The Christmas Season is the celebration of promises fulfilled. Throughout Advent we heard the prophets tell of God’s plan of salvation. In Jesus Christ, Our Savior, the Word of God made flesh, God shows us the supreme act of generosity:  God gives himself fully in Jesus Christ.
In my homily of the Fourth Sunday of Advent, I explained that Mary and Elizabeth experienced a unique joy in acknowledging the infants in their wombs. Since they carried within them the first born sons of their families, they rejoiced not only that they were to give birth to babies, but that these babies were of special significance. Since every first born son was to be taken to the temple in Jerusalem to be dedicated to God in gratitude, Mary and Elizabeth were filled with gratitude, knowing that they would be able to offer the greatest gift back to God a woman could give. And there could be no greater gift to offer to God than Mary gave, for she gave both the victim and the priest for the Passover of the New Covenant.
The offering of the first fruits to the Lord was an essential part of the worship of every family as they kept the promises of the Covenant. In Deuteronomy 26 we read:  “When you have come into the land which the LORD, your God, is giving you as a heritage, and have taken possession and settled in it, you shall take some first fruits of the various products of the soil which you harvest from the land the LORD, your God, is giving you; put them in a basket and go to the place which the LORD, your God, will choose as the dwelling place for his name.”
That commandment was not just a one time gift of gratitude for entrance into the Promised Land and gathering the first year’s harvest. This way of giving was to be the way of gratitude in every year to come. The people of Israel did not give what was leftover or in excess. Instead they gave the first and the best fruits of the harvest back to God as a sacrificial offering. These offerings were essential to a right domestic economy and the national economy of Israel. In these offerings, the poor were fed, the rituals were accomplished, the kingdom was prosperous, and above all God was glorified.
As we begin this year of grace, 2022, we will be especially mindful of the firsts that happen:  the first baby born, the first snowfall of the year, the first time we write the new year’s date down on a check, a letter, or a document. The recognition of firsts is a very human way to acknowledge that something is special, that one should be mindful of the new occasions that happen in our lives. Why is this? What makes a day in 2022 different from any other day we have lived?
Taking our cue from Mary and Elizabeth, we must be prepared at any moment to celebrate with joy the new life that God blesses us with. This is a fundamental religious and spiritual attitude which recognizes that each and every moment that we live is a new moment of grace. Joy-filled gratitude then becomes the response we bring to each new moment as a gift from God. The Blessed Virgin trusted in the Lord’s word given by the angel Gabriel because she already was filled with a profound gratitude to God for her own life. Mary must have realized that God had plans for her even before the Annunciation. In giving her “fiat”, Mary gave her first fruits, her very body as a vessel for the Son of God.
2022 will be a year of stewardship for our parish, but that doesn’t mean we haven’t been stewards all along. The way of stewardship is simply an awareness of what God has already done. Each of us has been given the gift of life. Each of us has been given the gift of eternal life in Jesus Christ. Stewardship is simply beginning each and every conscious moment of our day from the stance of gratitude. Stewardship is receiving God’s gifts of time, talent and treasure with gratitude, accounting for them as precious signs of God’s care for us, and in sharing them generously, sacrificially and proportionately in justice and love with others, that these gifts of grace may be returned with increase to the Lord.
This isn’t always easy. So often we approach life thinking of the things we lack. It’s not simply a result of the constant commercial refrains surrounding us telling us to buy our happiness with things, activities, and experiences. This is the idolatry of the consumer economy. At a more basic level, human nature tends to remember the negative experience more than the positive. The times that we are wounded, that we are unprepared, or that we are ill-equipped to handle a situation carry an outsized influence on our basic attitudes. At best we become defensive and begrudge anything that is asked of us. At worst we take what is not ours to take and jealously guard it from the hands of others. We forget how to give.
But Christ himself will teach us the way of gratitude and generosity. The Gospels of Matthew and Luke offer a glimpse into Christ’s own experience of the Father’s love. “I give praise to you, Father, Lord of heaven and earth, for although you have hidden these things from the wise and the learned you have revealed them to the childlike. Yes, Father, such has been your gracious will. All things have been handed over to me by my Father. No one knows the Son except the Father, and no one knows the Father except the Son and anyone to whom the Son wishes to reveal him.”
Finally, our celebration of Epiphany teaches us about giving back to God. The wise men come to adore Christ and offer him gifts. The gold is given for the King. The incense is given for the Son of God. The myrrh is given for the Sacrificial Victim. Gifts are given to the one who has been given for our salvation. Christ himself is the offering of God himself for our salvation. If God gives himself completely to us in Jesus Christ, then the only proper and right response is to give ourselves back to Him.