Luke 2:1-20 "But Mary" Scott Hoezee

If you are like most people, then you are probably a tad tired this morning. No matter how eagerly you may have looked forward to the holiday season last month when Thanksgiving Day kicked things off, by now you are probably equally ready to "get back to normal." Getting, setting up, and then sitting in front of the Christmas tree is nice, but few of us shed tears when it comes time to lug the tree out to the curb. Then you vacuum up all the needles, take down that last string of lights from the front porch, toss out the last of the stale cookies, heave a sigh of relief and declare, "There! That's better."

The holiday season has become the busiest month of the year. Retailers say they get 60% of their annual revenues in the last four weeks of the year. That's because most everybody goes out shopping during December, even a few of us who otherwise never shop. (You can see all of us non-shopping men in Hudsons or Jacobsons with a look in our eyes vaguely reminiscent of a deer caught in the headlights!) What all of that means is that the economy's well-being has come to depend on our being on the move during December.

But some of us who are not in retail sales perhaps look up against the season for that very reason. Our calendars can so quickly become a blur of scribbled-in office parties, luncheons, special church services, and family get-togethers. And sometimes we look at that flurry of activity and wonder if there isn't some easier way to get through the holidays.

As Stanley Grenz recently noted, we've fallen a long way from the traditional Christian approach to Advent. Centuries ago the season of Advent was a time when believers abstained from feasting and public parties as a way to focus their hearts on the Christ. Then, when December 25 rolled around, the four weeks of austere living gave way to great celebrations, the food and joy of which were made all the sweeter by virtue of having denied yourself such pleasures for a few weeks. You were ready for a hearty slab of prime rib and maybe a Christmas pudding or two in celebration of the Kings of kings.

How different we are when, by the time December 25 comes, we've had quite our fill of chocolate, thank you very much! The average American gains eight pounds between Thanksgiving and New Year's Day. We do not excel at austerity these days! That comes next month! But January's diets have very little to do with Christian reflection.

Naturally, the very notion of a four-week Advent season is not something mandated by the Bible. So I suppose a case could be made that the Christians who used to fast during Advent were not necessarily any more "correct" than we are with our protracted celebrations and feasts. There is more than one way properly to honor the birth of our Savior. But perhaps we would do well, nevertheless, to strike a bit more balance than we sometimes manage. And perhaps a small detail in Luke 2 presents us with just such a challenge.

In general Luke 2 is a highly busy chapter, clotted with a flurry of noise, music, and motion. Luke famously opens this chapter with a snapshot of the world on the move. With a stroke of his pen the Caesar managed to make the world jump. Then as now taxes were the name of the game in government. So in order to get an accurate count of the population (and hence of Rome's projected revenues for the year ahead), Caesar ordered everyone back to their hometowns to register themselves as citizens of the Empire.

It was a busy time in the Roman world. This decree probably inconvenienced everyone in the empire except Caesar. Everyone else from Quirinius on down to the Herods and Pontius Pilates of the government suddenly had a nightmare of bureaucratic details to deal with. Registration offices had to be set up and staffed in every little podunk, backwater village in the known-world.

Busy, busy, busy. The world in motion. Small wonder that even a dinky town like Bethlehem found its every lodging place, bed-and-breakfast, and motel with a No Vacancy sign swinging from the front porch. But the hectic pace of Luke 2 is not restricted to Caesar's doings. Eventually the hosts of heaven are also shown to be in full cry. The most serene image you get in Luke 2 is of those shepherds drowsing out in the fields. With their sheep safely bedded down for the night, the shepherds were puffing on their pipes or sipping from a skin of wine as they also prepared to slip into their bed rolls for the night.

But suddenly the skies ripped open to reveal first one, and then scores, of fiercely bright (and utterly terrifying) angels. They pierced the nighttime silence with their exuberant singing even as they danced around the stars with as much ease as fireflies flit around trees. This display unleashes still more activity in Luke 2 as the shepherds immediately scurry off to Bethlehem to check out the angels' improbable story. They had been given a sign by which to verify what they had been told. If they could go to Bethlehem and somewhere encounter the highly unlikely sight of a newborn lying in feed trough, then that would cinch the validity of what they had been told. So off they go. Once they do indeed find this sign, they flit off yet again to announce this to any and all who will listen.

