Luke 2:1-20 Christmas 2002

Title: “But Mary treasured up all these things and pondered them in her heart” (Luke 2:19)

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. What all of that means is that the economy's well-being has come to depend on our being on the move during December.

During December, 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 we turn our attention to our Gospel text from the 2^nd chapter of Luke, we find ourselves also in the midst of 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 Caesar Augustus 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 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. Everyone 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 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 with a No Vacancy sign swinging from the front porch. But the hectic pace of Luke 2 is not restricted to Caesar's doings. The hosts of heaven are also shown to be in full cry. The most serene image we 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. This display unleashes still more activity in Luke 2 as the shepherds immediately scurry off to Bethlehem to check out the angels' story. Once they find this very unusual story of a newborn king lying in an animal feed trough to be true, 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.

In the Biblical narrative we never find any words attributed to Joseph. This morning it is Mary who has grown silent. Having had a lot to say in the previous chapter, 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 Mary with 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 a 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 on top of what's happening.

But what if that was not the case? 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.

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 that she is a very young girl, perhaps no more than thirteen. She has been the recipient of surprising events and revelations. Certainly she has not forgotten the words of Gabriel but maybe she is starting to question their meaning. 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. 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 him 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 usually 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 so that Mary just had to hoof it mile after mile despite her bulging stomach and swollen ankles.

I bet that by this time Mary had long been wondering just how much God was looking out for her, especially when after surviving the 140 km trek up the mountains to Bethlehem she gets shunted into a barn. Bethlehem 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 had pictured things. Gabriel had not mentioned this!

When the Holy Spirit plants a child into your womb because you are most highly favored, you expect a few more doors to open up for you. But poor Mary experienced 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 this Christmas Day? 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 do you think really came to understand the meaning of what they witnessed?

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 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 on earth is he doing in a barn? Why must the little head of God's own Son nestle up against wood covered in the droolings (saliva) of barn animals?

Christmas is not an easy story to understand. Maybe we don't realize that often enough in our hurried, harried, hectic Christmas 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: as 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 were the 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." I wonder if Mary ever thought of it like that.

That's why you get the feeling that the woman who gathered up the confusing events of that night long ago 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. As we enter the third year of our new millennium, 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 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 hung from a Roman cross, she most certainly continued her confused pondering. "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 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. That is the news Jesus wants to give you this morning as he invites you to his table: To give you news of forgiveness, healing and hope in the midst of a reality of hardship and contradictions. 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.