December 19, 2014
The following is a homily based on the Scripture readings for Sunday, Dec. 21.
All around our school building in North East Washington I suspect very similar conversations are going on. These are people who have purchased a new townhouse, never been lived in before, and therefore never had Christmas before. What kind of tree should we get? Multi-colored lights or just one color? How about the Christmas balls? Place it in the window where others can see, or inside where we can gather more easily about it? Christmas dinner at our place? How many can we fit around our table?
After people have had one Christmas in their new house, of course, then the house is broken in. The patterns they set this year will probably endure. The beige of the new house smell will be colored by the aromas of cooking and baking, the smells of human life. The house will go from a generic building to something that feels like “home.” “A man’s home is his castle,” so goes the saying. We think of home as ours, where we feel safe and comfortable, where we have arranged things around our needs and desires.
It should be no surprise then when, as we see in the first reading, David wants to build God a house. God has other ideas. If David builds God a house, doesn’t David domesticate God? Arrange God to suit David’s needs? Confine God to a building? Make God do David’s bidding? God rejoins David’s ideas with one of his own: You don’t build me a home, I build you one. You don’t shrink me into your house. I elevate you into my house.
Mary is engaged but not yet married. One married back then by going into the house of one’s spouse. Mary is in-between, not yet in a house. When the Angel greets Mary, she is shocked. When the Angel tells Mary of God’s plans, she quite knowingly says, “How can this be since I am not living in a man’s house. I do not have my own home yet?” God addresses a woman in the outskirts of a lowly province of Judea – not inside the city, not inside the temple. In Mary God is bringing us to a new space, doing something totally new. “I will give him the throne of David; he will rule over the house of David forever.” In Mary, God is building us a new house.
The house that God invites us to exists in both the heart and the world. “Let it be done to me as you say,” says Mary. By opening her own heart to God’s plans, to God’s vast and loving vision, she gives herself to forces of love and grace that she could never generate on her own. “Mary, full of grace,” we say, “full of the unlimited love God gives her.” And by accepting that grace in her heart, Mary shows the new house God wants to build, not revolving around a temple, or a palace, or a single city or one particular nation. Rather, God’s house is available for everyone, a house for the nations, a house where everyone in the world can find peace with God, and with each other. This is the mystery that knocks Paul off his feet.
As we make our final preparations for Christmas, life will be busy and distracted. We will be tempted to think Christmas is all about the efforts we have put in, the decorations we have put up, the arrangements we have made. But it is not we who make Christmas. God makes Christmas, for us and within us. It’s not about our holiday party; it’s about God’s feast for the salvation of humankind.