Homily For the 4th Sunday of Advent, 2014

In today’s gospel, we find Mary, a young girl of about 14 years, encountering the angel Gabriel. Gabriel tells her that God has chosen her to be the mother of the Messiah. She initially is frightened, as we all would be if a supernatural being suddenly appeared to us. Then her fright changes to confusion. She knows the facts of life, how can she be pregnant when she is a virgin? Gabriel explains that all she needs to do is to say “Yes” to God, and through the power of God it will happen. After careful consideration, confusion changes to acceptance as Mary tells the angel, “yes.” I have often wondered what ran through Mary’s mind after she uttered the word, “yes”? The gospel writer, Luke, has a way of expressing the wonderment of Mary at these moments. He writes, “She pondered these things in her heart.”

For those of us who have children, or are to have children, do we not also share in the wonderment of what has happened to us? What did you think when you first heard that you were going to be a parent? When Ruthie told me for the first time that we were going to be parents, I didn’t reflect a great deal on it. We were newly married and I was caught up in that wonderful state of being married to the one I loved. However, it was when Ruthie told me that she was pregnant with our 2^nd child, Luke, that I found myself in deep reflection.

In September of 1976, I had just returned from my bowling league. My league bowled at a little 4 lane bowling alley, and my team that night bowled the 2^nd shift so I got home fairly late. Our first son, Andy, was 10 months old and sleeping in his crib. As I climbed into bed Ruthie told me she was pregnant. I responded (a bit like Mary), “How can this be? You are still nursing Andy? You’re not suppose to get pregnant while you’re still nursing?” She responded that she was, nonetheless. I laid in bed and the first thing I thought was, “Well there’s another method of Catholic birth control blown to kingdom come.”As I laid there in bed, I began to think about how I, as a dad, would handle different situations my children might present to me. 

How would I react if one of my kids married someone who was not of the same race and culture as mine? My ancestry is a mix of Northern European cultural diversity, Swedes, Irish, Polish and just a touch of German. Diversity is a good thing, so one of my kids marrying someone from a different race or culture was not a problem for me. Then I thought, how would I react if one of my kids told me that he or she was gay? As a musician, and having been involved in theater, I had any number of good friends who were gay. I thought, my kids are my kids, I would love and support a gay child just as much as I would a child who was straight. Then, I thought, how would I react if one of my kids told me that he or she was going to be an unwed father or mother? That was a no brainer. I instantly knew that I would support and love my child, and my grandchild. Content with my answers, I fell asleep.

As parents, none of us knows what the future holds in store for our children. At the time Ruthie told me she was pregnant with Luke, our 2^nd child, neither one of us knew that my teaching position would be cut in 9 months. We didn’t know that our baby would be overdue by a month and a half. We didn’t know that our baby would be born homeless and would not have a home to call his own until he was 6 months old. We didn’t know that at 3 months of age, we would be told by our doctor that there was a good chance that Luke was born blind. All we could do was to trust in each other and trust in God.

When Mary said, “yes” to that angel, she did not have a clue as to what would happen within a year’s time. She was an unwed mother, engaged to a man that was not her baby’s father. She didn’t know whether Joseph, her fiancé, would marry her, or would expose her to public scandal, a scandal that would lead her to being stoned to death by Jewish law. She didn’t know that the foreign occupiers of Judea would force her and her husband to travel to a distant town to register just as she was ready to give birth. She didn’t know that her baby was going to be born homeless. She didn’t know that she, her baby, and her husband would be forced to flee for their lives as political refugees to a foreign land before the baby was a year old. When Mary said, “yes” to the angel, she did so entrusting the future of herself and her baby to God.

St. Augustine once said that there is no such thing as a past, present, or future. There is only the present. All things of the past are contained in the present, and within the present is all that will happen in the future. When Mary said yes, she said yes to everything in the future that was present at that moment. What kind of Messiah her baby would become, the great a following he would gather, so great that it worried both the Roman authorities and Jewish authorities, the wonderful things he would say, the miracles he would do was unknown to her. She could not foretell that he would be abandoned by his followers nor that he would be arrested, tortured and executed. She could not foresee the battered, bloody, lifeless body of her child that she would hold at the foot of the cross and probably wonder how she failed him as his mother. She was unable to perceive his real nature as the Messiah, that which would only be revealed at his resurrection from the dead. All of this was unknown to her, but she said, yes, to God anyway.

We will remember and celebrate the birth of Jesus in a few days. As his disciples, we carry within us the living presence of Jesus Christ, We are spiritually pregnant with Christ. God calls us, as Mary was called 2000 years ago, to give birth to the presence of Jesus within us, to give new life to Christ in this upcoming year. We do so, not knowing how we will give birth or where we will give birth to Christ, or in what form Christ will take for us in this new year. What we do know is that God calls us to say, yes, like Mary, and entrust the future of our lives and the presence of Jesus within us, to God.