Immaculate Conception 2016 - Fr. Albert

Solemnity of the Immaculate Conception

December 8, 2016

I’d like to reflect with you this morning on the words of a traditional American spiritual, “He’s Got the Whole World in His Hands.”

First, then, I ask you to let your mind’s eye wander over to the Jurors’ parking lot behind you, across South Orange Avenue, and wander back in time with me one hundred years. Running down the middle of what is now that parking lot is Sterling Street, lined with two story wood-frame buildings. Now, look hard and you’ll see a horse pulling a wagon up the street. In the wagon are a mother and a father, their three young boys, and all of their belongings. They’ve just arrived by train from Warsaw, a town in upstate New York, because the husband has heard that there is work to be had in Newark. Take a close look at the youngest of the tree little boys. That’s my father.

Now, if you will, let your mind wander across the street to St. Mary’s Church, to the statue of the Blessed Virgin that now stands in the Radel Library. You remember that the statue was put back together after it was broken to pieces in an anti-Catholic riot that destroyed St. Mary’s Church. So, come back in time with me about ninety years. That same statue stands in a glass case in the back of St. Mary’s Church. In front of the statue is a woman, pointing to the statue and telling its story, as she has done many times before, to her little niece named Regina. Take a close look at the girl. That’s my mother.

This morning as I stand here picturing my father on Sterling Street and my mother in St. Mary’s church, I marvel at how God works—how he weaves together the threads of our lives to form our story, yours and mine. He’s got the whole world in his hands.

Now, sometimes God enters human history in the most unexpected ways, events that fill us with wonder and astonish us with joy. And this is exactly the point of this feast we celebrate today. It gives us the supreme example of how God works in unexpected ways. We honor the Immaculate Conception—the creation of Mary in her mother’s womb—and we are awed once more at how God works.

In the first reading we heard the story of the fall of Adam and Eve, how sin first entered the human heart, and would from then on be part of the human condition; every child of Adam and Eve would inherit that predisposition to sin.

But in the fulness of time, when God decided to come down to earth as a human being to set things right again, His first step was to choose a woman to bear his son, the Christ. But in order to prepare a worthy dwelling place for His son, God made sure that this young woman would be free from the stain of Original Sin from the very moment of her conception. That’s what we celebrate today, Mary’s Immaculate Conception.

In doing that for Mary, God was setting the stage for the beautiful event we just heard in this Gospel—the Annunciation, which brought about another conception, when Mary conceived Jesus in her womb. Let's take a moment to look at this scene when the Angel visits Mary, the moment when God’s plan for our redemption is really starting to unfold.

Let your mind's eye wander with me to the tiny village of Nazareth in Galilee two thousand and some years ago. We see a young teenage girl named Miriam in a small house; she seems to be listening intently and staring at something or someone we can’t see.

Think about this for a moment: She is among the most powerless people in society: She’s young in a world that values age, female in a world ruled by men, poor in a stratified economy where you can’t change your economic condition. She has neither husband nor child to validate her existence. She is about the most unlikely candidate you can imagine for someone who would play a key role in the salvation of the world.

Yet the angel Gabriel is telling her that she has found favor with God and that she is highly gifted. She is to become the mother of the Savior. To a skeptical world—or a puzzled teenager in Nazareth—it all sounds impossible. But of course: nothing is impossible with God. He’s got the whole world in his hands.

Saint Luke, who tells us this story, is fond of showing how God’s activity often surprises us by reversing our human expectations: the rich become poor, the lowly are lifted high, the hungry are filled.

Just yesterday I happened to click on the link to watch the thirteen-minute segment about St. Benedict’s Prep that appeared on “Sixty Minutes.” When it was over, I was filled with a sense of gratitude as I remembered the dark days when St. Benedict’s Prep had come to an end. I do not recommend that you let your mind’s eye wander into my room in the monastery in the spring of 1972 -- it was not a pretty scene. I would sit there in a daze, with no idea of what was to become of me or of my brothers in Newark Abbey. I wasn't even thirty years old, and my life had been turned completely upside down, my plans and my dreams shattered.

I couldn’t see at the time that God was preparing the way for something new. I forgot that He’s got the whole world in his hands. He was preparing for the next stage in the story, just as he was preparing Mary to be the mother of the Savior when he caused her to be conceived without the stain of original sin.

So, there’s an important message to each of us in this feast of the Immaculate Conception. Just as God was involved in Mary’s life from the beginning, preparing her for her task despite all sorts of impossibilities, he’s also involved in all of the events our our lives.

If God has the whole world in his hands, then every event of our lives, the painful ones as well as the pleasant ones, is somehow marked with his fingerprints.

Mary’s story teaches us that our God is a God of Surprises. He is also the Father of Possibility—the maker of miracles. The God who specializes in taking broken statues and dead dreams and, contrary to all expectations, even in our worst moments, works wonders of love in our lives.

This feast’s message to us today is that God has the whole world in his hands, and that in his hands, truly, nothing is impossible.

Albert Holtz, O.S.B.