“When Elizabeth heard Mary’s greeting, the child leaped in her womb.”  

 

Well, I know a little something about a child leaping in your womb.  As it happens, right now I am just about as far along in my pregnancy as Elizabeth was when Mary came to visit her.  This is the point in a pregnancy when the baby, who has been moving around for quite awhile now, is rapidly becoming big enough so that those little flailings are easily felt by the mother.  From here on in, the kicks and rolls become stronger and stronger as the baby gets bigger and bigger.  Mothers-to-be at this stage are encouraged to keep track of the baby’s movements as one way of determining that the baby is still healthy.

 

What is impossible to determine from the baby’s movements is WHY the baby is moving.  Babies at this stage can hear sounds from outside the womb, so it is perfectly possible that a baby’s motions are in response to a voice such as Mary’s greeting Elizabeth.  But Elizabeth says that the baby in her womb leaped for joy.  Now, while that may be theologically correct, or someone in writing down this story may have felt that it was important to emphasize that John recognized Jesus even when they were both fetuses, really we have to acknowledge that for Elizabeth to say that the baby in her womb leaped for joy was an interpretation that she, as the baby’s mother, projected onto him and his actions.

 

Of course, projecting interpretations is an occupational hazard of motherhood, at least in the first few years, before the child is really able to express him- or herself.  People are always saying things like “the baby is crying because . . . “ or “the baby is happy because . . . .”  Sometimes these interpretations may be correct, and sometimes they may be wrong, and the general rule is that we probably won’t find out.  Which, of course, leaves us sure that we are correct, and we go along and make more interpretations and project more things onto those people and situations around us.  Slowly we forget the crucial difference between projection and fact, between fact and interpretation.  The fact was that the baby moved suddenly in Elizabeth’s womb.  The interpretation, the projection, was that he leaped for joy.

 

The thing about these projections, these interpretations, whether we make them ourselves or whether they are presented to us, is that they quickly become real for us.  They become real for us whether or not they would have been equally real to another person who saw, heard, or felt the same things we did.  The MEANING of an event, then, is often a creation of the person or people who experienced it, not something that is intrinsic to the event itself.  Someone experiencing the same thing but coming from a different background, perhaps, or with a different set of assumptions about the way the world works, might end up with a completely different idea of the meaning of what happened.

 

I once worked with a girl named Carla who was about sixteen.  Carla told me about her mother’s experience when she was pregnant with her.  Apparently, there was some difficulty with the pregnancy, and her mother was afraid that she might lose the baby.  So she prayed, and told God that if the baby was born healthy, she, the mother, would give up chocolate for the rest of her life.  Carla was born healthy, and her mother gave up chocolate and, as of sixteen years later, still kept her promise to God.  

 

So:  was Carla really born healthy because of her mother’s promise?  Is Carla’s mother depriving herself of one of life’s joys (because personally, I think chocolate is definitely one of life’s joys) for a valid reason or for no reason at all?  What would happen if she decided to eat a piece of chocolate?  Who is qualified to answer any of these questions?

 

Whatever our own reactions to Carla’s story may be--whether we take it as a sign of God’s power or the power of faith, or as a manifestation of superstition within Christianity, or something else, the cause and effect relationship between giving up chocolate and a healthy baby girl are real for Carla and her mother.  If something is real for you, you live your life in accordance with it, you function in the world as though whatever it is is true, whether other people agree with you, disagree, make fun of you, whatever.  What is real for you is real for you--what is real for Carla and her mother is real for them.

 

So what is real, and what is not?  What matters, and what doesn’t?  What is true, and what is untrue?

 

It almost doesn’t matter.  What matters is what you do about it.  Carla’s mother believed that she could influence the outcome of her pregnancy by sacrificing something that she loved, that is, chocolate.  And guess what, her baby was born healthy.  Now, as a mark of faith to God and of keeping her promise, she continues not to eat chocolate.  

 

There are many people in the world who might call us fools for being here this morning.  For them, Christianity may be no more than a widely accepted superstition, or a set of stories that only those with insufficient intellectual capability would believe.  “It’s not real,” they might say, or “it’s not true.”  Many books have been written purporting to disprove various aspects of Christian belief.  And of course, to counter those, others have written books to prove that Christianity IS true, IS real.  

 

It’s all a lot of hot air.  Or maybe hot air and hot ink on paper bound into books, and hot electrons moving around the world wide web.  The real question is:  what are you doing about what you believe to be true?  If you say you are a Christian, what does that mean to you?  How does being a Christian manifest in your life:  what are you doing to make Christianity real?

 

We, here this morning, have chosen, either implicitly or explicitly, to live as Christians.  Whether that choice is one that was handed down to us from our parents and grandparents or one that we made ourselves at some point in our lives, we wouldn’t be here if the choice hadn’t ever been made.  And that means that, for us, it might as well be real that the baby in Elizabeth’s womb leaped for joy when he heard Mary’s greeting.  

 

The POINT of the passage is real for us, whether or not some kind of cosmic inter-uterine interviewer could have determined whether the fetus that would become John the Baptist was really feeling joyful or just waking up and stretching.  For us, it is the first of many times when John the Baptist indicated that Jesus was the one we all needed to pay attention to.  John shows us to be joyful as we wait to celebrate our Savior’s birth.  And that is real.

 

We are Christians:  that is real.  As Christians, we are bound up in the life of Christ as our Savior and of God as our Creator:  that is real.  And in this season of Advent, which the church sets aside for preparation for Christmas, we are waiting, confident in the knowledge that Jesus, the baby who was God, will be born again in us.  That is real.