Christmas homily at All Saints' Leonia adapted from the reflection shared on Christmas Eve at Saint Agnes'
This Christmas is very different as well as DIFFICULT for all of us for obvious reasons. When I spell or pronounce the word Christmas, I am so tempted to add the letter K at the end, making sure Christ wears a mask! As I can casually joke around this situation we’re facing, there’s something much deeper, sadder, and more serious as we enter into the Christmas season this year. For many of us, it’s not the same as it used to be. Some of us are grieving for the losses of our loved ones while others are still struggling to recover or simply to adjust to changes. There are also those who are living in isolation, keeping everyone safe. What we’re missing the most in this crazy and uncertain time is the presence. The presence of our family members and friends. Being present to each other, especially on Sundays, on feast days, on Christmas Day. When faced with sorrow and grief, our attempt to be joyful, to lift up our moods is challenging and laboring. Rather than pushing ourselves to be happy and merry, I would like to invite all of us to acknowledge and appreciate the very presence that we’re missing. This is the reality that we’re experiencing. We don’t find God elsewhere but right here, right now, in our very reality. This rather dark, gloomy, and sad reality is the true face of the nativity scene 2,000 years ago. Instead of imagining the Holy Family beautifully depicted in a hallmark card, see them as the lost, the poor, and the homeless who are looking for shelter, not just to sleep but to give birth. No one welcomes this family into their home. It’s a cold, cruel world that they face. Imagine Mary, the pregnant girl’s agony, fear, and anxiety. Imagine Joseph’s feeling of helplessness and powerlessness that he isn’t able to provide a safe place for his wife and the baby but a stable. This is the context where our Christmas tradition begins. In this dark, depressing, brutal reality that Mary, Joseph, and Jesus are encountering, God is revealed. God is present with them in Christ. What Jesus reveals is God being with us even when we don’t sense God’s presence, at times when God seems to be completely absent and missing in action. God becomes the stable where Mary can give birth. God becomes the manger that can hold the baby Jesus. God becomes the warmth of animals around them so that this poor family can stay warm. As we reflect on those missing presences that are no longer physically with us, we go beyond the vanity of life and see God’s very presence that goes beyond life and death. When we see this divine presence in the absence of our loved ones, we are once again found by God. This presence of God transforms our isolation into communion with our loved ones in Christ. It turns loneliness into contentment in Christ. When God is experienced and seen in the darkness, all the curveballs life throws at us become manageable and bearable. Rather than asking “why curveballs!?” God becomes a bat with which we can swing or a glove that we turn into a catch ball. The mystery of the incarnation defeats all the images that God is far from us. Perhaps our spiritual dullness numbs our experience with the very presence of God in us, yet the good news is that God’s presence does not disappear even if we are completely unaware of it. This mystery of the incarnation then takes us from the manger of Jesus to the cross on which he cries out, “My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?” This cry of Jesus is not the proof of God forsaking him but Jesus forsaking the image of a god who is somewhere out there like a bystander. As God is present in the wooden manger that once held the baby Jesus, God is present on the wooden cross that now holds the dying body of Jesus. The mystery of the incarnation shows us how God is present in our suffering. Our faith in God gives us the eyes to see God’s presence even when God seems to be absent. With these eyes opened by the mystery of the incarnation, we find our ways to be present with and for each other. We ourselves become an anchor to hold each other when storms of anxiety, fear, and loneliness come at us. “Emmanuel,” meaning God with us, is not only the gospel of the incarnation but also the challenge and the mission that God asks us to join. Me with you, you with me, us with them...the union of God and us, you and me, us and them is the essential message of the Christmas story. My friends in Christ, to us, to the world a child is born. And into Christ, we are, the world is born into. I wish all of you a meaningful Christmas in which the void of your hearts is filled with the everlasting presence of God the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit. Amen. |
Paul"...life up your love to that cloud [of unknowing]...let God draw your love up to that cloud...through the help of his grace, to forget every other thing." Archives
January 2025
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