Caritas Christi Urget Nos

Category: Christmas

  • The Epiphany of the Lord: Journey and Vocation

    The Epiphany of the Lord: Journey and Vocation

    Today’s readings

    “Where is the newborn king of the Jews?”  This was the question those magi asked after their long and harrowing journey.  They had observed the star at its rising and were proceeding to pay tribute to the newborn king.  They brought with them gifts of gold, frankincense and myrrh.  We know the story well enough; we’ve heard it so many times.  But maybe this time, we can make a resolution not to lose sight of this wonderful event in the year to come.

    We celebrate Epiphany today, and Epiphany is a revelation, a manifestation of God here among us earthly creatures.  Epiphany is God doing a God-thing so that we will sit up and take notice.  But it takes some awareness to perceive such an Epiphany, such a wonderful event.  We, like the magi, have to ask the question, “Where is the newborn king of the Jews?”

    To answer that question, we well might look toward our manger scenes, or assume we’ll only find him in church or in our prayer books, or in Adoration of the Blessed Sacrament.  And, of course, we will find the Lord there – those are wonderful places to start.  But the event of the Epiphany of the Lord reminds us that God wants to do a God thing in us in all sorts of circumstances.  So now we have to find God at work, at school, in our homes, in our community.

    Can we see the Lord in the demanding customer, the needy co-worker, the sulky teenager, the hovering parent, the snippy public servant?  We have to.  We dare not ever miss the opportunity to seek out the newborn King in every situation!  How could we ever turn up our nose at an opportunity for grace?  Why would we ever knowingly miss a situation that could help us grow in holiness?

    Finding the Lord is a journey that we all must make, at every stage of our lives.  God wants to do God-things in us all the time, leading us this way and that, helping us to know him in more profound ways and more relevant ways at all the stops and starts of our life-long journey of faith.

    For all of us, as we pursue the question of where is Christ in our lives, and as we make the journey with him, we are called also to discern our vocation.  Everyone has a vocation: some as parents, some as single people, some as ordained priests or consecrated religious.  God has a plan for all of our lives, and it is up to us on this Epiphany day, as well as every other day, to continue to seek clarity of that plan and to be certain we are following it as best we can.

    Where is the newborn king for us?  Are we ready to make the journey?

  • Christmas Weekday: The Most Holy Name of Jesus

    Christmas Weekday: The Most Holy Name of Jesus

    Today’s readings

    Not everyone has St. John the Baptist around to point out the Messiah to them.  Lots of us, I think, at one point or another, would have loved to have been in the sandals of those apostles when Jesus was passing by.  As much as we believe that Christ is present in every person, place and time, I’m sure lots of us would love to have St. John the Baptist point out when we’re missing Christ’s presence in some person or situation.  It’s harder when you don’t have the Forerunner showing you the way.

    But not everyone even recognized Christ – or at least who he was – in that time and place either.  St. John tells us in our first reading that people don’t recognize that we are children of God because they didn’t recognize God in Christ in the first place.  So if we miss Jesus in some situation or person, well, our mistake is not unique to us.

    During the Christmas season, we are celebrating the Incarnation: the presence of God among us.  Of course, this isn’t just about the presence of God among us two thousand years ago, but his real presence among us in every person, in every place and blessing, and especially in the Eucharist.  During this time, we might gaze on the manger and long to have been there gazing into the face of Christ.  We can gaze into the face of Christ today by taking time for Adoration of the Blessed Sacrament or time to reach out to someone in need.  During this time, we might imagine ourselves next to the Manger on that night long ago, and long to have been there, holding the Christ Child in our arms.  In a few minutes, we can come to the Altar and receive our Jesus and hold him in our hands in the Eucharist, receiving him body and blood, soul and divinity.  Jesus is just as incarnate, just as Emmanuel, God-with-us, now as he was back then.

    We will be strengthened by the Word and the Eucharist today to go forward and see Christ all around us.  Behold, the Lamb of God, who takes away the sins of the world!

