“Blessed are you among women, and blessed among men shall be your son!  And why is it that the mother of my Lord comes to visit me?  Blessed is the woman who believed that the promise of the Lord to her shall be made true!”

Then Mary was filled with the Spirit of the Lord, and broke out into a song of praise.  She stayed with Elizabeth for nearly three months, and then went again to her own home at Nazareth.

As the angel had said, to the aged woman Elizabeth was given a son.  They were going to name him Zacharias, after his father.  But his mother said:  “No, his name shall be John.”

“Why,” they said, “none of your family have ever been named John!”

They asked his father Zacharias, by signs, what name he wished to be given to the child.  He asked for something to write upon; and when they brought it, he wrote, “His name is John.”  Then all at once, the power to hear and to speak came back to Zacharias.  He spoke, praising and blessing God; and he sang a song of thanks to God, in which he said: 

“You O child, shall be called a prophet of the Most High; to go before the Lord, and to make ready his ways.”

When John was growing up, they sent him out into the desert on the south of the land, and there he stayed until the time came for him to preach to the people; for this child became the great prophet John the Baptist.

THE STORY OF JESUS, THE BABE OF BETHLEHEM

Soon after the time when John the Baptist was born, Joseph the carpenter of Nazareth had a dream.  In his dream he saw an angel from the Lord standing beside him.  The angel said to him: 

“Joseph, sprung from the line of king David, I have come to tell you, that Mary, the young woman whom you are to marry, will have a son, sent by the Lord God.  You shall call his name Jesus, which means ‘salvation,’ because he shall save his people from their sins.”

God’s people had had several kings.  Some of them had been selfish and cruel, but Jesus was to be a new kind of king, one who would save, not destroy men.

Soon after Joseph and Mary were married in Nazareth, a command went forth from the emperor Augustus Caesar through all the lands of the Roman empire, for all the people to go to the cities and towns from which their families had come, and there to have their names written down upon a list, for the emperor wished a list to be made of all the people under his rule.  As both Joseph and Mary had come from the family of David the king, they went together from Nazareth to Bethlehem, there to have their names written upon the list.  For you remember that Bethlehem in Judea, six miles south of Jerusalem, was the place where David was born, and where his father’s family had lived for many years.