The Winter Visitation Sermon, Advent 4 ~ December 22, 2024

In the beautiful month of May, in the springtime of the year, the church keeps a feast known as the Visitation of the Blessed Virgin Mary. The gospel reading on that occasion is the one we just heard, the story of pregnant Mary’s visit to her elderly relative Elizabeth, who is herself pregnant with John the Baptist.

Now, at this time of year when the days are shortest and the nights are longest, we hear that visitation story again on the final Sunday of Advent, in preparation for Christmas, which comes in only a few days. We can call today the winter Feast of the Visitation.

What happens? Young Mary, a teenaged girl, has heard the angel’s monumental message that she is to be the mother of the Messiah, the other parent to the Son of God. In an exercise of the bravest faith and submission, she agrees.

Mary agrees, though this pregnancy seems to promise the end of her engagement to Joseph. She agrees, although her people remember well how in the past they would put to death a woman about to marry who was found not to be a virgin.

Mary agrees to this remarkable and scandalous motherhood. It seems she has been brought, all in a rush, to a dark stone wall. But her faith finds a door, her faith finds a door.

One barrier after another collapses in Mary’s life. Now she is on the road to Elizabeth’s home, a house in the hill country. Pregnant women in Mary’s time and place did not travel; they stayed at home. But Mary gets up and goes.

Why does she go? Is it to find refuge with an understanding relative against criticisms thrown against her because of the scandalous circumstances around her pregnancy? We do not know. But the meeting of these two pregnant women is thick with surprises.

It is common for babies to move in the womb in ways their mothers can feel. Sometimes these movements are called kicks. But John in his mother’s womb did much more. He jumped for joy! When Mary called out upon her arrival, John jumped in the womb of old Elizabeth. How startled his mother must have been!

The Holy Spirit then filled Elizabeth, and she cried out to her visitor, “Blessed are you among women, and blessed is the fruit of your womb.”

Theirs is a culture that honors the elderly, but here we have the older woman offering extravagant honor to the younger one, a teenager mysteriously pregnant. Yes, the world is turning upside down! The old era, which Elizabeth represents, has not much time left. The new era, ushered in by Mary, is about to dawn.

“Blessed are you among women, and blessed is the fruit of your womb.” Elizabeth is the first to utter this acclamation, which becomes a favorite Christian devotion down through the centuries.

She then says more. She asks:

Why has it happened that my Lord’s mother has come to visit me? As soon as I heard your greeting, the baby inside me jumped for joy! You’re blessed, Mary, because of the child you carry. You’re blessed, Mary, for believing that what the Lord told you would come true.

Here the older woman does not bless the younger, but recognizes that the younger woman is already superabundantly blessed. Yet we who know what will follow recognize that this blessing is not all springtime. It will have its winter season. A sword of anguish will pierce the heart of blessed Mary. She will cradle the baby at Bethlehem, yet years later she will cradle her dead son at Golgotha.

Suddenly the scene at Elizabeth’s house becomes a sacred opera. It moves into music. Mary does not speak; she sings. And what a song she sings!

We call this song the Magnificat, from the first word in the Latin translation. We also call it the Song of Mary. It is a universe away from any self-indulgent, sentimental ditty. Instead, what we have is an explosive celebration of the God who saves: the one who looks with favor on a humble servant, who does great things, whose name is holy. The God whose mercy is known by those who reverence him, who shows his arm to be mighty, who scatters the proud and throws down the powerful and throws out the rich, who lifts up the lowly, and leads the hungry to a banquet. The one who keeps his promise to our forbearers in faith, whose name is holy, who does great things! This is the God who sets Mary to singing, and maybe, as Herbert O’Driscoll suggests, Mary, pregnant Mary, footsore after trekking up the hillside, not only sings for all she is worth, but starts to dance as well.

Often we Christians don’t get it right about Mary. Protestants and Pentecostals and Anabaptists tend to ignore her, except perhaps at Christmas. Catholics and Orthodox appear sometimes to deify her, exaggerating the honor of she who is already higher than the cherubim. Episcopalians love the Mother of the Lord, but are rather diffident in talking about her. But sometimes we Christians do get it right about Mary. May this be such a moment.

For it seems that, in some mysterious way, reflection on Mary unlocks the door to Christian joy.

That joy rings out in ancient hymns – Greek, Latin, Coptic, Syriac – many of them modeled on Mary’s own song.

It sounds forth in the work of Anglican poets and preachers, among them Henry Vaughn, who calls out:

Bright Queen of Heaven! God’s Virgin Spouse
The glad world’s blessed maid!
Whose beauty tied life to thy house,
And brought us saving aid.

This joy radiates in the bright madonnas of Italy. It shines in stone in medieval cathedrals named for Our Lady.

Yes, reflection on Mary unlocks the door to Christian joy. Mary shares her song with us, asks us to sing the Magnificat. She invites us to delight with her in the God who turns the world upside down, who saves us through this girl’s courage.

Mary always points us to her Son, the one redeemer. Her existence reminds us that we can be as she is: the faithful disciple, the one who brings Christ to birth, the soul espoused to God.