  • The Blessed Virgin Mary, the Holy Mother of God

    The Blessed Virgin Mary, the Holy Mother of God

    Today’s readings

    One of the ways that I think we come to know about ourselves and our families, is the shared memories and stories that our parents and senior members of our families share with us over time.  I always enjoyed hearing stories from my grandparents about Mom and Dad, and my aunts and uncles, when they were growing up.  Now, we get to hear stories about me and my sisters.  Those are sometimes a little harder to enjoy!

    I wonder if Jesus felt the same way about the stories about him that Mary must have told.  Luke tells us of all the amazing things that were observed and said about Jesus, even in his infancy, and all these things are what Mary kept and reflected on in her heart.  I think it’s fair to say that she may not have understood all of them at the time, or at least she didn’t know where they were leading, although she certainly knew that her son was someone very special, the Son of God.  And so she keeps all these things and reflects on them in her heart.  She is the first, really, to receive the Gospel – observing it, as it were, while it was happening and unfolding.  And so she is the model for all of us hearers of the Word; we too catch little phrases or episodes that we later reflect on in our hearts.  When we first hear them, it might well be that we don’t understand them.  But we know that we can later reflect on them in our hearts, and the Holy Spirit will reveal their meaning.

    The Church gives us this wonderful feast of Mary on this, the octave day of Christmas.  In a very real way, the Church still celebrates this day as Christmas Day – that’s one of the wonderful things about being Catholic.  We get to celebrate this glorious event for many days.  But to celebrate the eighth day of Christmas as the feast of Mary, the Holy Mother of God is a wonderful and appropriate thing to do.  We all know that we are indebted to Mary’s faith, a faith which made possible the salvation of the whole world and everyone ever to live in it.

    More than that, Mary’s faith is a model for us.  Much like Mary, we often do not know where God is leading us, but in faith we are called to say “yes” anyway.  How willing are we to do that?  We are often called upon to take a leap of faith, make a fiat, and cooperate with God’s saving plan for us and for others.  Just like Mary, we have no way of knowing where that might lead us; just like Mary, that might lead to heartache and sorrow; but just like Mary, it will lead to redemption beyond belief, beyond anything we can imagine.

    And so, yes, Mary is the Mother of God.  And let me tell you, this was a doctrine that came without its price.  People fought over whether a human woman could ever be the mother of God.  How would that be possible?  But the alternative, really, would be to say that Jesus was not God, because we clearly know that Mary was his mother.  So to say that Mary was not the Mother of God is to say in a very precarious way that Jesus was not God, and we know just as surely that that would be incorrect.  Jesus was fully human but also fully divine, his human and divine natures intertwined in his person without any separation or division or degradation of one nature at the expense of another.  And so, as theologians teach us, Mary is the Mother of God the Word according to his human nature.  Every once in a while, when I’m feeling particularly theologically courageous, I reflect on that statement and marvel at its beauty.

    So, Mary is the Mother of God, but Mary is also the Mother of the Church, leading its members to her Son Jesus and to faith in God.  She is mother of priests, caring for us in a special way and interceding for the faithful completion of our mission.  She is the mother of mothers, interceding for them and showing them how to nurture faith in their children.  She is the mother of the faithful, showing us how to cooperate fully with God’s plan.  She is mother of scripture scholars and those who just love the scriptures, having seen the Word unfold before her and treasuring it in her heart.  She is the mother of disciples, having been the first of the disciples and the most dedicated of them all.  She is the Mother of God, and our mother, and we cannot sing our Christmas carols without singing her praises too.  We honor her faith and example today, and we ask for her intercession for our lives, for our families, for our Church and our world.

    Pray for us, O Holy Mother of God, that we may be made worthy of the promises of Christ.

