Place an Advent wreath at the center of your group. Place a statue

or art picturing Mary at her visitation or annunciation in the center of the wreath. Light four candles.

LEADER: Slow our haste and heighten our anticipation in the final days of the Advent season.ALL: On Earth peace to all of good will.

LEADER: Let us recognize God’s gifts in one another; we are full of grace.ALL: The Holy One is with us.

LEADER: In Jesus the Word who was with God became one of us.ALL: Let us trust the word God speaks to us.

A fading reproduction of Fra Angelico’s annunciation hangs on

our living room wall. It hangs just to the right of the TV—but I seldom notice it.

The real fresco painted on the wall at the Convent of San Marcos in Florence, Italy, stopped me on the stairs as I climbed to see the monk’s rooms on the second floor. I stood in awe. It is luminous, the holy showing through.

Mary sits on a wooden bench inside a room open on two sides to sunlight and garden. The Angel Gabriel has found her in this open porch; the space surrounding her mirrors her inner receptivity. Mary wears a blue robe; the angel has rainbow-colored wings.

Green grass blooms with flowers on a lawn beside the porch. A brown wood fence creates a boundary from the outer world at the back of the painting. Green trees appear beyond, a hint of Eden. The green adds depth to the painting and, by contrast, makes the inner room where Gabriel and Mary speak a place of light and conscious attention.

The angel leans slightly toward Mary with hands crossed at his waist, a gesture expressing composure, prayer, and honor toward her. Mary leans slightly toward the angel in the same gesture. Their eyes focus intently on each other, making their exchange the center of the painting. Everything visible in the painting makes us see

what we can’t see—presence, relationship, communion.

I n Sunday’s gospel Mary visits her kinswoman Elizabeth, who recognizes

God has blessed her among women. Elizabeth recognizes that Mary lives in the same holy mystery that she, too, knows from conceiving her child late in life. Mary has trusted God’s word to her and said yes to the overshadowing of the Spirit.

Mary’s experience of the Spirit calls us to recognize our own. My deepest experience of Spirit I would call an undergirding rather than an overshadowing. One Sunday after my mother died, I cried until I exhausted myself. I reached a place within that

by Joan Mitchell, CSJ

by SUNDAY

Sunday Readings: Micah 5.1-4, Hebrews 10.5-10, Luke 1.39-45

December 19, 2021, 4th Sunday of Advent, Vol. 31, No. 12

The Advent gospels lead us toward Christmas with thoughts of Jesus’

coming in glory and with John the Baptist’s urgent preaching to repent. Those of us who have not yet agreed to let God’s word transform us have a few days yet to share our extra coats and food, to challenge ourselves to consume less, and to let the rejoicing of all creation at Jesus’ birth inspire our care for Earth.

In Mary and Elizabeth the gospel focuses on two model believers who welcome God’s word into themselves, into their bodies. Their faith and trust in God’s Spirit is bearing fruit in their wombs. In their visit together these two women share their faith in what God is doing in them for the world.

Mary sets out to visit Elizabeth right after saying yes to the angel. Luke tells us her

route. Mary lives in Nazareth and journeys to Judah near Jerusalem, three or four days away. The angel has told Mary that Elizabeth has conceived a son in her old age, so she can anticipate Elizabeth will understand the impossible that God is doing in both of them.

Luke has Mary set out “in haste,” a tantalizing detail. Is her haste so no one recognizes she is pregnant? Are her parents less sympathetic to what is happening in her life than Elizabeth, whose own pregnancy opens her to understand? Is Mary seeking support from Elizabeth or coming to give support and help to her kinswoman in her final months of pregnancy? Does Mary make the trip alone? We have only what Luke tells us to reflect upon.

The gospel describes their encounter as spiritually electric. Each woman has responded to God separately. As they meet, the Spirit arcs between them like sparks. At Mary’s greeting, Elizabeth’s baby leaps in her womb. Her words express ecstatic awe at the holy happening within their wombs.

Elizabeth’s words begin a conversation. Mary responds with the Magnificat (1.46-55). Faith sharing groups can see in this encounter what happens in their conversations. Sharing insights and commitments magnifies and expands our faith as we experience the Spirit at work in each other.

l Who supports and affirms the Spirit’s stirrings in you?

l How do faith-sharing conversations affirm and deepen your faith?

NARRATOR 1: Mary set out in haste into the hill country to a town in Judah, where she entered the house of Zechariah and greeted Elizabeth, her kinswoman.

NARRATOR 2: When Elizabeth heard Mary’s greeting, the baby stirred within her womb. Elizabeth was filled with the Holy Spirit and cried out in a loud voice.

ELIZABETH: Blessed are you among women and blessed is the child of your womb. Who am I that the mother of my Lord should come to me? The moment I heard your voice, the baby within me stirred for joy. Blessed is she who trusts God’s words to her will be fulfilled.

Luke 1.39-45

Blessed is she who trusts God’s words.

seemed to be the bottom of myself.

To my amazement I experienced there the Spirit alive in me, or me alive in the Spirit—a profound inner affirmation that I could do my life without my mother and trust God’s gifts in me. What Fra Angelico makes visible in his annunciation fresco I knew to be real from this experience.

l What is an experience of Spirit from which you live?

Who are we that God should come to us?

her childlessness at the temple in Shiloh; God hears her prayer, and she becomes the mother of the great judge Samuel.

