Holy Pondering

A sermon for Christmas Day
December 25, 2022
The Rev. Mark Nabors, Vicar

Readings: Luke 2:8-20

“But Mary treasured all these words and pondered them in her heart.” 

​Something in me prefers today’s service to last night’s. Now, I love a raucous party for the birth of Christ. I love the organ–the louder, the better. I love noisy children, excited that the day is finally here. Some churches have live nativities, complete with donkeys and camels. I would even love that, too. But the quiet of Christmas morning, the simplicity of a quite normal liturgy to mark such a big feast: there is a beauty in that that I love. It gives us time, like Mary, to treasure words and ponder their meaning. 

The Christian life is impossible without such times in quiet pondering. Or, at least, it is quite impossible for me without that. I need time to look back, to wonder, to marvel, to see the threads of God’s grace weaving the disparate elements of my life together into a new pattern. I think that is what is going on with Mary. She has heard the message of the angel. She has heard the message of her cousin Elizabeth. She hears the message of the shepherds today. In time to come, she will hear the message of the magi from the east. She will hear her own son’s words as he teaches in the temple. And she will ponder. She will treasure. She will wonder. She will marvel. She will begin to see the threads of God’s grace weaving an Incarnation and Redemption together. And as she stands at the foot of the cross one day, and hears the words spoken by Jesus, “woman behold your son, son behold your mother,” she will know the new pattern God is making. 

Year after year, we hear the same words from Luke 2. We know the story. We know the arch from promise to birth to death to resurrection and back to promise again. But we have to take time to ponder, to treasure, to wonder, to marvel, to see how that grace of redemption is working itself out in our lives, to see the new pattern God is making from our filthy rags. It’s only something we can see in hindsight. We usually don’t see it all fully until we find ourselves at the foot of a cross, in an unimaginable moment. But from the scene of death, in the valley of despair, we will ponder anew the grace and love of God so active within us and we will see the new pattern God is making, and we will look up. We will look up in expectation and anticipation, because we will know that God is at work even through this, making us into a new creation, and resurrection is coming.