  • Seventh Day in the Octave of Christmas

    Seventh Day in the Octave of Christmas

    Today’s readings

    Our Liturgy today gives us some appropriate readings for the last day of our calendar year.  We have the end and the beginning in the Scriptures, just as our minds and hearts are reflecting on the end of this year and the beginning of the year to come.

    In the reading from the first letter of Saint John, we are told that we know it is the last hour because of the appearance of the antichrists.  We don’t have to worry about who the antichrist is, we are told, because there are so many of them: those who have rejected the faith and live according to their own whims.  If Saint John saw many of them in his own day and age, we certainly can see plenty of them now, can’t we?  We live in a society that is, as Saint John says, “alien to the truth.”  We have to battle the antichrist element around us all the time.

    But if the end of all things is bad news, the beginning is Good News.  In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was God.  We don’t have to worry about battling the antichrist element on our own, because as our Gospel says, the Word became flesh and made his dwelling among us.  That is what we continue to celebrate on this Christmas Day: God did not abandon us to the power of death and darkness, but instead came to dwell with us as a human being, taking on our fallenness, embracing our brokenness, and redeeming all that is anti-Christ in and around us.

    Today we realize one of the essential truths of our Church’s theology: the already and the not-yet.  Because Christ has taken flesh and been born among us, we are already redeemed.  But it is not yet perfect, because we can see so much anti-Christ around us, and even, sometimes, deep inside us.  In the wonder of the Incarnation, Christ, God the Word, has revealed God’s glory to us.  We long for the day when we can behold that glory face to face.

  • The Holy Family of Jesus, Mary and Joseph

    The Holy Family of Jesus, Mary and Joseph

    Today’s readings

    One of the great snapshots of Christmas for me has always been the manger scene.  Ours is a bit banged up and the worse for wear, but it still gives us a glimpse as to what God is doing at the Incarnation of Christ – an amazing moment in time!  The centerpiece of the manger, of course, is the Holy Family of Jesus, Mary and Joseph.  The birth of Jesus couldn’t have come at a more inconvenient time or in more difficult circumstances.  But it was precisely this timing that changed everything: for the world, and for the Holy Family.

    But I am aware that the idyllic holiness, peace and love the crèche depicts is often quite foreign to the experience of many families, including many families in this assembly.  I know there are families where communication is anything but good.  There are families who may never have known the kind of love that is shared between Jesus, Mary and Joseph.  There are families who struggle with abuse: physical, sexual, or emotional.

    Even in the “best” of families, there is often hardship.  I know there are families who struggle to keep up with all the activities that are expected of them.  There are families who can’t find time to have a meal together, let alone take a trip together.  Families often struggle to make ends meet.  There are families who struggle with the changing needs of children as they grow older.  Families may be separated by great distance, or may have suffered the sickness or death of one of the members.  Other families may find themselves changing roles as a parent, the one who provided for his or her children, grows old and becomes ill and then becomes the one in need of care.

    Families can be and are the source of our greatest joys and our deepest anguish.  Sometimes all in the same day.  The truth is, and perhaps you find yourself thinking this as you sit there and listen to these readings today, none of our families is perfect.  Few of us would rush to describe our families as well-functioning, let alone holy.  And so we can sit there and look at the manger and find its serenity meaningless in the hectic anxiety of our day-to-day family lives.

    But maybe we need to look a little deeper or listen a little harder today.  “Holy” and “perfect” are not the same thing.  We don’t need to be perfect to be a family.  That was true of Jesus, Mary and Joseph as well.  Would a perfect family have lost their child on the way home from a trip?  I don’t think so, but that’s exactly what happened, isn’t it?  Mary says to Jesus when they find him that she and Joseph had been looking for him with “great anxiety.”  Those of you who are parents can well imagine the anxiety and can totally identify with what Mary and Joseph had to have been feeling.

    Jesus’ response shows the struggle that so often happens in families when the children are trying to grow up faster than the parents would like to see.  He is becoming aware of his mission and feels ready to take it on.  They still see him as a child, a child for whom they feel great responsibility, not to mention great love and concern.  This story is the last time we see Jesus until he begins his ministry at the age of about thirty.  It has been theorized that the reason for this is that he was grounded until he was thirty.

