For this is not a story simply for telling – it is a story for living – and not only in the rituals of this week but – and more importantly – with every breath and every thought and every action of every day, life without end. Amen.

So repent – which is to say, turn again and again to God, who is our patient and attentive gardener. Offer yourself up to be pruned and fed and watered. Reach your roots deep into the fertile soil and your branches high towards the sunlight so that you might bear all the fruit you possibly can for however long your fragile, beautiful life turns out to be.

If we are willing – if we accept the invitation to be sheltered, safe under the open wings of our mother Jesus, something remarkable happens. Our hearts are broken – and we discover that it is in the breaking open that they are healed.

Love does not allow injustice and abuse. The call to turn the other cheek is not a call to suffer for suffering’s sake or to deny one’s own belovedness in light of another’s. It is not a call to endure violence – it is a call to reject violence and the tit-for-tat, us versus them, me-first script this false world would have us live by. Love is active, not passive. Love is, perhaps, the only form of resistance that does not become that which it resists.

As Christians, our political views should be shaped by our understanding of the Gospel – by the teachings of God revealed in Scripture and the world as interpreted through the life, death, and resurrection of Jesus.

Jesus’ first sign, launched by Mary in the context of a community celebration with the help of the servants, needs still more people to bring it to completion.

At Christmas, God Almighty – creator of the earth and heavens; sovereign over all time and space -put Godself in the place of the weakest among us and at the mercy of the strongest. This is good news – good news about God, good news about what is means to be human and good news for all creation.

It’s important to recognize God’s subversive choice in making Mary and Elizabeth prophets of Jesus and of God’s kingdom because that that is what they were – prophets. The scene before us today may seem cozy and domestic – and perhaps it was. But it was not tame.

for Luke, the world into which Jesus is born; into which John’s voice cries out is relevant to the story. God’s salvation does not come in the abstract, as a disembodied idea or a pretty theory, but in the real time, in real places, through real people and real events. As one commentator (Troy Troftgruben, from Working Preacher) puts it: “God saves not in Nevernever land or “somewhere over the rainbow” but in history.”