How is one to know what to do at such moments?
There had been no movement inside until that day by the stove, and the doctor seemed so sure of his diagnosis. And he was THE DOCTOR, after all
When are you certain enough to get the nursery ready? When can you trust what you feel inside?
Must you wait until the doctor has confirmed it for you? I am not speaking only of pregnancy, as you well know. All of us have stirrings within and moments when they manifest themselves to us, seemingly out of nowhere.
Ralph Waldo Emerson once put it this way: "What lies behind us and what lies before us are small matters compared to what lies within us."
Let me ask. What are you carrying inside yourself his morning? Some anticipation? Maybe some fear. Maybe both? Let me ask then, what have you discovered some time in the past at a similar juncture, something that came up from within you with no explanation? What may be stirring there now?
Can you trust that stirring? Or, will you wait for another opinion—the doctor, the professor, the review in the paper, your therapist, your parents, maybe your children?
Elizabeth trusted something inside her, and so it was old Elizabeth, six months along, that Mary went to see to get a word of confirmation and a sense of solidarity in an uncertain time.
Stirrings are seldom loud resounding calls from the heavens: a divine subpoena. They are instead quiet reminders; often they are recognizable visitations-- we sense them in serendipity, a line from a movie that comes back to us for weeks, or a paragraph from a magazine that says, "Hello?" Something haunts us. Our intuition nags us, yet it is probably not explicit.
We may sense we need to reconnect with someone, a former teacher, dead or living, It may be an old friend, a wise aunt, or even a stranger sent from who knows where, right when we need him the most, though we may not even know it.
Mary, alone, worried, looking for any support she could find, enters the house of her cousin and greets Elizabeth—and Elizabeth feels the unborn baby leap within her womb.
Full of joy Elizabeth exclaims, "Blessed are you among women, and blessed is the fruit of your womb. And 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 "
Audre Lord says the following in her wonderful poem, "Now That I Am Forever With Child."
How the days went
while you were blooming within me
I remember each upon each –
the swelling changed planes of my body
and how you first fluttered, then jumped
and I thought it was my heart.
“ . . . and I thought it was my heart.”
No, it was something bigger than her heart. It was another person. And every life that other would touch, and then every life they would touch, as well. Think of that chain of blessing.
Think of teenage Mary meeting old Elizabeth, both having babies at the wrong time, but when is the right time? Then think of Mary linking herself up with someone her mother would probably have thought bad news, Joseph who, in one tradition, is an old widower.
This Christmas thing is a cockamamie story any way you slice it, and it works because our lives are all cockamamie too. Just as God, apparently designed.
Why? Maybe because God knows we learn what’s most important when we get in way over our heads. Poor Joseph and Mary coming together when the world is in such upheaval, realizing that life is a bigger matter than they had ever dreamed . . . and also full of God’s mysterious purposes.
At advent times God comes into the rooms of our lives and, sometimes, without asking, rearranges the furniture; whether we like it or not:
But the text adds something wonderful. We needn't wait alone. Mary is sent to Elizabeth so she won't fret alone; "she stayed with her cousin for 3 months.
Sometimes God doesn't want us to wait alone.
This is what Elizabeth and Mary do for one another. They heal one another of the other's doubt, uncertainty, and loneliness. Old, young, it matters not. They affirm to one another just how beautiful they are; these odd sisters.
One more story for Christmas sake -- one more odd pairing.
In his book of whimsical stories, Good News from North Haven, Pastor Michael Lindvall tells it like this –
The Sunday before Thanksgiving a taciturn, silver-haired gentleman named Angus McDonnell told his pastor that his son, Larry and Larry's wife, Sherry, who live in Spokane, Washington would be visiting for the Thanksgiving weekend. They had just presented the McDonnell clan with a son, named, believe it or not, Angus Larry. Because Sherry's family lived close by, Thanksgiving weekend was going to be a big reunion. Angus told the pastor they would like him to "do the baby" on the Sunday after Thanksgiving.
The pastor talked to Angus about the integrity of baptism, which is what he assumed Angus meant by "doing the baby". He asked Angus about Larry and Sherry's church affiliation in Spokane, explaining that it was best for a child to be baptized in the church where they would be raised. It seemed that they had not yet settled on one. The pastor talked about the importance of the parent's commitment to the faith and that they are asked to make some rather sweeping and deep promises in the course of the baptismal service.
Angus soon caught his drift: that Larry and Sherry ought to find a church in Spokane and have the baby baptized there. Angus didn't argue. He simply shook the pastor's hand and thanked him for his time. Then, Angus proceeded to speak to all the members of the church board, who met and voted 9 to 0 in favor of the baptism.
So on the morning of the Sunday after Thanksgiving, he "did" little Angus Larry. That congregation has a baptismal custom: the pastor asks, "Who stands with this child?", and then the whole extended family of the little one rises and remains standing for the ceremony.
So with Angus Larry in his arms the pastor asked the question, and up stood Angus and his wife Minnie, and all of Sherry's family.
After church, everyone rushed home to turkey leftovers and the pastor went back into the sanctuary to turn off the lights. A middle-aged woman named Mildred Cory was there. After some hesitation she commented on how lovely the baptism had been. After another long pause, she added that her daughter, Tina, had just had a baby, and well, that baby ought to be baptized too shouldn't he? The pastor suggested that Tina and her husband call him and discuss it.
Mildred hesitated again, and then she said, "Tina's got no husband. She's just 18, and she was confirmed in this church four years ago. She used to come out for the senior high fellowship, but then she started to see this boy who was out of school. She got pregnant and decided to keep the baby and she wants to have him baptized here in her own church, but she's nervous to come and talk to you, Reverend. She's named the baby James—Jimmy."
The pastor said he would take the request to the church board for approval. The church board already knew the whole story. They knew that Tina was a member of the church and an unwed mother. They knew that the father had taken off and was now completing basic training at Fort Bragg. They began to ask questions about whether Tina would stick to the commitment she was making in having her child baptized. The whole Angus Larry affair had set the pastor in a combative mood and he remarked that she and little Jimmy were, after all, right here in town where the congregation could give them support. He did not have to say, "And not in Spokane." The board approved the baptism and it was scheduled for the last Sunday in Advent.
The church was full that day. Down the aisle came Tina, nervously, briskly, smiling, shaking slightly, holding month-old Jimmy. She was so young, so alone; it would be a hard life for this pair. Still, the pastor could not help but remember another baby boy born so long ago into difficult circumstances. A boy who's mother had also been unwed and frightened when she learned she was pregnant.
The pastor read the opening part of the service and then—looking at Mildred Cory sitting in a front pew, asked, "Who stands with this child?" He nodded at Mildred slightly to coax her to her feet. She rose slowly, looking to either side, and then returned his smile. The pastor's eyes went back to the service book.
He was just about to ask Tina the parent's questions when he became aware of movement in the pews.
Angus McDonnell had stood up, Minnie beside him. Then a couple of other elders stood. Then the sixth grade Sunday school teacher, then a new couple
in the church, and soon, before his incredulous eyes, the whole church was standing up with little Jimmy! Tina was crying. Mildred was crying. Many people had were moved as they all stood together for this little innocent child about to be welcomed into God's family.
You are neither too young nor too old. The world is a match for you and you are a match for the world. God may yet do a new thing with you. Wait, but know you may not have to wait alone. Find someone to stand up for and do it proudly.
Amen.