    I don’t know if that’s true or not, but the point is that even in the Holy Family of Jesus, Mary and Joseph, there were struggles.  Nothing was perfect in that family, not even from the beginning.  Right at the beginning, there was a hint of scandal about the pregnancy; they had to flee for their safety; they suffered from poverty and violent threats.  Like many modern families they suffered under political and military oppression, had to settle far from their original home and had to start a new life in a foreign place.  Two thousand years may separate the modern family from the “Holy Family,” but there is much to link us, much that we share.

    So supposed to see in the Holy Family is something perhaps different from perfection.  Perhaps it is faithfulness.  Faithfulness to God and faithfulness to one another: indeed, it is this faithfulness that leads them to the holiness we celebrate today.  Look at the way the situation in the Gospel reading today was resolved among them.  Even though they were panicked and anxious about the disappearance of their son; even though they did not understand what was going on with him, yet they appreciated his uniqueness, and Mary kept all of these memories in her heart, kept them to be sorted out and understood much later.  And even though Jesus was ready to grow into adulthood and ready to begin his mission, yet he understood the concerns of his parents and continued to be obedient to them as he continued to grow in wisdom and grace.  They were faithful to one another.

    Our first reading today from Sirach addresses these same concerns.  The family members are instructed to care for one another, to honor one another, to love and respect one another all their days.  Even as parents age and the roles become reversed, still we are to respect them for all they have been for us.  We are called to be faithful to one another.

    I continue to be aware that even as I pull that theme of faithfulness out of today’s Scriptures, that can still seem insurmountable to many of you.  Why should you be faithful when the hurts inflicted by other members of your family still linger?  That’s a hard one to address, but the call to faithfulness is still there for all of us.  And we’re not told to be faithful just when everyone else is faithful.  Sometimes we are called to make an almost unilateral decision to love and respect the others in our families, and let God worry about the equity of it all.  I know that’s easier to say than to do, but please know that this Church family supports you with prayer and love as you do that.

    Every single one of us is called to be holy, brothers and sisters.  And every single one of our families is called to be holy.  That doesn’t mean that we will be perfect.  Some days we’ll be pretty far from it.  But it does mean that we will be faithful in love and respect.  It means that we will unite ourselves to God in prayer and worship.  It means we will love when loving is hard to do.  Mary loved Jesus all the way to the Cross and watched him die.  What we see in the model of the Holy Family for us is not perfection, but faithfulness and holiness.

    That holiness will make demands of us.  It did for Jesus, Mary and Joseph.  Our church still has the Nativity scene on display; we are still celebrating Christmas Day.  But today’s story of Jesus in the temple reminds us that our faith in the Incarnation does not stop at the crib.  The Gospel already has hints that Jesus’ disciples will be asked to make a break with the past and accept a new life of sacrifice.  Just as Jesus is beginning to show signs of moving beyond the safety of a small family and entering a larger world and responding to its needs, so too must we move out of the confines of the safe and serene and enter and respond to the areas of need that the world presents to us.  It will take holiness for us to be able to do that.

    Holiness demands that we seek it; it doesn’t just descend from above.  If we want holy families, and we certainly should, we will have to make decisions and even sacrifices to pursue it.  We will have to make an honest priority of worship; attending Mass every Sunday and Holy Day of Obligation as a minimum without fail.  We will have to surround our families in prayer, praying at meals, teaching and reviewing prayers, praying together at night, reciting the rosary together, reading the Scriptures together.  Holy families are not going to be perfect in these things, but they will not fail to pursue that holiness every single day.  It takes a daily decision to do that; but that is the vocation of the family in the world.

