To me, there’s no more beautiful or poignant way to describe a mother-to-be than to say she’s expecting. One could of course say she’s pregnant, which while accurate sounds rather clinical, or that she’s “going to have a baby,” which is fine but a tad wordy. For me, though, “expecting” captures it all: joyful anticipation mixed with wonder at the uncertain. How wonderful it is that although we might expect many things, a final exam, a paycheck, a visit from a friend, the word has been especially conferred upon those who are “with child,” expectant mothers.

And these expectant folks - you can’t always tell by looking at them, can you? Outwardly, at least at first, they appear quite ordinary. (That’s why it’s so dangerous to ask!) Could the person in the pew in front of you be one of them? Hard to tell. Those who are expecting have an inward reality that transforms them, even though we may discern it, even though at their annoying jobs nothing may change, even if they have the same set of headaches as before. Those who are expecting live with an internal disposition, this hope they never before have imagined.

That’s how it was with the one chosen by God to bear, birth, nurse and parent the Savior of the world. (There was a case to warrant prenatal vitamins, wouldn’t you say?) Mary made a three-to-four-day journey to see her likewise-expectant cousin Elizabeth, and probably only those among us who have been pregnant can imagine the joy that was in Mary’s heart. She, alone in the world at that time, knew the secret: she was expecting. Likely not even Joseph knew yet - only she was possessed of Gabriel’s news, that in her womb was a tiny ovum, a fertilized egg, the beginning of a life. But not one of us can fathom Mary’s unanswered questions: What will Joseph say, and what will he do? Will my parents throw me out when I begin to show? Will my friends remain my friends? Will I survive childbirth? How will I parent the Son of God? Or will I be dragged to the village square to be given the punishment reserved for those who are found to have betrayed their engagement – by being pelted with stones until my baby and I are without life in us?

Several days on the road, this frightened girl, this pregnant teenager with no knowledge of how she will support herself or her child: her expectancy must have been both wonderful and fearful. Then she surprises her cousin, and the child in Elizabeth’s womb leaps for joy, a prenatal fulfillment of the Baptist’s divine purpose: to point to the coming of the Messiah. How wonderful for Mary to have found, at last, one person in the whole world who is also singing her song of praise and wonder at the might of the Lord. They are expecting; few even know about it.

It is strange to think that someone sitting nearby you today might also be expectant, and you don’t even know it. But let’s go beyond the biological, this morning: are you expecting, this Christmas? Some younger ones here may be pondering other things they are expecting this Christmas, of the under-the-tree variety. But for most of us, that kind of expectancy is mostly a fond memory of Christmases long past. We have learned to enjoy Christmas for lots of other reasons, but not necessarily to expect all that much.

And that’s the danger, isn’t it? What are we expecting, this morning? Most of us, probably not too much. Our spiritual lives are dangerously close to a vague sense of comfort, stretched over a busy rhythm of holiday duties and habits. Of course, we love Christmas in the church - the candlelight and the bathrobe shepherds, the magi and the glow of the manger. I grew up in the Church – I even love the strains of unpracticed voices sliding through “Angels We have Heard on High” - but I am not sure that I always live in expectation, wonderful, terrible expectation, that God is going to invade and transform my world all over again. How about you?

Christmas is about expectation, and about Incarnation - a word we seldom use. Incarnation is the belief that God came among us in the flesh, that Jesus had a mother, that he was born in blood and amniotic fluid, squalling and waving his tiny fists in an unpracticed gesture at the world. In fact, most of us can accept that this happened. We have some unanswered questions, but the power of Luke’s infant Messiah is too much for our doubt - it makes us want to believe. God in the flesh, Emmanuel, God-with-us, the Everlasting Father, the Prince of Peace! Could this be true? On Christmas Eve, most of us will be crying YES! It could indeed be true. For all our doubt and hardheartedness we want to believe it is true.

But to believe may not necessarily mean to expect. Young Mary felt, after she returned home into her second trimester, the Son of God kicking against the nourishing constraints of her body. I’d say she lived expectantly. Her very life magnified the Lord, because she bore the incarnate miracle of her biology joined with divine flesh - a God-Person, our Savior, her Savior - inside her. After all, she was smuggling God into the world within her own body! And smuggle him she did. The rattling sound at Jesus’ birth was not made by a baby toy, but by Herod’s soldiers on the march. Not the first time, not the last time that the politics of men would place little ones under the sword. Mary smuggled Jesus into the world as it then was, so that God could begin its transformation into the world that is to be.

To carry the Son of God might seem utterly unique to the girl from Nazareth - but what if it were your task to magnify the Lord this way - namely, to bear Christ in your body? Could God reasonably expect a thing like that, today? Consider the state of the world as it now is. This Christmas, our nation is fighting wars abroad which we pray in time might change hearts, but are surely spilling blood this day - the blood of our brothers and sons, the blood of our enemies, the blood of the innocent whom we have killed, pregnant mothers, little ones. Here at home our city-dwelling youth turn to gangs for belonging rather than to the Church, turn to drugs for gratification, rather than to the One who is the Source of all good things. Far and near women suffer the abuse of men and reckon it their own fault. Just two years from now, the UN has estimated that 45 million people will in 2010 die of AIDS worldwide, mostly in Africa. Did you know that two-thirds of those deaths could be prevented by the nations of the world tripling their current funding for HIV/AIDS relief – a quantity of money that even at that augmented level - $6 billion – looks ridiculously small next to what it costs to run a war these days, or even perhaps an auto company. We might conclude that our world is not expecting too much this Christmas, either.

But friends, hear the good news: Christmas is not something we do. Christmas is something God has done, and continues to do. Would you like to be part of what God is doing, the unfolding of Christmas expectancy? You can be. Because of what use is it to you if Jesus is incarnate, but not in you? What is the meaning of “Mary full of grace,” if you are empty inside? Mary bore the Son of God into the world 20 centuries ago, yes! But in 2009, bearing Jesus to the world is going to require you, your body. * So what do you expect this Christmas? I suggest you expect it all. Expect joy instead of cynicism, hope instead of gnawing anxiety, love for others instead of unfettered self–interest. Expect to be blessed with the knowledge that in you Christ can be born to others.

I can’t tell you “stranger things have happened!” Because they have not. Incarnation is the surely the strangest thing that ever happened. But happen it did. And best of all, Incarnation can still happen, when God is enfleshed in you. Expect that.

Amen.

* For the notion that we are to bear Christ incarnate to others, I am indebted to the medieval mystic Meister Eckhart. See Meditations with M.E., Matthew Fox, ed. and tr., 1983.