Luke 1:39-55 In the midst of everything else about this Christmas season, the secular attachments and the religious meanings; at the very center of it this is a story about women having babies. It’s about pregnancy and childbirth. And today we rest our minds on that. In Luke’s gospel, it is a story about two women – Elizabeth and Mary – both finding themselves pregnant in the most unexpected circumstances. Elizabeth, older cousin to Mary and wife of the temple priest Zechariah, is too old for having babies. For Elizabeth, those years have passed and left her empty. She is barren, like other women we have seen in the scriptures: Sarah, the wife of Abraham; Rachel, the wife of Jacob; Hannah, the wife of Elkanah. All these women waited for their turn to come, while they watched their peers’ swelling bellies and glowing faces; they waited, while month after month […]
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He Is Coming; Prepare the Way
Malachi 3:1-4 ; Luke 3:1-6 Our youngest child, Henry, had some interesting ways of saying things when he was little. He soaked up information like a sponge, but sometimes his brain got a little ahead of his mouth and things came out funny. For example, he would tell you that our town of Bloomsburg sat along the banks of the Sexy-Hanna River. Also known as the Susquehanna River. One day he and I were in the car driving along a road that was known locally as The Narrows, because it was a narrow, winding road with railroad tracks on one side and a straight, jagged rock wall on the other. Henry pointed toward the rocky wall and said to me, “You know why it’s like that? It’s because they daminated the mountain to make this road.” It took me a second to translate what he said from daminated to dynamited. For a […]
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