There are a variety of lay ministries in a church of any size. Recognizing and supporting you folks in your work is important to me. Identifying and licensing specific people is important to the diocese. We have several categories. Two of the major ones at St. Thomas are Lay Eucharistic Ministers (LEM) and Lay Eucharistic Visitors (LEV). In this diocese these ministers are approved and the priest gets a letter listing them. In the Diocese of Tennessee when we were licensed, we got certificates saying among other things that we were “sober, devout and of good character.” It was signed by the bishop. As you can imagine, I used to get mine laminated and put it on the bulletin board in my classroom right next to the diagram with the emergency exits in case of fire. It was nice to have the bishop vouching for me.
At St. Thomas we have a team of Lay Eucharistic Visitors who take Communion to those who can’t get to church. If I am making a pastoral call, I will take Sacrament with me. If you look in the bulletin, we list the shut-ins in the prayer list. Those with an asterisk by the names have a LEV assigned. Our team of LEV’s includes Mary Kubley, Michael Wraight, Jim Smart and Sharon Fiorella-Teves.
The Lay Eucharistic Visitor literally takes Jesus to people with the consecrated host. This may sound like an odd observation, but when I read today’s Gospel, I was struck by the fact that in some ways Mary was the first Lay Eucharistic Visitor. She took Jesus in her womb on a visit to Elizabeth.
Just to remind you of the timeline, Gabriel appears to Mary and tells her she will conceive and be the mother of Jesus. The angel also tells her that her cousin Elizabeth is six months pregnant despite being a little old to be bearing children and her history of being unable to conceive. This is the Annunciation, and it is March 25. The Annuciation is also Bishop Sheridan’s birthday, and it is a day in Lent that is not a fast day on the calendar. This meant that Bishop Sheridan was usually allowed cake on his birthday even in a family that strictly o
bserved the fast. This next year Good Friday falls on March 25, and that trumps the Annunciation in terms of fasting, and so even Bishop Sheridan would be not be eating cake on the 25th if he were alive next year.
Mary then goes to visit Elizabeth, and this is called the Visitation, and we keep that on the calendar May 31 usually.
Mary arrives and greets Elizabeth, and the child in her womb “leaps for joy.” This is understood to be the first prophecy of John the Baptist. He recognized Jesus and responded to Him before most people would have given Jesus a second thought if they were even aware Mary was pregnant. It is a touching narrative to me as a guy who has been an expectant father and seen a child “leap for joy” while in the womb.
A touching narrative is one thing, but the point of sermons is to get you to act on your faith. There is a challenge here for us in the visitation, and that is that we should be like Mary and take Jesus to people. This is our call as Christians, and we are doing it in a variety of ways. We do it by living lives that witness to God’s grace. We do it by being kind and acting in love and charity. We do it by inviting people to church.
This all gets back to our baptismal promises. Think about the things I just mentioned – the ways we act on our faith. I have just given you the high points of a couple of the promises as ways that we respond to our call.
The first response to God’s call though is so typically “I am not ready.” We don’t feel adequate to the task, and so we don’t do anything. I would like to point out that if anyone felt overwhelmed by circumstances and maybe did not feel ready, it would have to be Mary. She was unmarried and probably a teenager. Tradition tells us she was 13 or 14, although recent scholarship seems to suggest she may have been a few years older. I don’t know about you, but I was doing well to keep my hair combed and get to class on time when I was a teenager. So this teen is going to be the mother of the Son of God? I am a little overwhelmed just thinking about it, and I am getting to watch it from a distance, and I know how the story ends.
Mary had every expectation that Joseph would refuse to marry her once he found out about her “condition.” She was living in a very patriarchal society where women really had no rights in general, and an unmarried pregnant woman was just glad people were not collecting stones to start throwing.
I have two observations to make here, and the first is that some apprehension might be a perfectly normal human response. It is such a normal human response that when the angel addresses Mary, he says 30”Do not be afraid.” Was Mary afraid? I suspect she had her moments, but we don’t see any of them in the Gospels. She was running off to visit her pregnant cousin after all and did not seem to be frozen with fear.
The second observation is that we have to operate sometimes on the faith that the Holy Spirit will give us the power to fulfill the things we have been called by God to do. In the liturgy for the ordination of a priest from the Book of Common Prayer, the Bishop prays “May the Lord who has given you the will to do these things give you the grace and power to perform them.” The ordinand responds “Amen.” This is a good prayer for all of us really.
Mary certainly had this faith, and she has a great response to the angel. She has this awesome responsibility laid on her, and “then Mary said, ‘Here am I, the servant of the Lord; let it be with me according to your word.’”
Mary as the first Lay Eucharistic Visitor brought Jesus to Elizabeth, and we are called to take Jesus from St. Thomas to the world.
So how do we do that? We do it by living out our baptismal promises, and we do it by listening for God’s call.
When that call comes, and we don’t feel adequate to the task, we remember first the words of Gabriel. “Do not be afraid.”
May we all have the grace to respond to that call in the same way that Mary did. “Let it be with me according to your word.”
I have said these words in the name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit. Amen.
Sermon preached by Fr. Tom at St. Thomas, Plymouth
December 20, 2015; Advent 4 – Year C
Micah 5:2-4
Canticle 15
Hebrews 10:5-10
Luke 1:39-56