Last week we began our Advent series by considering why we need to fully receive and appreciate God’s gifts to us before we regift them to others. Without taking this first step in the process, we can’t explain why the gift is significant to us and why we want to pass it on. But as good as it feels to name the ways that God has blessed us, we can’t afford to get stuck on this step. Personal gratitude for God’s gifts is important, but it does very little to advance God’s kindom or make disciples on its own. So this week, we’re turning to Mary once again in order to learn what we should do next: the second step in regifting what God has given us.
Scripture says that immediately after she accepted God’s gift and the angel departed from her, “Mary got up and hurried to a city in the Judean highland” [Luke 1:39] to visit her kinswoman, Elizabeth. Scripture doesn’t tell us WHY she does this - maybe Mary craved the company of someone who could relate to her situation, or maybe she had already been planning a trip to help Elizabeth in the last months of her pregnancy. What we DO know is that, according to Luke, Elizabeth becomes the first person aside from Mary herself to learn about the incredible gift that Mary had received from God.
Before Mary had spoken even a single word, Elizabeth sensed her gift and knew that it was something special. Filled with the Holy Spirit, she blurted out, “God has blessed you above all women, and he has blessed the child you carry. Why do I have this honor, that the mother of my Lord should come to me?” [Luke 1:42-43] Whether or not Mary had been ready to move on from the first step of regifting, it seems that the cat was out of the bag. This was no longer just about her. She’d had the opportunity to understand how this gift would impact her; now it was time for her to take the second step in regifting: reflecting on how the gift might impact others.
In today’s reading, you can pinpoint the exact moment that Mary makes this shift in her thinking, when her understanding of God’s gift expands beyond herself. Her song of praise begins with a celebration of God’s gifts to her personally (“He has looked with favor on the low status of his servant,”) but by verse 50, she’s not thinking about herself anymore. From this point on, she thinks in terms of the world at large. “He shows mercy to everyone,” “He has filled the hungry with good things,” “He has come to the aid of his servant Israel.” As part of her preparation to regift what God has entrusted to her, Mary pauses to reflect on the meaning that this gift holds for people beyond herself - it’s not only going to change HER life; it’s going to turn the whole world upside down.
As important as the first step of regifting is, it’s this second one - the reflecting - that really gets things moving in the right direction. If we understand what a gift means to us, but don’t reflect on what it might mean to OTHERS, we’re making the act of regifting entirely about ourselves. And that kind of defeats the purpose of giving a gift, doesn’t it? At the end of the day, no gift should ultimately be about the giver - it should be about the recipient.
If we don’t move beyond the first step, we put ourselves at risk of treating the recipient as incidental - at best, a way for us to feel good about ourselves for sharing something that we love, and at worst, a way to unload something that’s been taking up space in our lives. If we only ever consider a gift in terms of our own experience, then regifting it can actually wind up doing more harm than good. And whatever our intentions may have been, that makes for a really bad gift.
Take food bank donations, for example. This is a really common, really important way that people choose to regift the blessings that God has given to them. But without careful reflection about the real people who are on the receiving end of the donations, our giving may not wind up being as helpful as we think it is.
For some people, donating food means going through their cupboards and pulling out all the things that are expired, have damaged packaging, or that simply aren’t all that appetizing, and then dropping them off at the local food bank. They think that they’re keeping food from going to waste, but they don’t stop to consider that if THEY don’t want to eat it, maybe the recipients won’t, either. There’s also the unspoken and (hopefully) unintentional message that this food isn’t good enough for MY family, but it’s just fine for YOURS. While this is still TECHNICALLY a gift, I think we can all agree that it’s not a very good one.
Other people will donate inexpensive items like boxed macaroni and cheese or rice-a-roni by the ton, but they don’t think about the fact that these meals are inedible without additional ingredients. What kind of a gift would these things make for someone who doesn’t have ready access to milk or butter or oil? All of these donations may have good intentions behind them, but without an effort to reflect on their actual impact on the recipient, they can wind up being a way for the giver to feel good about themselves, and not much more.
While this second step was named to fit with a pattern - REgift, REceive, REflect - I could have just as easily called it “practicing empathy”. If you want your gifts to have meaning for the recipient, you have to first put yourself in their shoes, see the world through their eyes, consider their thoughts and feelings and perspective. Ideally, you wouldn’t just imagine these things; you’d learn from them directly. Only then will you be able to determine whether your gift will actually be a blessing or a burden. If you aren’t willing to take that step, it may be time to admit that your regifting isn’t about them after all - it’s about you.
Mary knows that, as precious as God’s gift is to her, it’s too big, too precious, too transformative to make all about herself. She’s grateful for what God has done for her personally, but she knows that the story can’t end there. And so, in order to keep the story going, to keep herself from limiting the potential of God’s gifts to change the world, she chooses to reflect. She reminds herself why she consented to God’s gift in the first place: not to stroke her own ego, not so that all generations would call her blessed, but because the world needs mercy. Because the lowly deserve to be lifted up. Because the hungry should be fed. Because Israel longs for a savior. She may be the most blessed of women as the mother of God, but at the end of the day, she’s not doing it for herself. She’s doing it for humankind.
Why do we regift the things that God has blessed us with? Are we doing it for our own benefit - to stroke our own egos? To be seen as righteous by those around us? I don’t think so. I think that most of us do it for a far better reason: because God’s gifts are too good to keep to ourselves. And so, if we truly want to share God’s goodness and love with others in a way that will turn a broken world upside down, let’s learn from Mary’s example.
Before we thoughtlessly regift God’s blessings for our own reasons, let’s reflect on how our giving might be received. Let’s look beyond ourselves to consider the real impact of our actions, regardless of our intentions. Let’s put ourselves in others’ shoes to learn what gift would be most meaningful to them. If we reflect on the impact of God’s gifts beyond ourselves, we may be surprised to discover just how much power and potential lies within them - potential that we couldn’t even imagine without considering a different point of view. We’ll begin to see the future that God intends, not just for each of us, but for all of us. And like Mary, we’ll get to be a part of making it happen. Thanks be to God. Amen.
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