Good Morning! And
Happy New Year!
It’s so good to see so many of you here today. Of course, I am curious and have a lot of
questions. But I don’t want to embarrass
you or myself, so I will try to phrase them in the most general way
possible. You don’t even have to raise
your hands; just nod you head. Okay,
Question Number 1: How many of you have
either personally, or have known someone in your life who has made a New Year’s
Resolution? Okay. Great.
Now, did any of those resolutions ever concern losing weight and getting
into shape? Or involve giving up
something—like smoking or drinking alcohol?
You know, this is a great time for gyms and health clubs. In January, everyone else has to deal with
credit card statements from Christmas and all of that. But the gym folks are counting on people
buying year-long memberships and then quitting before February. So they’ve got eleven months they can spend
here on the beach in Santa Barbara, or in Kauai, or someplace else. It isn’t fair, is it?
Now, let me ask
you: how many of you, one year later,
can honestly say that you have kept your New Year’s Resolution from 2013? (No hands).
Thank you! Now I don’t feel so
bad. Because I didn’t keep my resolution
either! So I don’t feel so bad. Experts tell us that it takes a great deal to
make a resolution stick. We make
resolutions as an act of our wills, and then, to our sorrow, realize sooner or
later how weak and wobbly our wills really are.
We just can’t do it alone. We are
told that one of most important things we can do in making a resolution is to
tell everyone about it, so they will hold us accountable. Even more importantly, though, we need a
support system, people around us who will encourage us in our decisions and
help us to start over again if/ when we slip along the way. We just can’t seem to make this sort of
promise and keep it.
Our faith tradition gives us an entirely different
perspective on making promise, though.
It actually turns our conventional wisdom upside down. We are not so concerned with keep promises as
we are in allowing Jesus, our Promised One, to keep us! It’s not a matter of making up our minds and
having our own will. Rather, it is a
function of surrendering our will to God and trusting that, just maybe, God
might know what is better for us than we ourselves think.
That’s why it’s so instructive to enter into the sense of
the Gospel of Luke today, on the Solemnity of Mary, the Mother of God. Mary made and kept her promise to God, but
the Promise of God in Jesus also “kept” Mary, enabling her to trust God ever
more deeply through the struggles of her life throughout her life.
Most of the stories we know about Mary come to us from the
Gospel of Luke. We have a very solid
tradition which tells us that Mary shared her stories with the community of
Luke and that they were subsequently included in the Gospel text. It makes sense, doesn’t it? How else would we know what we do about
her?
It’s as if we can hear her own voice in the “voice” of the
Gospel, as she pondered all that had happened to her: “There was the moment when the angel Gabriel
asked me to be the mother of the Savior.
And I had to just stop for a moment to try to think it all through. And all that it would mean to me. Then, I went to see my cousin Elizabeth and
the baby (John) leapt in her womb when we met.
And now, with the birth of the Child and these shepherds barging in out
of nowhere—looking bad and smelling worse.
But when they saw Him, Jesus, they were absolutely transfixed and
transformed. And I had to stop and think
again—ponder—about what all of this has meant.
How the promise of God has been unfolding in my life in ways that I
never expected or could ever imagine.”
Mary’s narrative continues throughout Luke and the Acts of
the Apostles. We can experience her impressions
and reactions to significant events throughout her life with Jesus, as she
“ponders” in retrospect: “Then, there
was the day Joseph and I took the Child to the Temple for His name day and
circumcision. And Simeon told us that He
would be the ‘rise and fall’ of many nations.
And how he turned to me, then, and predicted that a sword would pierce
my heart. I had no idea what he meant
that day, but years later, when our Son was about twelve and we went to
Jerusalem and thought we had lost Him. Then, I remembered what Simeon said and
I was worried sick and devastated that we had lost Him. But then, here he comes skipping along like
nothing had happened, and when He told us the things he had said to the
scribes, I thought to myself: “Where did
He get all of this? We didn’t tell Him
these things? He couldn’t have picked it
all up in a place like Nazareth.” Again,
I really had to stop to think. And
ponder.”
“And then, years later,
there was this wedding we went to in Cana. And I noticed how they were running out of
wine and I thought, well, this couple is going to be really embarrassed. And I turned to Him and mentioned it to
Him. And when he started to react, I
just gave Him that look, and He
helped. I had no idea He was going to
turn all that water into wine. But when
I saw what had happened, I just had to stop and think. And ponder.”
“Of course, He broke my heart. And more than once. Once, I went to hear Him preach and when
someone told Him I was waiting outside along with some other family members, He
came out with this, “Well, my mother and brothers are those who keep my Word,”
and, of course, I was stunned and hurt.
And then I thought it over and realized, okay, He doesn’t belong to me
anymore—if He ever did. Now He belongs
to everyone and I’ve got to step back and let Him go.”
“The worst part, though, was when they came to arrest
Him. And then tortured Him, mocked him,
and put Him through this phony show trial before they marched Him off to His
Death. When I stood at the foot of that Cross, I felt myself dying right along
with Him. And it took everything within
me—everything—to hold onto that last slim thread of the promise God had made to
me about him even before He was born. I
just wanted to die. Right then and
there.”
“And then, finally, when I was sitting in the room with His
friends. Friends? Almost all of them had run off and abandoned
Him when He really needed them. But,
never mind, I was there. And then, all
of a sudden, I felt the warm rushing wind of His Presence and Spirit. And then, and only then, I finally was able
to put together everything I had known and experienced about Him and realize how
little I really new or understood from the very beginning. It all had to play out over His lifetime and
mine. And I had to think it all through,
carefully, until I saw the sense of it.”
Mary pondered. She
made a promise. She kept her
promise. And God most certainly kept His
Promise to her. In Jesus.
And so it is with us.
Homily given at St.
Barbara Parish, Old Mission Santa Barbara, Santa Barbara, California. January 1, 2014
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