Pondering the Holy Name of Jesus

Sermon for Christmas II, the feast of the Holy Name

 Text: Luke 2:15-21

Christmas is different this year, different from other years. It’s not because we’ve emerged from the COVID pandemic, or that there’s a war in Europe for the first time in at least 75 years, or because we’re in uncertain economic times. It’s because Christmas fell on a Sunday this year as has New Year’s Day (happy new year, by the way). This is the second Sunday after Christmas when we would usually read the Prolog of John, the first 18 verses of John’s Gospel, “In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God.” But because this is also the Feast of the Holy Name, we heard the reading from Luke this morning. The reading ends with a single sentence recounting when Jesus was circumcised in a ritual called a bris, and he was named in the eyes of the synagogue and in the eyes of God. We have a similar naming ritual in the Episcopal Church. For those baptized with the 1928 prayer book, the words “Name this child” were spoken by the priest or bishop. In the current prayer book, the parents and/or sponsor name the person to be baptized with “I present N. to receive the Sacrament of Baptism.” Either way, the person to be baptized is named in the eyes of the church and God. Jesus’ name was given to Mary by the angel Gabriel who visited her to tell her of her pregnancy, and in Hebrew that name is Yeshua, which means to rescue, or to deliver. The meaning of Jesus’ name was revealed over his lifetime as he rescued the lost, the forgotten, the cast aside from meaninglessness in society, and delivered them to the grace and eternal love of God. All through his life, Mary was watching Jesus, from his birth to his death.

Mary watched as the shepherds arrived at the stable where she, Joseph, and Jesus were staying, and they told Mary what they had been told by an angel about Jesus. And Mary pondered these words. She pondered the words of Gabriel, who greeted her during her pregnancy, calling her a favored one in the sight of God. She treasured in her heart the things that Jesus said and did in his childhood that she never saw other children say or do. Mary pondered and treasured, which means that she was thinking, wondering, asking questions, ones that we find ourselves asking today. What does this all mean? Who is Jesus? Why did this happen to Mary? All of this thinking and wondering meant that Mary was aware, that she was listening, and not just listening to the angels or the shepherds, but listening to God. God was present with her, as Gabriel had said to her, “Greetings, favored one! The Lord is with you.” It was a powerful revelation to her that God would care about and be present with a young woman who was not rich, or who had come from an influential family. She was ordinary, unremarkable, and there lies a profound truth that Jesus later demonstrated, that all of us are loved and treasured by God regardless of who we are or who we are not. We don’t have to give birth to a savior, or be visited by angels to know that we too are favored and that God is with us, in good and bad times, in sickness and in health, and in strife and in peace.

Mary didn’t have to do anything to deserve this attention from God. She didn’t need to because she was chosen by God to be the source of something wonderful and life-changing for the world. She had something within her that God understood was needed to bring Jesus into the world and raise him. That can be a scary thing to suddenly find out that you have the power to bring someone into the world who will transform it. I can imagine her thinking “What if I fail? How do I make this happen? I wasn’t raised to be who God is calling me to be.”  Remember that she was ordinary and unremarkable, but recall, too, that she listened, and pondered. It is in those still, quiet moments of pondering that we hear God’s voice cutting though our doubts, our insecurities, our feelings of inadequacy to say “greetings, favored one” to us. And like Mary, we think about what sort of greetings these are, and what does God see in us that we are unaware of. Can we trust God to not let us fail or that we truly are who God sees us to be? It is unlikely that most of us here will have an impact on the world that Mary had, but that does not make us less in the eyes of God, and it does not mean that we can’t have an impact on the world, or that we have to succeed beyond expectations. We are instead called to make an impact as we are able to the world within our reach, one person at a time if necessary. When we have those moments where we are not sure what someone’s words mean, or what we should do, that is when we treasure things in our hearts, and like Mary, listen, and trust in God. Greetings, favored ones. Emmanuel. God is with us.