CHRISTMAS EVE 2021

          My nephew is an active tweeter. The generation before him, that is, his mother and father and me, we have not gotten beyond texting. So he copies and pastes tweets he thinks his elders should read and texts them to us. Recently he shared a tweet from an Episcopalian priest in Baltimore, who is also one of his allies in various community action projects. The priest is the father of two young children, a daughter in elementary school and a pre-schooler son. This Advent season he overheard his daughter filling her little brother in on the Christmas story. She told him all about Mary and Joseph and the infant Jesus, the shepherds and angels and the three wise men, and how Jesus’ parents couldn’t get a motel room, so he was born in a stable with a bunch of animals in attendance. But that was okay because he was fine, and the angels gave the shepherds directions and the star guided the magi, so they all found the place and came together to worship him. “And everybody lived happily ever after,” she concluded, “well, except for this Easter thing, but I’ll tell you about that some other time.”

          I have always been struck by these verses in Luke’s account of the nativity: “When they saw this, they made known what had been told them about this child; and all who heard it were amazed at what the shepherds told them. But Mary treasured all these words and pondered them in her heart” (2:17-19). The shepherds are into sharing the news; if they were living in the 21st century, they would be posting pictures all over their FaceBook pages and anticipating lots of “likes.” Mary is just the opposite; she keeps her counsel. And Luke tells us later in this same chapter, jumping from Jesus’ infancy to his adolescence, that Mary is once again perplexed by her experience with her son. On this second occasion Jesus stays behind in the Temple, unbeknownst to his parents, when they leave Jerusalem to return to their home. They travel back to the city and find him, and his mother chides him for his thoughtlessness. “Look,” she says, “your father and I have been searching for you in great anxiety” (2:48). And Jesus replies, apparently surprised at his parents’ lack of understanding, “Why were you searching for me? Did you not know that I must be in my Father’s house?” What were they to make of that? No wonder Luke reports that once again “[h]is mother treasured all these things in her heart” (2:51).

          Any parent can sympathize with Mary. The fierce scrutiny our babies direct at us that leaves us wondering who it is behind those soft features and unblinking eyes. The adolescent bursts of independence that cause us grief and leave us baffled. From the moment a child comes into the world, we know our responsibility is to keep them safe, this person so literally bone of our bones and flesh of our flesh (Genesis 2:23), and yet always a mystery to us, whose life is inseparable from our own, yet not ours to live. The word translated “treasured” here doesn’t mean cherished or prized, like treasuring a memory. Mary holds onto these events as valuable information and wonders what they portend. She knows they cast a shadow into her son’s future, but she sees through a glass, darkly (1 Corinthians 13:12), as do we all while traveling the road of parenthood.

          But you and I come to Christmas every year knowing what she could not, what lies ahead for her child, that Easter thing. We celebrate Jesus’ birth, the beginning of his story among us, in the full light of its ending. When Mary and Joseph take the infant to the Temple to be blessed, the holy man Simeon tells his mother, “This child is destined for the falling and the rising of many in Israel, and to be a sign that will be opposed so that the inner thoughts of many will be revealed — and a sword will pierce your own soul too” (Luke 2:34-5). More words Mary must have treasured and pondered in her heart over the years until the ending when she stood at the foot of her son’s cross. We know the path lying before him, which she could not, and just how accurate Simeon’s prophecy proved to be. Jesus’ words of mercy, his acts of love, his demand for justice cut a path through the world’s cruelty and suffering that ended in this brutal death. But then that ending was not the end.

          It is because of the Easter thing that we celebrate Jesus’ birth tonight. It is because of the Easter thing that we dare to live in hope and take our Lord’s words of love and mercy to heart, even though, like Mary, we see through a glass, darkly, in a mirror, dimly, as we move into the future. For as the star blazed over Bethlehem that night long ago, a light came into the world that does not desert us. The light of Christ shines in the darkness, and the darkness will not overcome it (John 1:5). Amen.