    Jesus, emerging from childhood to adulthood, reminds us that in his name, we must be ready to live faithful and holy lives, regardless of whether others are doing the same, and no matter what the personal cost.  Because the cost of rejecting holiness in our lives is just too great, and the loss of an earthly family is nothing compared to losing our place in the family of God.

  • The Holy Innocents, Martyrs

    The Holy Innocents, Martyrs

    Today’s readings

    Right here in the middle of the joy of the Christmas Octave, we have the feast of what seems to be an incredibly horrible event.  All of the male children in the vicinity of Bethlehem two years old and younger are murdered by the jealous and, quite frankly, rather pathetic Herod.  But not only are his plans to kill the Christ Child (and thus remove any threat to his reign) thwarted by the providence of God, but also the horror of this event is transfigured into something rather glorious in terms of the Kingdom of God.

    As I said, in some ways, this is a horrible feast.  Sadly, this year, the events in Newtown, Connecticut make this feast all the more poignant and disturbing.  Add that to the millions who have been slaughtered by abortion, and the many children who die in inner-city violence every year, and we see just how precarious childhood can be in our time.  But the Church, in recognizing the contribution of the Holy Innocents to the kingdom, turns all of this sadness into hope and asserts that this is just the beginning of the world’s seeing the glory of Jesus Christ.  As disgusting and repugnant as Herod’s actions are to our sensibilities, yet these innocent children bear witness to the Child Jesus.  Saint Quodvoltdeus, an African bishop of the fifth century writes of them:

    The children die for Christ, though they do not know it.  The parents mourn for the death of martyrs.  The Christ child makes of those as yet unable to speak fit witnesses to himself.  But you, Herod, do not know this and are disturbed and furious.  While you vent your fury against the child, you are already paying him homage, and do not know it.

    To what merits of their own do the children owe this kind of victory?  They cannot speak, yet they bear witness to Christ.  They cannot use their limbs to engage in battle, yet already they bear off the palm of victory.

    I think the key to making sense of all this is in the first reading.  The line that really catches me, because it seems almost erroneous in light of the horrible event we remember today, is “God is light, and in him there is no darkness at all.”  We can see all kinds of darkness in an event like the murder of innocent children.  Yet only God could turn something that horrible around to his glory.  They may have lived extremely short lives on earth, yet their lives in eternity were secured forever.  They become some of the first to participate in the kingdom that Christ would bring about through his Paschal Mystery.

  • The Nativity of the Lord: Mass During the Night and During the Day

    The Nativity of the Lord: Mass During the Night and During the Day

    This is an absolutely incredible time of year.  We come together tonight (today) in a beautifully decorated and lighted church.  We hear the most wonderful carols and hymns that our choir has worked on for the better part of the fall.  The homes around us are decked out in their Christmas finery, brightly illuminating the darkness of the nights that come so early this time of year.  In our homes, we’ve all baked up some treats that we only get to have this time of year.  We gather together as families and give gifts that are tokens of our love for one another.

    This is clearly a special time of year for all of us.  During this time, it’s so important that we come together as a Church and take the time to reflect on the meaning behind all of this festivity.  It is not, as Seinfeld would have said, some kind of generic “Festivus.”  This is one of the holiest nights (days) of the year, and it is good for us to be reminded why we celebrate, or else the Christmas shopping becomes just shopping, and the cookies are just another thing we have to work off in the coming year, and the carols are nothing more than background noise for all the stress in our lives.

    God didn’t want us to live that kind of bland existence.  He wants us to live abundantly and to that end he has sent us the greatest gift we’ll ever get: the gift of his love poured out from the core of who God is, embodied in our own kind of flesh – his only-begotten Son, our Lord Jesus Christ, who came that we might not be mired in sin and death and blandness, but instead live the kind of incredible life that the bright lights and merry songs of this season only begin to foreshadow.

