Christmas 1C
Text: Luke 2:41-52
sermon by Rev. Robert Klonowski
Faith Lutheran Church, Homewood, IL
December 26, 2021
Mary’s Heart and the Life of Promise
“His mother treasured all these things in her heart.” Luke 2:51.
The gospel of Luke gives more detail than any of the others about Jesus’ birth and childhood. We still don’t get all that much: even in Luke the couple of stories about Jesus’ early life pale next to the many chapters devoted later to the Passion. Christmas, the gospel writers are telling us, is much less important than Holy Week and Easter.
In fact some parts of the Christmas story are there to foreshadow, to point us to the rest of the story. There is the matter, for example, of Mary’s heart. Her mother’s heart is mentioned on Christmas night, after the shepherds make known what had been told them by angels about this child, Luke writes: “But Mary treasured all these words and pondered them in her heart.” In the very next story, when the infant Jesus is presented in the Temple, Simeon says, “This child is destined for the falling and rising of many … and,” he tells Mary, “a sword will pierce your heart also.” Finally in today’s gospel, after the precocious boy Jesus is found teaching in the Temple, we are told that “his mother treasured all these things in her heart.”
So we don’t get very much about Jesus’ childhood, but isn’t it interesting that what we do get is chock full of Mary’s heart. And how could it be otherwise? What story of any birth and infancy and childhood could be complete without the heartedness of the mother, figuring large? Treasuring; pondering. Have you ever watched a breast-feeding young mother – talk about your Madonna figures, right? – contentedly and quietly holding and nursing her child? What is she doing there but treasuring and pondering the gift, the promise that she holds in her arms; she holds all of our future, right there.
Now, the specific shape of the promise, and what the future holds for this child, are not precisely known by the nursing mother. Those of us who are older parents know a little more about these things. You’d like to protect your child, if only you could!, from every disappointment that he will know. You’d like to protect your child, from every way that people will betray her and let her down. You’d like to protect your child, from having his heart broken. You’d like to protect your child, from every injustice that she is going to have to face in a world that is as far from God as this one can be.
But as important as it is to know these things, it’s even more important that the story be allowed to go on. You think God did not know that the end result of taking human flesh was going to be the Passion and the Cross? God knew, for in a world like this one how could it be otherwise? And yet God chose to enter the story. Treasure that for a moment, and ponder it in your heart; you’ve got to, if you’re ever going to understand the Christmas event aright, and if you’re ever going to understand the witness of Mary’s heart. Think of it this way, you who are older parents with me: even with everything your kid has gone through in this world, have you ever regretted that you brought that person into life? Of course not. And what that tells you is that it’s the nursing mother, more than the older parent, who is right, and faithful, and holy in her stance, bearing forward in those arms of hers and in that heart of hers nothing less than everything God ever promised us. Every pregnancy that you know is God’s promise to us of new life. Every infant baptism we see here is yet another proclamation of God’s grace washing down like flooding water. And every one of our lives, renewed, born again into the story!, is God’s guarantee that though the arc of this world is long, yet it bends toward the Kingdom of God that is our home and our salvation.
At my house last week we had a conversation about what the future holds. After my diagnosis of arthritis in the last couple of years, now we learned last week that my wife’s got it too. In the first place it just sounds to us – arthritis! – like the tolling bell of an aging future. And while there are some blessed medical interventions that can mitigate what’s coming, there is nevertheless no doubt that what’s in store is a certain amount of physical limitation. Is this what life looks like, going forward?
But when we get into that place, I don’t think we’re thinking about it right, and I don’t think we’re witnessing to the ways of faith. I repeat: every one of our lives – at any stage of our lives! Even in our older age! – is renewed, born again into the salvation story!, and into God’s guarantee that though the arc of this world is long, yet it bends even now toward the Kingdom of God that is our home and our salvation. That’s the story that we are a part of, no matter what our age, or physical condition, or station in life.
We think we know so much, we who have been around the block so many times, who are weary with the knowledge of what is to come for us at the end of life, weary with the knowledge of the sword that will pierce your heart. But it’s Mary in her naivete, treasuring, pondering, who in the end knows so much more. It’s Mary, whose heart is right with God.
I want to end here with the poem about Mary that inspired this meditation. It’s by the American poet Dorothy Parker, written in the 1920’s, I think, and is entitled “Prayer for a New Mother.”
The things she knew, let her forget again –
The voices in the sky, the fear, the cold,
The gaping shepherds, and the queer old men
Piling their clumsy gifts of foreign gold.
Let her have laughter with her little one;
Teach her the endless, tuneless songs to sing,
Grant her her right to whisper to her son
The foolish names one dare not call a king.
Keep from her dreams the rumble of a crowd,
The smell of rough-cut wood, the trail of red,
The thick and chilly whiteness of the shroud
That wraps the strange new body of the dead.
Ah, let her go, kind Lord, where mothers go
And boast his pretty words and ways, and plan
The proud and happy years that they shall know
Together, when her son is grown a man.