This morning we see God’s great choice of Our Lady to be mother of Our Lord.
When we look closely at Mary’s story, especially in Luke’s account, we see how she struggled before saying Yes to God’s choice of her to be the mother of his Son.
In our own lives we also struggle many a time to conform our lives to what God would have us do.
This morning in Mary the church invites us to ponder the choices of God and to think about how much our lives are faithful to God’s choice of us.
One of the advantages of being a semi-retired priest is that you get a choice of where to go to Church or indeed, as today, of where to celebrate the Eucharist. I’m learning to get family weekends in the diary well in advance so I can respond to vacancy calls such as that from St John’s and St Bartholomew, Brighton. I’m to be a monthly visitor to each over the next three months from my base in Haywards Heath.
Before I left Horsted Keynes two and a half years ago I totted up some of the pastoral involvements from the baptism, marriage and burial registers. Over 8 years I helped celebrate 39 baptisms and 40 marriages with double that number so far as funerals go. That doubling is significant. Birth and marriage today are seen much less in terms of faith than funerals as these reflect Christian formation three generations back.
Nowadays the choice to baptise your child is less about fitting in with the norm in a Christian country but a decided act to own the Christian church with its particular vision and values as an extension of your family.
Similarly to commit to your partner before God with the understanding of life-long irrevocable union is counter cultural. Aspiring to a gift of self that will not be called back, mirroring God’s love given on Calvary in blood, sweat and tears, goes against the grain today.
I love you so often means I love me and want you rather than I love you and want to give to you now and for ever.
Life choices make or break us. So much moral decision making is about choosing the least bad option. This is where the Holy Spirit, prayer ministry and the sacrament of confession are so precious to us as church members seeking what God most wants of us in the different crises of life.
Some of us are thinking about a change of job. Others making the most of a redundancy. One or two may feel they have done a voluntary task for long enough and are seeking new possibilities.
Just a few thoughts, returning to Our Lady, on the process of guidance. You might have spotted the connection between the Isaiah 7 passage and the Gospel from Matthew 1:18-25 with the prophecy of the virginal conception: the young woman – the Virgin shall conceive and bear a son, and they shall name him ‘Emmanuel’, which means ‘God is with us’. For Mary and Joseph their choice of one another was set within a bigger choice of God to which they deferred to in facing indignity. As we profess Jesus Christ, God’s only Son, our Lord, was conceived by the Holy Spirit and born of the Virgin Mary
Christianity is a faith that holds disparate truths together – God is one yet three, Jesus is God yet man – and God has chosen us yet we have to decide how to live our lives.
It seems to me that Christians are at two ends when it comes to divine guidance. Some see God‘s choice as starting us off and then leaving us with common sense – sanctified common sense – to get going on our own.
Others, if you ask them to do something, will say they need to pray about it, and they talk of God’s guidance as very immediate and direct.
I’m not coming down on one side or the other. What matters is to recognise the hand of God in our lives, as Mary and Joseph did, and to cast aside the things that draw us away from his leadings.
The sanctified common sense sort of guidance needs supplementing by openness to God’s surprises in the form of obvious divine intervention. Those who sense something of a hotline to God need to work harder to check their leadings by arguing the case at times with other experienced believers. Both reason and faith are God’s gift and they shouldn’t contradict each other.
If we want our lives, including our decision making, to go where they’re meant to go, it means developing what Paul in our second reading from the opening verses of the letter to the Romans calls the obedience of faith.
This obedience is more than avoiding deadly sins. It is the best directing of our energies. It’s about knowing we’re in the right employment or state of life, be that married or single. It’s readiness to ask ourselves whether where we’re at is truly in God’s will or whether it’s actually at variance with it, if only we’d take courage to open our ears to him.
If you are on the rails God gives us, living close to Jesus, you move more peaceably than if your life is off the rails. A lack of inner peace can be a helpful warning from God to take stock of your life.
Christmas and New Year bring us such an opportunity to reflect.
Some of us will use the sacrament of reconciliation or take opportunity to talk to the priest or another experienced Christian. Please do so after the service. Others may want to find a spiritual director or prayer guide.
All of us can ask God directly: ‘Show me the needs that are deeper than my wants. Place my energies more to your service and less to aimless self interest’.
God’s hand on our lives, God’s choice of us, is a wonderful and a costly thing. We have a lifespan to exercise our faith in that choice. The penitent thief who turned to Jesus as he died shows us it’s never too late to seek God’s leading.
God has chosen you and I and yet we have to decide how to live our lives.
In making this decision the clue is WWJW – maybe you have seen the Christian bracelet – WWJW – What would Jesus want?
The eucharist is all about WWJW. We offer our souls and bodies with Christ to the Father so that our lives are put back on the rails Sunday by Sunday.
With Mary we say: I am God’s servant. Let it be to me as God wills!
Take my energies and use them for good since there is work for those God has chosen.
There’s a harvest to gather and the labourers are few.
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