    Tonight, as we gaze on the gift of Christ in our Manger, we remember that God wants to save the world.  He created us in love and for love, so he greatly desired in his grand plan that we would all come back to him one day and live forever with him in the kingdom.  But he knew that, steeped in sin as our world can be, fallen and flawed, as we individually can be, that we would never think to turn to him on our own.  We were – and are – too caught up in things that are not God and that are not ultimately going to bring us happiness.  So he knew that the only thing that he could do was to enter our history once again.

    And he could have done that in any way that he pleased – he is God after all: all-powerful, all-knowing and present everywhere.  John’s Gospel, though, tells us just exactly how God chose to enter our history: “And the Word became flesh and made his dwelling among us.”  He chose not just to visit us, but instead to become one of us, taking upon himself all of our weaknesses, our pain, and our sorrows.  He was born a baby: the all-powerful One taking on the least powerful stage of our existence.  He was born to a poor family and announced to an unwed mother.  The one who created the riches of the world and who himself was clothed in the splendor of the Almighty turned aside from all of it so that he could become one with his people.  Because he chose to take upon himself all that we must go through and then some, he is the way to salvation for all of us.

    The only way that the full brokenness of our human form could be redeemed was for Jesus to take on all of it when he came to save us.  That’s why his birth was so messy, why he had to be born in a manger with all the farm animals, that’s why he never had a place to lay his head in all his life.  What is amazing is that, as wretched as our earthly lives can be sometimes, God never considered himself above it all, never hesitated for a moment to take it on and fill it with grace.

    God didn’t take on our form so that he could become less, he took on our form so that we could become more.  So, yes, God becomes one of us and takes on all of our infirmities and weaknesses.  But in doing that, we ourselves become more than we could ever be on our own.  Our lowliness is filled with grace, our sadness is filled with rejoicing.  That was always the plan God had for us.

    So as we gaze upon and adore our Lord in the manger, maybe we can take some of the items in that beautiful snapshot and see what will come for him as he grows older.  We see the shepherds, lowly men despised often by society, the marginalized ones who are the first to receive the message.  We see the wise men (or rather, we will on Epiphany!), those who in the wisdom they have received from God, are ready to give everything to follow Christ.  We see the angels, the messengers who urge us to take a second look at an innocent child who might not otherwise attract our attention.  We see his father Joseph, who will teach him the law, as a good father would, and help him to grow in the ways of humanity, which he so completely assumed.  We see his mother, who nurtured him in childhood and followed him in adulthood, becoming the first of his disciples.  We see the wood of the manger, a foreshadowing of the wood of the Cross, which will be the means of our salvation.  And we see and adore Christ himself, the Way, the wonder-counselor, our father forever, and prince of peace.

    When we look at that manger scene with eyes of faith, we become different, knowing that Jesus paid an incredible price to bring us back to him, not just on the Cross, but even at his birth.  The preface of the Eucharistic prayer which we will pray in a few moments makes this so clear: “For in the mystery of the Word made flesh a new light of your glory has shone upon the eyes of our mind, so that, as we recognize in him God made visible, we may be caught up through him in love of things invisible.”

    The world’s eyes can look at that manger and see with cynicism that he’s just like us, nothing special.  But our eyes of faith look at the same event and see that he’s just like us in every way but sin, and that makes him incredibly special, worthy of adoration.  So if our eyes of faith have helped us to see beyond an ordinary child and to recognize our Saving God, then this Christmas has to find us sharing that vision with others.  May Christmas find us open to the needs of others, willing to reconcile differences, looking for opportunities to be of service to others, eager to change our own little corner of the world for the better.  Human eyes see opportunities like that as nuisances or things for other people to do.  Eyes of faith see them as occasions of grace and blessing to both the receiver and the giver.  May this Christmas find us seeing all of our world with eyes of faith.

    On behalf of Father Steve, Father Venard and Father Dan, Deacon Frank and Deacon Al, and all of our parish staff, I wish you a most blessed and holy Christmas, today and through the entire season of Christmas.  I pray that you encounter Christ in every moment of the coming year, and that you and your families are filled with every grace and blessing.