Yet in the middle of all this hubbub in heaven and on earth comes verse 19. It is an odd insertion into the text--it arrests the action. Mostly it interrupts the flow of events surrounding the shepherds. First we're told in verse 18 that the shepherds left and told everyone what they had seen and heard. Then we get these words about Mary in verse 19, only to return in verse 20 to a recap of the shepherds' departure. Were you to erase verse 19, the narrative would flow seamlessly: "All who heard were amazed at what the shepherds said to them. Then the shepherds returned, glorifying and praising God."

Luke 2 does not seem to need verse 19. Certainly the little sidebar about the shepherds could do without it. So why is it there? Perhaps because we need this verse. A closer examination of these words may reveal why.

Last week Sunday evening we noted the fact that Joseph never speaks a single word in the biblical text. But this morning it is Mary who has grown silent. Having had a lot to say in Luke 1, including one entire song, Mary does not say a word in this most famous of all Christmas narratives. Instead she is shown with a furrowed brow.

But maybe you've never envisioned verse 19 as involving a furrowed brow of contemplation. Maybe the way we've mostly imagined this scene is of the holy virgin Mary with a look of utter calm and enraptured joy on her face. There she is, surrounded by shepherds, sitting in the midst of the hay and straw of remarkably clean-looking stable, utterly at peace. Certainly that is the primary way we've seen Mary depicted in art. With just the hint of a halo behind her head, Mary stares out at us from thousands of paintings with a look of supreme confidence and wisdom. She seems to know exactly what she's doing and what's going on.

But what if that was not the case? Because it is possible to translate verse 19 this way: "But Mary clutched these things and tried to make sense of them in her heart." The traditional way of translating verse 19 uses the loaded words "treasured" and "pondered." Put that way it makes it sound like Mary is adoring a diamond ring Joseph had just given her. She's got a treasured thing before her heart and is pondering it adoringly. When you take it that way, the beatific smile of all those Medieval Madonna paintings fairly beams at you.

But suppose it's not meant that way. Suppose that the picture we have of Mary in verse 19 is one of reflective confusion. Keep in mind what we said in a sermon about Mary a few weeks ago: she is a very young girl, perhaps no more than thirteen. She has been the recipient of a flurry of surprising events and revelations the last nine months. Certainly she has not forgotten the words of Gabriel but maybe she is starting to question their meaning.

After all, in Luke 1 Gabriel greets Mary like royalty. The archangel of almighty God himself all-but bowed down before her to announce the arrival of something cosmic. But in the months that followed perhaps Mary had occasion to wonder about all that. Nothing else out of the ordinary happened. Joseph had even tried to divorce her, which shattered her world for a few days until a dream calmed Joseph down.

But then it was just a long succession of morning sickness, stiff muscles, and clothes that would not fit. And on top of all that, right about the time she was about as uncomfortable as she could get, Caesar orders her to hit the road for a trip to Bethlehem. We always picture Mary riding on a donkey, though the Bible nowhere mentions that. It's possible, given the poverty of Mary and Joseph, that they did not own such an animal such that Mary just had to hoof it mile after mile despite her bulging stomach and swollen ankles.

Long about the time Mary had started to wonder just how much God was looking out for her after all, she arrived in Bethlehem only to be shunted into a barn. Bethlehem was full of Joseph's relatives. They were his kith and kin, all in from out of town for the same reason Joseph had come: this was their mutual hometown. And still they got turned away. The trauma of it all, not to mention the jostling of the journey, made Mary go into labor in the stable. But this is not the way Mary pictured things. Gabriel had not mentioned this!

When an angel plants a child into your womb because you are more highly favored in God's sight than anyone, you expect a few more doors to open up for you. But quite the opposite. So by the time some mangy shepherds show up, smelling of cheap wine and stale tobacco, and announce through their brown, scraggly teeth this whole story about angels and a Savior, Mary may well have felt done in by the contradictions of it all. Exhausted from the ordeal of childbirth and still bunking with the cows and goats, Mary's mind had taken in about as much disconnected, disconcerting data as was possible.

So she scooped up these events and guarded them in her heart as she tried to piece it together. It was all a puzzle. The verb we usually translate as "pondered" literally means "to throw together." Mary tossed these divergent things into the hopper of her heart in the hopes that eventually she would be able to assemble these puzzle pieces into a larger picture that would make some kind of sense. But for the time being they surely did not add up.

