Homily for Tuesday, 8 September 2015– Feast of the Nativity of the Blessed Virgin Mary

Tuesday of the 23rd Week in Ordinary Time

Readings of the day: Micah 5:1-4a; Psalm 13:6ab, 6c; Matthew 1:1-16, 18-23

How many of us recycle?

I am speaking primarily of a different kind of recycling than the kind that is good for our environment. I speak of the recycling, over and over again, of God’s love from the first moment of creation. Today we celebrate the Feast of the Birth of the Blessed Virgin Mary. I cannot help, on today’s feast day, to do a bit of recycling of my own.

It was this past December, a few days before our celebration of the Immaculate Conception of Mary. (This Feast of Mary’s Nativity is, of course, connected with the Solemnity of her Immaculate Conception, when Mary was conceived without original sin by Sts. Anne and Joachim. Today we are exactly nine months after the Immaculate Conception, December 8). On that day I was, as on most days during the school year, greeting the children as they entered St. Kateri School to begin their school day. This one day, a child stopped me in my tracks with a brilliant question: “How did God create Jesus and Mary”? Only occasionally is a priest completely outwitted by a third-grader!

A few days later, I had recovered enough from this St. Kateri School edition of “Stump the Priest” to try to answer the girl’s question in my homily for the Immaculate Conception, also last December’s monthly St. Kateri School Mass. “How did God create Jesus and Mary”? In short, my answer is this: God recycles.

God is a master recycler of love. Mary’s conception by Anne and Joachim, her protection by God from original sin and, about nine months later, her birth, was only one instance of God’s love for us. Through Anne and Joachim; through Mary, God was putting the finishing touches on his work of our salvation through Jesus Christ. But this was far from the first act of God’s love for us. Our Gospel reading today from Matthew includes a lengthy genealogy from Abraham, our father in faith, through to Joseph and Mary, “of [whom] was born Jesus who is called the Christ.”

Matthew’s genealogy includes three parts or “cycles”: Abraham through King David, David through “the Babylonian Exile,” and the Babylonian Exile through Jesus’ Nativity. Each cycle begins well but becomes tainted with human error and sin; with some questionable historical figures involved. And each time God, out of love for us, recycles. God constantly renews us: In Abraham, our father in faith, in Israel’s kings beginning with David (Matthew does not mention David’s predecessor King Saul, perhaps a false start), in the rebuilders of Israel after the Babylonian Exile, and finally in Jesus Christ.

God recycles. And today we celebrate one very significant step in this divine recycling of love for us, the Birth of Mary; the last step necessary for the Birth of Christ, the fullness of our salvation. But this was not the first time God recycled. Nor does God intend it to be the last. An Orthodox Christian prayer for today’s Feast proclaims: “From you,” Mary, “arose the glorious Sun of Justice, Christ our God.” The work of justice; of reflecting the light of Christ, the Sun of Justice; of God’s recycling of love in our world is now ours. And so I highly encourage us to recycle.

Homily for Monday, 8 September 2014– Feast of the Nativity of the Blessed Virgin Mary

Monday of the 23rd Week in Ordinary Time

Readings of the day: Romans 8:28-30; Psalm 13:6ab, 6c; Matthew 1:1-16, 18-23

Whose birthday are we celebrating today, anyway? Why, on this Feast of the Nativity of the Blessed Virgin Mary, do we hear in our Gospel reading a genealogy from Joseph’s side of the Holy Family? And then we hear nothing of Mary’s Nativity. In fact Matthew turns his focus to Jesus’ Nativity.

True, Mary is mentioned in Matthew’s genealogy, and then again as having conceived of Jesus by the Holy Spirit and brought him to birth. Even so, Mary is not the focus of this beginning of Matthew’s Gospel. Joseph is, and then Jesus is. Mary’s nativity is never even mentioned in the Bible. And so why do we celebrate this birthday of the Blessed Virgin Mary?

 I like to think of Mary in Scripture as somebody who points to realities and people beyond herself. St. Paul says in his letter to the Romans, from which we hear today, that “those [God] foreknew he also predestined to be conformed to the image of his Son.” Mary is the first person in God’s plan to save us, a plan that reaches its fullness in the birth of Jesus Christ, to have been perfectly “conformed to the image of [God’s] Son,” but not because it was ever Mary’s plan to bring the Son of God into the world. This was God’s plan, although Mary had to consent to it.

Mary’s birth is part of God’s plan of salvation, and this plan of salvation is for us; to save us. Mary shows us how we, too, might be “conformed to the image of” Christ as she is. Mary points to us. Mary’s birthday is a celebration of our birthday as a redeemed people; a people promised God’s salvation through Christ’s becoming human, like us in all things but sin.

We are given a beautiful prayer for today’s Feast of the Nativity of Mary that we will pray in a few moments over the gifts of bread and wine when they are brought to the altar. We pray in this prayer “to be given strength by the humanity of [God’s] Son, who from [Mary] was pleased to take flesh.” Just before this Prayer over the Offerings, at every Mass the priest silently prays in similar words as the water and wine are mixed: “By the mystery of this water and wine, may we come to share in the divinity of Christ who humbled himself to share in our humanity” (this for those of us who may wonder sometimes what we priests pray under our breath at the altar!).

Jesus’ humanity, not only his divinity, matters for our salvation. Mary’s “yes” to God’s plan made Jesus’ becoming human possible. But God’s plan to save us did not start with Mary’s “yes” to God. It started from the moment of creation. It took shape in a special way through the Birth of Mary, perfect image of Christ in his humanity; perfect image of who we are called to be: a people redeemed and saved; a people perfectly “conformed to the image of [God’s] Son.”