  • The Nativity of the Lord: Vigil Mass

    The Nativity of the Lord: Vigil Mass

    Today’s readings
    Mass for the children:

    Once upon a time, there was an old shepherd named Elias.  He had been a shepherd for his whole life long, just like his father, and his father’s father.  Being a shepherd was hard and lonely work.  He took care of a large group of sheep and did his best to protect them from wolves and keep them together.  He would lead them by day from pasture to pasture, allowing them to graze, and bring them safely to market where they would give their wool for people to use.

    Nights could be very lonely and sometimes scary.  There was no one else to talk to, and he did his best to keep the sheep safe.  Sometimes, if he listened hard enough, he could imagine the wind talking to him as it blew through the trees.  That made him feel like he wasn’t so alone.

    One night, as he was nearing the place where he and the sheep would spend the night, he saw a bright light up in the distance.  He couldn’t help but wonder what was going on so he moved toward it. When he got close enough, he got the sheep settled down for the night and he went to check out the light and make sure there was nothing to worry about.

    Other shepherds had done the same thing, and they all arrived to see the angel of the Lord, surrounded by the bright light of God’s glory.  It was frightening to see, and Elias and the others just stood there, awe-struck, not knowing what to think.

    Then the angel spoke to them.  He said, “Do not be afraid; for behold, I proclaim to you good news of great joy that will be for all the people.  For today in the city of David a savior has been born for you who is Christ and Lord.  And this will be a sign for you: you will find an infant wrapped in swaddling clothes and lying in a manger.”

    Then the sky grew really bright as hundreds of angels joined in and began to sing: “Glory to God in the highest!  And on earth, peace to those on whom is favor rests!”

    When the angels left, Elias and the other shepherds decided to travel the short distance to Bethlehem, the city of David, and to search out the Savior that the angel talked about.  Bethlehem was a pretty small village, and so it didn’t take much looking to find the baby.

    He was in a manger – a feed-trough for animals.  His parents looked like ordinary people, but Elias knew that this baby was special, and that the family was holy.  The angel was right: there was joy and peace here, it was a special feeling that Elias knew could only come from God’s blessing.

    Elias never forgot that night.  He went about taking care of his sheep, but whenever he was in town, he would try to find out about the baby he saw that night.  He found out the boy’s name was Jesus, and he would often hear of wonderful things that Jesus said and did.  When he was very old, Elias heard that people had turned against Jesus and they nailed him to a cross.  But he also heard that three days later, he rose from the dead, and all of his friends were now starting to go out and tell the Good News about him.

    Elias knew that Jesus was special from that very first night he saw him.  He knew that Jesus had come to change everything.  And he was right.  Got changed everything then, and he continues to change everything now, if we let him.  Jesus didn’t just get born two thousand years ago; Jesus is born right here, right now for us, if we would just make a little space, a little manger for him in our hearts.  Just as Elias didn’t know exactly what God had in store for Jesus, we don’t know what God has in store for any of us in the year ahead.  But we do know this: God sent Jesus so that He could be here among us, and he is here among us now, leading us back to him, telling us that we are his special children, and loving us all with love beyond anything we can imagine.

    Things were hard for Elias and the other shepherds, and for Jesus and his family, and sometimes things will be hard for us too.  But all along the way, there are angels, guiding us to where God wants us, watching over us, shining the light, and helping us to find the Good News.  Today, God brings us here to worship, so that like those shepherds, we can find Jesus again, and we can see Jesus in those who love us, and in our own hearts.

  • The Baptism of the Lord

    The Baptism of the Lord

    Today’s readings

    Today is the last day of the Christmas Season. What a wonderful gift we have as Catholics to celebrate the birth of our Lord for an extended period of time! Yesterday was the Epiphany of the Lord, a time to celebrate Christ manifested in the flesh, the greatest gift of God to his creation. On the occasion of the Epiphany, we have three traditional readings. The first is the reading about the magi visiting the Christ Child. The second is the wedding feast at Cana, where Christ turned water into wine, the first of his miracles. And the third is the Gospel we have today, of Christ being baptized by John the Baptist in the River Jordan.