A child born to a barren woman is clearly God’s gift. Elizabeth belongs to this long line of women whom God blesses when all hope of children and new life seems past.

l What blessing have you felt at the birth of a child in your family?

As one who believes in the God of unexpected grace and life, Elizabeth

blesses her young kinswoman. In calling the baby in Mary’s womb Lord, Elizabeth expresses Luke’s Christian faith that Jesus is God’s Son.

Mary and Elizabeth live open to the future and the new life

they carry in their wombs. In contrast, Zechariah, Elizabeth’s husband, a priest serving in the temple, cannot believe the Angel Gabriel’s words to him that his wife will bear

a child he must name John. The angel silences him for not believing God’s word.

The new life that is good news for the world does not come from within the existing temple structure but in the wombs of two believing women. Women of faith frame Luke’s gospel: at its beginning Mary and Elizabeth; in its end, Mary Magdalene, Joanna, Mary the mother of James and other women who find the tomb empty and remember Jesus’ impossible promise to rise on the third day.

In Luke’s time, as in Elizabeth’s, new life is stirring among unlikely people—the Gentiles, the poor, women, tax collectors. Perhaps people on the margins experience enough discomfort with things as they are to open their hearts to more impossible, transcendent hopes.

In our time more than 50 years after Vatican II, two generations have lived the call to be the people of God in our world and now must live authentically the word of God

Mary’s coming touches Elizabeth

deep within where the child in her long-barren womb stirs. Elizabeth is Luke’s first theologian in this gospel. She reflects for us on the meaning of Mary’s coming. She blesses Mary and her baby. She proclaims who the child in Mary’s womb is in a question that expresses her own humility and receptiveness. “Who am I that the mother of my Lord should come to me?”

Motherhood gives women place in Israel’s society. To be barren is to have no connection with the people’s future. However, barren women often become the mothers of Israel’s greatest leaders. Sarah is so old she laughs when visitors tell Abraham the couple will finally bear the long-promised child. “Is anything too wonderful for God?” the messenger asks. Sarah names her child Isaac, which means laughter of God.

Rachel, the second wife of Jacob, waits long years for her children, Joseph and Benjamin. Hannah grieves

M.O. McGrath/bromickeymcgrath.com

l Visit Annunciation House at annunciationhouse.org.

Some of our Spanish-speaking Sisters of St. Joseph have

volunteered in this shelter ministry, giving hospitality to

reunited families in El Paso, Texas.

C HA R I T Y

J U S T I C E

LEADER: Let us bring peace to all on Earth.ALL: May we be joy to the world.

Share commitments to act on a stirring of the Spirit in you.

Sing: O little town of Bethlehem,How still we see thee lie!Above thy deep and dreamless sleep/The silent stars go by;Yet in thy dark streets shinethThe everlasting Light;The hopes and fears of all the years are met in thee tonight.

For Christ is born of Mary,And gathered all above,While mortals sleep, the angels keep, their watch of wond’ring love. O morning stars togetherproclaim the holy birth!And praises sing to God the King, and peace to all on earth.

Exchange a sign of peace.

Sunday’s first reading comes from Micah, a prophet in Judah during

the years when the Assyrians rise to power and conquer the Northern Kingdom of Israel in 721 B.C. They destroy its capital, uproot orchards and olive trees, displace families, take captives, and resettle foreign tribes in the land.

As people from the north move south to escape the devastation, the waste and suffering of war sickens Micah as it does his contemporary, Isaiah. Micah urges the leaders of Judah to trust God rather than their armies, to do justice to the poor rather than stand up to a superior Assyrian power. “You hate the good and love the evil,” Micah tells those who lead the people into war that tears them apart like meat for a stew (3.2-3).

The prophet asks what is good and what God requires. His answer is famous: To do justice, and to love kindness, and to walk humbly with your God (6.8). Like Isaiah, Micah envisions nations streaming to the temple to learn the ways of God, beating their swords into plowshares, and sitting under their own vines and fig trees.

Micah trusts God will act in surprising and unexpected ways. In Micah’s time the clan of Judah, with its center in the city of Jerusalem, held power, wealth, and religious leadership. In Micah’s view, the leaders of Jerusalem and Judah had grown wealthy by extorting lands, collecting heavy taxes, and accepting bribes. A small farming village in the southern hills would become the unlikely place from which God would do the impossible.

The Savior is coming.You, Bethlehem-Ephrathah,too small to be amongthe clans of Judah,From you shall come forth for meone who is to be ruler in Israel.He shall stand firmand shepherd his flockby the strength of the Holy One.His greatness shall reachto the ends of the earth;he shall be peace. Micah 5.1-4

l What leaders is God raising up today in unexpected places? in unlikely people? in your family? in society? in the Church? in your parish?

Leaders arise in unlikely places.

Joan Mitchell, CSJ, the editor of SUNDAY BY SUNDAY, holds a Masters of Theological Studies from Harvard Divinity School and a Ph.D. in New Testament from Luther Seminary in St. Paul, MN.

too many Church leaders have betrayed. It’s a good time for older and younger people to learn from each other about what leaps within, stirring new responses to the Spirit’s activities in our world.

l What do you see coming to birth in younger women?

l What do you see coming to birth in older women? In yourself?

Merry Christmas from all of us at Good

Ground Press—Joan, Jennifer, Lacy, and

Therese.