Without such joy, Christianity is ever in danger of becoming less than itself, falling into respectable dullness or mean-spirited fanaticism.

However, where this joy of Mary singing the Magnificat is set free, Christianity becomes confident, the harbinger of an eternal springtime, rich with hope for this world and the next.

We live in a time, my friends, when people ache for such a hope. May we help them find it in the liberating God who is the subject of Mary’s song and the center of Mary’s life.

This sermon was written by the Rev. Charles Hoffacker for Advent 4(C) in 2009.

Woven Together by Love and Faith: The Story of Jim and Elaine

Once upon a time, in a small town not far from the banks of the Chippewa River, Jim Ellenson and Elaine Roosa arrived in Eau Claire as young college students, fresh-faced and earnest, with lives stretching before them. It was the 1950s for Jim, 1960 for Elaine, back when downtown Eau Claire had just a handful of stoplights and Christ Church Cathedral was a grand stone building on Farwell Street with doors wide open to anyone who might wander in.

Jim was a quiet sort, a young man of decent Midwest stock who worked as hard as he could at his studies. But one chilly autumn, money ran out, and he faced the hard fact of dropping out. He trudged to church that Sunday, heavy with the weight of it all, only to find the Dean himself, Gordon Brandt, waiting by the chapel door with a warm handshake and a keen eye for troubled students. When he found out that Jim was thinking of leaving school, he did something remarkable: he reached into his discretionary fund and pulled out $150 to keep him in classes. “No strings attached,” he said. Just one friend helping another. Years later, Jim tried to repay the kindness, but Dean Brandt just smiled and said, “Jim, it was a gift.” Well, Jim knew that, but he couldn’t resist, handing over that repayment with a nod, saying, “Maybe someone else needs it now.”

Meanwhile, young Elaine Roosa had come to Eau Claire for her own reasons. She was a reader, a lover of ideas and debates, and one day while flipping through the university handbook, she saw that the Canterbury Club was meeting that week. “Why not?” she thought, picturing tea and conversation, perhaps a bit of C.S. Lewis. Little did she know she’d find Jim there—handsome, earnest, the club president, and himself a great fan of Lewis. She joined the study group in the Buffington Home dining room, where the walls were thick with the smell of wood polish and old books, and they talked about “The Screwtape Letters,” the kind of book that made you laugh and think at the same time.

During Lent, they’d climb down to the little basement chapel for services, led by Fr. Robert Leve. It was just down the outside staircase, and a slight draft would whistle through the chapel, but nobody much minded. After all, they were young and in good company, sitting in the candlelight, reciting the words that had brought them together in the first place. Now, Elaine wasn’t one to sit back and wait for life to find her. She rather liked Jim and wasn’t about to let a little shyness get in the way. So, one sunny day, the Canterbury Club had a picnic in the park, and Elaine, with a twinkle in her eye, pointed to a green Cadillac in the parking lot. “That’s my car,” she said with a casual wave, though she didn’t even own a bicycle. When it came time to leave, she confessed that, actually, she had no way home. Jim took her hand, smiled, and brought her to the Blugold Room, where he bought her a Coke and asked if she might join him for a double date sometime. She said yes.

And so it began. They became regulars at the dances held in the basement of the Wilson Building, tasked with chaperoning the young students and enforcing the six-inch rule between dancers—a rule they themselves were known to forget from time to time. As the years went on, they became more than just dance chaperones and Canterbury members. They taught Sunday school together at Christ Church Cathedral, Jim handling the sixth graders and Elaine the third graders, under the kind eye of Jo Gow, the superintendent. They found that teaching children brought out something special in each of them, maybe a bit of that joy and whimsy they’d known as young people, now passing it down to others.

It was the fall of 1962, on their second date, when Jim took Elaine out to Menomonie, where Bundy Hall sat grand and slightly worn around the edges, like a grand old aunt. They walked in the woods, the air heavy with the scent of fallen leaves and woodsmoke, and Jim said, “If I could live anywhere, I’d choose here.” There was something timeless about Bundy Hall, something that appealed to his heart, which loved the past as much as the present. And then, in 1970, on a December afternoon during a Christmas tea at Christ Church, Bishop Atkins approached Elaine. He leaned in and asked if they would consider becoming the caretakers of Bundy Hall, to live there with their three young children, and to tend to its rooms and grounds as if it were their own. It was, in Jim’s words, a dream realized, the kind of gift that arrives quietly, dressed as an opportunity but wrapped in grace. By the first of the year, they had accepted.

Jim and Elaine raised their family at Bundy Hall, watching the seasons turn over the hills, raising children who ran through the same halls where, as students, they’d once shared whispers and laughter. And they remained part of the parish at Christ Church, the heart of their faith and the place where, long ago, they’d found each other. They still sit together at church, a little older, maybe a little slower, but no less full of the quiet joy that brought them together. And as they share this story, with its laughter and memories, they remember that $150, the Canterbury Club, the dances, the chapel, and those steps down into the basement—all pieces of a life woven together by love, faith, and a good dash of adventure.