A pattern of intersession

Bishop Scott Bullock
Homily from the Solemnity of Mary, Mother of God
Cathedral of Our Lady of Perpetual Help, Rapid City
December 31, 2025

Several years ago, I was traveling from my dad’s home in the center of Michigan back to Iowa where I was living. It was right after the holidays. We all like to get together at that time. So, I was on the way back after lots of excitement with my dad as well as the nieces and nephews, various animals, lots of commotion. It’s nice to be in the quiet car. 

However, it’s not uncommon on that particular path to encounter some kind of snowstorm as you make your way along the southern edge of Lake Michigan into the Chicago area, and this year was no exception. The driving was pretty dicey. After hours of snow, white knuckling it in my car on the Interstate artery with lots of semis and other voyagers and my fuel gauge getting dangerously low and blinking at me, I spotted a beacon of a gas station on a rise, so I pulled off the highway. 

So, after taking a breather from the drive and then pumping the gas, I stepped inside to pay when I discovered a very long line of folks waiting at the cashier all delayed by a young man buying scads of lottery tickets. As he was deliberating on which games to play and which numbers, he turned light heartedly to acknowledge the crowd behind him and then spotted my Roman collar and a priest inside of it. The combination of his participation in the many games of chance that he was playing and the arrival of a man of God was an irresistible combination for him. He shouted out, “Look, there’s a priest. I picked the right time to buy lottery tickets. I need a big win.” 

I joined this good cheer but also knowing that I might spend the next hour there blessing lottery tickets and if others became losers, I would be the loser. I replied to him, “I will ask God’s blessing on you, and I will pray for you.” 

This was not satisfactory. He seemed deflated because he was sure he had a sure bet here and so he repeated with persistence, “No, Father, bless these tickets and make them winners.”

It is amazing who one runs into when one is dressed like a priest. But he was not the only one who was persistent. So was this priest, so I replied again, “I will pray that God will bless you which is the win you really need.” 

In doing so I was proving any place is a good place for a homily. In the face of this withering sermon he relented in his request, thanked me for my prayers. The rest of the exhausted customers were grateful as he was off. We completed our transactions and we were again on our way. 

With some more time in the car and time for reflection, it occurred to me that the whole rather comical scene in the service station was a vivid display of the meaning of today’s feast day in a certain sense. How we know the spiritual instinct that God’s action and salvation enters our lives. In a nutshell, it happens according to God’s plan through others — through others without exception. What the man in the service station was doing was asking me to be his intercessor. To bring what he thought his needs were — a win in the lottery — before God through my prayer and blessing. 

Well today on this feast of Mary, we’re reminded of that same truth on display that was at work, however crudely, in that service station in northwestern Indiana. Christianity is never a solitary endeavor. Never! To follow Christ requires us to trust others to carry us to the presence of the love and the mercy of God. This pattern was set definitively from the beginning of our faith and the person of the blessed Virgin Mary. She bears God to us. We don’t go get God. 

We hear in today’s scriptures, particularly and succinctly expressed in Saint Paul’s letter to the Galatians. Paul, summarizing this great mystery of salvation when he says, “When in the fullness of time had come, God sent his son born of a woman.” Born of a woman. “Born under the law to ransom those under the law so that we might receive adoption as sons and daughters.” 

Well of course Jesus was born of a woman. But Saint Paul is reminding us that another bore the savior to the world. By God sending his son born of a woman. From the beginning of the Christian life, God chose to bring his saving presence through an intermediary, through the humanity of a woman, our blessed mother Mary. That Mary intercedes for us is not just some Catholic thing then, it’s God’s thing. It’s the Christian thing. How God would choose to save us to the intervention of another. Through the sending of his son born of a woman, the mother of God. Furthermore, if Jesus had not received his humanity from Mary, he could not enter into our human condition and save it from within — which was God’s plan. 

So on this feast day, when we remember Mary’s indispensable role in God’s plan of salvation, we simply cannot dismiss her role and in fact the roles of many others as unnecessary to my life of faith. And regarding Mary, it might be tempting to say yes, she bore the Lord to the world but now that he is born and has sent his Holy Spirit, he could take it from here and I’ll just go directly to Jesus. 

But as we see in the Gospel, particularly that scene on the cross when Jesus entrusts all of us to Mary as our mother, we know that we are meant to be born still to the savior through Mary in her intercession. Notice in the Gospel the shepherds, having seen the glory of God and the Christ child, made known the message about the child and all were amazed in what had been told to them. Again, that pattern of intercession is going on and on and on, now with the shepherds.

So to discover Jesus, to hear his saving message of salvation and to experience his presence especially in the sacraments, we must accept that we will never be an individual solitary effort. We’re in this together. Others, following the pattern of the shepherds, necessarily taught each of us about Jesus who they have known and seen. 

We’re now obliged to witness to him to others, and in eternity will join the community of the angels and Saints with whom we will together give eternal praise to God who gave us life in this wide diverse family of faith. From the beginning to the end being a Christian means being and meeting God with and through others. How could that be more clearly displayed than this magnificent icon in our church. When the child is being borne by the blessed mother to the world. She’s holding him out for our salvation.

Mary, with a life perfectly conformed to the saving plan of God, is today honored as the perfect model of a follower of Jesus. As God chose her to bear the saving son of God to the world, so let our Christian vocations continue this pattern of God’s desire to save us through others. 

Let us come now to the one she bore to the world — our savior Jesus — and in receiving him be strengthened for each of our patience to follow our mother’s example in interceding for others. Mary bore the savior to the world. For this is God’s manner of saving the world, most vividly on display in that great intercessor of Mary, through whom Jesus came to the world and through whom the world as it turns out, comes to God.