The pregnancy test was positive. I’d gone through the classic first trimester symptoms – nausea, afternoon naps that lasted for hours, a general sense of mental fogginess, strange food cravings. Now, well into the second trimester, tunic tops and jeans held closed by giant safety pins were no longer adequate and I’d graduated to honest-to-goodness maternity clothes.

But still, somehow, despite all the obvious signs, I couldn’t get my mind around the reality that there was a person being formed within me. Then it happened. I was sitting quietly, reading, and there was…an effervescence of movement, a flutter where there’d never been a flutter before.

What a flood of feelings. My heart leaped, lurched with joy and a kind of holy dread. Oh, I understood what was happening in physiological terms. Heavens! I grew up in an obstetrician’s household. My childhood reading included medical illustrator’s flip charts of the stages of fetal growth.

But, what I was feeling now had little to do with physiology and much to do with mystery. I was no longer alone in my own body. And not only that. This new life, this other person, was both here and somewhere else, both between and in more than one world at once. I felt suddenly linked to something vast and other yet startlingly and challengingly intimate.

Quickening.

According to the dictionary, the English word “quick” has its roots in two Old Norse words. One is kvikr, which means “living”. Remember “the quick and the dead” of the 1928 Prayer Book creed? An un-athletic and uncoordinated child, I was rather traumatized by the only sense I was able to make out of that archaic language. I concluded, logically enough, that the quick must be the ones who were fast enough to get away from whatever it was that made the others “the dead”.

This caused me to wonder why we devoted so much time to sitting still and being quiet in church. Wouldn’t our worship time be better spent doing things that would make us quicker, like jumping jacks and running sprints? This was one of those occasions when an ounce of Christian Education would have been worth a pound of cure.

“Quick”’s other Old Norse root is kvika, which means “sensitive flesh”. “Sensitive flesh”…yes, that describes us well, don’t you think? From it we get the name for our fingernails’ beds and for the very center of our beings, the home of our inmost sensibilities, as in “hurt to the quick”.

These meanings – aliveness and acute embodied core awareness -- are woven into the concept of “quickening”, a word which carries a number of connotations. There is, of course, the one which is associated with the moment the movement of an unborn child is first felt by the mother. But “to quicken” is also to cause something to burn more intensely, or to sharpen a curve, or to accelerate, or to cause something to shine more brightly.

What a wonderfully rich and vibrant word! Quick with meaning, you might say. Let’s look at another word that carries more than one meaning—the Greek word, skirtao (skeer-tah-o). Luke uses it in today’s gospel to describe the behavior of Elizabeth’s unborn child when Mary, newly pregnant with Jesus, enters Elizabeth’s home and greets her.

Skeertao means “to leap”, particularly “to leap with joy”, which is the way it is translated in today’s story. It also means “to skip”. And, it means “to sympathetically move, as in” – and I quote – “the quickening of a fetus.”

What if the Biblical translators had decided to go with that meaning? The way the story is presented now, the focus is all on the unborn John the Baptizer, who, even in utero, is leapingly able to perform his incarnational role of recognizing and announcing the presence of the Messiah.

Such a focus is in keeping with the intention of the gospel writer, whose purpose was to convince his readers of the authenticity of the early church’s claim that Jesus was, indeed, the Annointed One of God, whose coming had been foreseen by the prophets of old.

There are other elements of the meeting of Mary and Elizabeth that inform that purpose. Elizabeth is a “type”. That is, she stands for or represents a whole line of barren women in Old Testament scripture who become pregnant miraculously as part of God’s unfolding plan of salvation.

Mary reminds us of this lineage in her Magnificat, which we said together between our first and second readings and which directly follows Elizabeth’s recognition of Mary’s blessedness in this morning’s gospel. It is a reworking of the song of praise and thanksgiving sung by Hannah, one of those miraculous mothers, when she conceived.

But, can we who seek to follow Christ in the 21st century really become convinced of his divinity via these ancient proofs? We don’t live in the Mediterranean world of the first century where prophets and potential messiahs were, if not commonplace, at least part of the living social fabric of the time. The concepts of kingdom and lineage don’t mean much to us. I would venture to say that many of us aren’t all that familiar with the collection of Old Testament messianic prophecies that the gospel writers were so committed to proving were fulfilled in Jesus.

We live in an age which doesn’t offer much validation of the inner life and, hence, doesn’t provide much nourishment for the spirit. But, we are “sensitive flesh”. We are hungry for meaning, hungry to the quick. There is within us an emptiness that finds no fulfillment in the materialism that saturates our environment. We are, one might say, barren – longing to conceive, carry to term and birth a self which is meaningful, fully alive, connected to something vast and eternal, and wholly able to give and receive love.

We are all, male and female, feminine when it comes to God. By that, I mean, that we are all receptive in relation to the Holy. We are all receptacles for Spirit, and we all yearn to become pregnant with the Divine. It is the quickening of the Holy within us that is most likely to convince us of Christ’s authenticity and authority.

So, let’s pretend the Biblical translators chose the gestational meaning for skirtao. Let’s pretend the passage in question reads something like this: “When Elizabeth heard Mary's greeting, her child quickened within her womb and she felt for the first time life move within her.”

Translated so, this line is about Elizabeth, life-bearer, not John, forerunner. And, I offer, she then becomes a “type” not for those who went before her but for us, the ones who come after. She has endured long years of barrenness. She had given up hope of ever conceiving. And then, the miraculous pregnancy.

Luke reports that Elizabeth went into seclusion for five months upon conceiving, but does not tell us why. My guess is that she had observed the difficult pregnancies, the miscarriages, the still-births of other older women, and she was doing all she could to keep this child.

And so, alone, save for her dumbstruck husband, she welcomed the signs of pregnancy – the morning-sickness, the prodigious need for sleep, her swelling belly. And, she hoped, waiting for that moment when movement within her womb would prove that her longed-for child lived.

When the proof comes, it arrives not as a flutter but as a leap of joy. Life indeed is blossoming within she who was once barren, life which responds to the presence of the Christ, the Lord of Life, with a gloriously celebratory dance.

Caught up in this bursting forth of life within her, Elizabeth becomes more fully alive herself. She is, Luke tells us, filled with the Holy Spirit. She is, in a manner of speaking, pregnant with the Divine. And she becomes able to speak what the Spirit knows with the voice of a prophet. She cannot know by any conventional means that Mary is pregnant, yet she cries in a loud voice, “Blessed are you among women,” she cries to Mary, “and blessed is the fruit of your womb.”

Elizabeth’s story is our story. We who have been barren in spirit can conceive and bring forth new life in Christ.

Quickening.

Life stirs within – be it a flutter that can only be felt when we are at our most still, or a joyous leaping dance that calls us into prophetic action.

Quickening.

There, at our very quick, in our innermost selves -- a flame intensifies, a light begins to shine more brightly in the darkness of a winter’s night. AMEN.