So what is Luke 2:19 doing in this text? What does it have to say to us on this Sunday after Christmas? Perhaps just this: sometimes in the Christian life the right posture to strike is one of thoughtful reflection--a posture which admits that we do not have it all figured out. For all their busy scurrying and excited talk, how many of the shepherds really came to understand Jesus, worship him, or follow him?

We don't know the answer to that, of course. But maybe what Luke is trying to tell us by juxtaposing verse 19 with all of the other hyper-busy activity of Luke 2 is that the gospel is deeply mysterious, apparently incongruous, and worthy of serious reflection. The unalloyed joy of the shepherds is a good response, just as were our own busy celebrations of the month gone by. These are glad tidings of great joy. In the long run, given what happened in Bethlehem, we've probably not sung nearly enough carols this month.

But these are also serious matters of utterly surprising shapes and forms. Mary does not beam beatifically out of this text because very little of her present circumstances seemed blessed or graced. If the one born of Mary is to be called, as Gabriel predicted in Luke 1, "the Son of the Most High God," then what is he doing in a barn? Why must the Son of God's little head need to nestle up against wood which still bore a residue of cow saliva?

Christmas is not an easy story to understand. Maybe we don't realize that often enough in our hurried, harried, hectic Advent celebrations. Then again, maybe the world wants to keep itself just this busy to avoid the harsher realities of life. Maybe we do, too. Perhaps that's why even we Christians have come to view tragedy, illness, or bad news that comes during December as an unwelcome Advent guest.

If we, blessedly enough, can get by without any real sadness within our own family circle, then we shut out and bracket for a few days the tragedies we hear from others. But if we are forced to deal with a tragedy in the holidays, well then we conclude that Christmas is maybe ruined forever for us. If from now on Christmas Eve will remind us of that night when grandpa had a stroke, then we have the uneasy feeling that this unfitting event will keep us from ever really observing Christmas the only way we think it should be celebrated: namely, with a busy joy that must not stop for or include sorrow.

Perhaps we think this way because for too long now we've focused on the shepherds' busy celebrations instead of on Mary's wrinkled forehead. It was the incongruities of it all, the cross-currents and contradictions, that motivated Mary to do her pondering. If ever there were a person who had some bad memories attached to Christmas, it was Mary. For the rest of their life together Mary could say to Joseph, "Remember that awful night we ended up sleeping in a barn!?" And she'd be referring to Christmas! With the benefit of hindsight we call it a "holy night." It almost certainly did not seem that way to Mary, however.

That's why you get the feeling that the woman who gathered up the disparate events of that long-ago evening and pondered them in her heart would not find pain and sadness at variance with "the holiday spirit." Mary had no other way to ponder what we call Christmas other than to recall hurtful memories.

And so while angels danced and shepherds sang, while cattle lowed and guiding stars twinkled, while townsfolk marveled and Joseph fretted, Mary sat silently and tried to make sense out of it all. How well she succeeded that night or in the years to come we don't know, though it seems a lot of confusion remained for Mary. But at least she recognized that the birth of the one whom the angels had called Savior and Lord had something, and just maybe had everything, to do with the world's jagged edges.

This morning we do well at the end of all our busy parties and merry-making to do some similar reflecting and to draw similar conclusions. At the end of this most unhappy century, how do we piece together holocausts and genocides, wars and racism, with the birth of the One who is supposed to bring "peace on earth"? What does that boy-child of Mary mean in a world where sadness refuses to take a holiday? Mary did some hard thinking on just such questions the very night the world first caught wind of Christmas.

We don't know what, if any, conclusions she drew. But a few decades later, when she wept over her baby boy as he writhed on a Roman cross, she most certainly continued her confused pondering. This son of hers just never had an easy road--not when his life began and certainly not when it ended. "What could it all mean?" Mary's heart screamed.

Perhaps it means that to say "Merry Christmas" must never be a way to paper over real life with all its hurts. Instead the only thing that makes Christmas merry is precisely the knowing presence of our Lord in the midst of life's jagged edges. Because then, when on Easter he rises from the dead "with healing in his wings," we understand that what this resurrected Lord will make sure to heal in our lives are the very things he so well knows wound us. And that is the good news that is for all people. Ponder it, mull it over, make sense of it as best you can. And when you've done so, then join the shepherds in amazing all the people with what you have seen and heard. To God alone be the glory forever, Amen.