06/01/2026
Sermon: The Visitation
Today we celebrate multiple miracles. Two pregnant women – one way past the age of bearing children and one who was a too-young virgin – come together. They need each other to help handle the impossibilities they are living. Then there is another miracle – or at least it feels like one. Elizabeth looks at her pregnant, unmarried young cousin and does not immediately judge and condemn her. She listens. Luke doesn’t tell us much about their actual conversation. He goes straight to prophetic utterance on Elizabeth’s part and radical, ancient poetry on Mary’s. It’s like a perfectly choreographed ballet of words.
But we know life is not like that – even when we are in the realm of the amazing acts of God. Life is messier. Communication is messier. Relationships are messier. Whether or not gossip had gotten to Elizabeth ahead of Mary’s arrival, she was still faced with a young kinswoman who was scandalously pregnant and, virgin conception or not, could bring shame on her family.
Whole libraries have been written about these two impossible pregnancies. There is no way to prove or disprove anything about them. We believe about them what we choose to believe and, at the very least, receive incredible grace from the powerful symbolism. We can rejoice that God worked through an elderly woman whose culture said she had failed in her purpose. What might that invite us to ponder as we deal with where we are now?
We trust that in the pregnancy of an unmarried young teen, God was doing something that would change the world. With what new life are we pregnant without even knowing it yet?
Those are a few of countless possible questions and opportunities for wild, wooly and wonderful speculation. But we can’t know.
What we do know from our own experience is how badly people hurt each other, how easy it is to judge, mock, and criticize each other, especially as a way to cope with our own struggles. So let’s explore the third miracle in this story: the miracle of generous relationship.
It’s clear from Luke’s account that Elizabeth was more than just an old woman with a worn-out uterus who was suddenly able to carry a baby. She would have been hurt, badly, during the passing years. She had never been able to give birth, and in that time, in that culture, that meant that she was a failure. There would have been gossip. People would have speculated about her sins or the sins of her parents, as they did with the man born blind. She would have been weighed in the balance of community judgment and been found wanting. No matter how kind she was, how faithful in her duties, how caring for those in need, people would have judged her, gossiped about her, snarked at her. And she had a choice. She could have let that turn her bitter.
Her life did not turn out the way she dreamed.
She wouldn’t have had extravagant dreams. But she might have dreamed about a contented married life, raising many children, being an active part of village life. But she did not have children. Somehow she received the grace not to let her disappointment, the judgments aimed at her, the gossip, her acute pain and sense of failure, turn her against others. She let her own suffering soften her heart and teach her to listen.
Luke says that Mary greeted Elizabeth. He doesn’t tell us what that greeting was. Maybe she just stood there, waiting for more condemnation, but hoping that here was someone who would believe her. Would support her. We know how Elizabeth chose.
You’ve heard about interpersonal exercise. It includes leaping to judgment, flying off the handle, carrying things too far, dodging responsibilities. Both of these women would have been the victims of people who were committed to such exercise.
We’ve all been hurt by people exercising that way and we have all hurt others when we’ve done it. We’ve decided that we know the motives of someone and judged them for that without checking it out first. But we still have the example of Elizabeth and Mary in front of us. We see the choice that Elizabeth made. We also know how her son John turned out, what he taught about how people were to treat each other. Granted he could lay out the facts when it came to the evil and hypocrisy of Herod and his ilk, but when he was teaching those who went to him with questions about how to live, it was about kindness, caring, generosity, living with actual humility. He would have learned those high values at Elizabeth’s knee.
It’s so painfully easy to get so caught up in our own pain, our own wants, our own fears and losses and resentments, that we forget how our reactions can hurt each other. Maybe that’s why there is so much in scripture about the basics of kindness.
Listen again to some of the challenges we are given in the letter to the Romans:
Let love be genuine; hate what is evil, hold fast to what is good; love one another with mutual affection; outdo one another in showing honor.
These are not prescriptions for how we should feel. When Paul, with wry humor, says to turn showing honor into a competition, we can probably trust that he doesn’t mean for us to get into any sort of “I’m more courteous than you are” contest. Instead, we look in the mirror and ask, “Am I growing in how I treat each person with the respect, kindness, and courtesy owed to another child of God to the best of my ability in this moment?” We can compete with ourselves.
We can speculate the Elizabeth grew over time into the kind of woman who gave grace and could welcome Mary without judgment. She listened. She trusted. She welcomed. She allowed her experience of pain – what she had badly needed but did not get – to shape her into someone who gave in response to another’s need.
There is so much more to the brief passage from Romans which invites living into Elizabeth’s example. Is it reasonable to trust that she was one who continually chose to allow God to weave healing into her heart by a choosing to rejoice in hope, be patient in suffering, and persevere in prayer? That is hard, risky work. But it is how we open ourselves to receive God’s transforming love. It is how it becomes possible for us to follow Elizabeth’s example.
Philosopher Walter Percy wrote, “We love those who know the worst of us and don’t turn their faces away.” As we are reminded every time we pray the Collect for Purity, that is how God treats us. To God, our hearts are like open books, our desires are well known, and from God none of our secrets are hidden – even the ones we keep from ourselves. And God does not turn God’s face away. We also know that, we who are created in the image and likeness of God, are urged to grow in that direction. Living as closely as we do together, we do know the worst of each other. We hurt each other. We get things wrong – sometimes quite badly. We protect ourselves by drawing back and judging because vulnerability is so frightening and we have been hurt so much already. To acknowledge when we have been wrong is flat out hard work and batters our fragile egos.
Elizabeth might well be the patron saint of those who want to work through the kind of suffering we inflict on each other and do the hard work of growing into love. It’s not a journey we take without acquiring fearsome, lasting bruises. Sometimes we have to recognize that relationships are broken beyond repair on this side of eternity. Sin is real and we miss the mark constantly. But that quiet woman who suffered so many slings and arrows from her neighbors and her own self-judgment was able to welcome a pregnant, unmarried kinswoman and give her the strength for what was to come.
Thanks be to God for the miracle of Elizabeth.
Sister Diana Doncaster CT
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