    As we heard yesterday, Epiphany means “manifestation.” In each of these Gospels, Christ is manifest in our world in a different way. The magi celebrated that this baby was truly the manifestation of God in our world, because no other birth would have been occasioned by such great astrological signs. The wedding feast at Cana celebrates that Jesus is no ordinary man, that he had come to change the world by the shedding of his blood, just as he changed the water into wine. And today his baptism celebrates that Christ is manifest in the weakness of human flesh to identify himself with sinners through baptism.

    So if Jesus Christ identified himself with us sinners through baptism, then we who have been baptized must also identify ourselves with him. We must manifest him in the world through living the Gospel and following in his ways. Today we hear in the reading from the Acts of the Apostles that Jesus, having been anointed with the Holy Spirit, “went about doing good and healing all those oppressed by the devil.” That’s the model he set for all who would be baptized as he was. So we baptized ones must do the same.

    It is easy to see how we can go about doing good. There are thousands of opportunities to do that in our lives. Every day there is an opportunity to do good in ordinary and extraordinary ways. All we have to do is decide to live our baptismal call and do it.  Healing those oppressed by the devil might seem harder to do. But there are lots of ways to cast out demons. Teaching something to another person is a way to cast out the demons of ignorance. Reaching out to an elderly neighbor is a way to cast out the demons of loneliness. Educating ourselves on the evils of racism is a way to cast out the demons of hatred. We have opportunities to heal those oppressed by the devil all the time. All we have to do is decide to do it.

    On this Epiphany Day, on this Christmas day, Christ, born among us, enters the waters of baptism to sanctify them through his body. Our own baptism is a share in this great baptism and outpouring of the Holy Spirit. We who have been baptized then are literally INSPIRED – given the Holy Spirit – in order to continue to make Christ manifest in our world. All we have to do is decide to do it.

  • The Epiphany of the Lord

    The Epiphany of the Lord

    Today’s readings

    “Where is the newborn king of the Jews?”  This was the question those magi asked after their long and harrowing journey.  They had observed the star at its rising and were proceeding to pay tribute to the newborn king.  They brought with them gifts of gold, frankincense and myrrh.  We know the story well enough; we’ve heard it so many times.  But maybe this time, we can make a resolution not to lose sight of this wonderful event in the year to come.

    We celebrate Epiphany today, and Epiphany is a revelation, a manifestation of God here among us earthly creatures.  Epiphany is God doing a God-thing so that we will sit up and take notice.  But it takes some awareness to perceive such an Epiphany, such a wonderful event.  We, like the magi, have to ask the question, “Where is the newborn king of the Jews?”

    The journey of the magi was undoubtedly long and arduous.  T.S. Eliot hints at this in his poem, “Journey of the Magi:”

    A cold coming we had of it,
    Just the worst time of the year
    For a journey, and such a long journey:
    The ways deep and the weather sharp,
    The very dead of winter.

    It is well for us to pay heed to this poem.  Because we too make a journey to the Epiphany of the Lord.  We too are seeking the newborn king.  It is the goal of our lives to be seekers, to find Christ in our world: to meet him in the poor and marginalized, to feed him in the hungry, to minister to his needs as we give of ourselves to others.  Some days, the journey might be joy-filled and glorious, other days it may be long and difficult.

    For all of us, as we pursue the question of where is Christ in our lives, and as we make the journey with him, we are called also to discern our vocation.  Everyone has a vocation: some as parents, some as single people, some as ordained priests or consecrated religious.  God has a plan for all of our lives, and it is up to us on this Epiphany day, as well as every other day, to continue to seek clarity of that plan and to be certain we are following it as best we can.

    Where is the newborn king for us?  Are we ready to make the journey?