Luke 2:19 reads, “And Mary treasured all these things and pondered them in her heart.”
I know this isn’t in the readings for Christmas Eve or the Sundays following, but our recent Collective+ guest speaker, Dr. Karoline Lewis, suggested rightly that its meaning could be.
She unpacked the word “ponder” for us from the Greek. She said “‘Pondering’ literally means things are being thrown together and you’re having to figure out what’s going on.”
“Pondering” is an active sorting to find a pattern between circumstances, experience, perceptions, emotions, and events.
Some things—like angels, shepherds, a star in the East, and a divine birth—were hard enough for Mary to make sense of.
Put those in the middle of poverty, hunger, the majority of children dying before age five, and an oppressive Roman regime (which Luke takes pains to make clear), and the riddle is more than the human heart can solve.
Like Mary, we might not find the pattern, at least not right away.
In fact, it’s possible we’ll never make sense of it all.
Yet we continue to ponder.
Author and writing professor George Saunders suggests this may be enough:
“The true beauty of a story is not in its apparent conclusion but in the alteration in the mind of the reader that has occurred along the way. Chekov once said, ‘Art doesn't have to solve problems, it only has to formulate them correctly.’ ‘Formulate them correctly’ might be taken to mean: ‘make us feel the problem fully, without denying any part of it’” (A Swim in a Pond in the Rain).
Reword Saunders’s words for preachers and sermons, and you’ll get something like:
True sermons don’t solve our problems. Rather, they make us feel our problems fully without denying any part of them—while holding God’s incomprehensible grace alongside.
That’s the beauty of Luke’s rendering of Mary’s pondering and preaching this Christmas and into 2022.
If you’re feeling at a loss about how to preach into this weary world, perhaps you can simply help listeners feel the problems we face together. Without denying any part of their pain and complexity. while also holding up the grace of God.
We don’t have to solve the problems—not even the problem of our discomfort when problems are unresolved, when the future is uncertain, and when so much is at stake for human diginity, democracy, and the viability of our planet.
We can feel the weight and truth of those problems and ponder God’s grace, creativity, imagination, and the power of love, without knowing how any of it will turn out.
Conclude your Christmas sermon, and many of your sermons in 2022, with a question mark or an ellipsis (a “stay tuned,” if you will), and transform your sermons into art.
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