WELCOME AND A BLESSED CHRISTMAS
I hope that you enjoyed the celebration of that awe-filled moment in time when God ‘pitched his tent amongst us’ and took on human form. What a tremendous act of humility for our Creator to become one of us. In the Incarnation, God came to live in our midst. He experienced in the deepest way our joys and sorrows. God, in the words of St. Paul:
Emptied himself (of his divinity)
to assume the condition of a slave
and became as all people are
accepting even death on a cross
(i.e., the death of a condemned criminal)
How amazingly profound of our God to join the human race in this way. He could have decided to join the human race as a child of privilege. Instead, he choose to live among us as a poor man—identifying in a special way with the lowly and outcast.
When God appeared to Moses in the burning bush (Exodus 3) he said to him.
I have seen the miserable state of my people…..
I am well aware of their sufferings….. V. 7-8
In the Incarnation, this same God decided to go one step further and join his suffering people. But, he did not just visit the suffering. He actually took on the sufferings of all humankind. “Ours were the sufferings he bore” (Isaiah 53:4). In the Incarnation, God became “a man of sorrows familiar with suffering” (Is. 53:2). Never again could we say our God is aloof and distant. We may think he is. But the truth is he is closer to us than we are to ourselves. His Christmas name Emmanuel (God-with-us) reminds us that our Creator is not only Transcendent (totally other) but also Imminent (totally close with us).
Sometimes in our pain and suffering and loneliness we cry out to God for help. We want desperately to feel his closeness and presence. If for some reason we cannot feel that presence, we must try to believe in the darkness of faith he is very close. In fact, he is weeping with us and suffering. This is the truth whether we experience it or not or believe it or not.
I believe one of the very successful tricks that Satan plays on us is helping us to believe that “God is absent” “God is distant”, “God can’t be trusted”, “God doesn’t care”. When we think any of the above we are, I believe, under the influence of the evil one.
It must sadden, if not break the heart of God when we give in to the evil spirit’s promptings and believe God is absent, distant and uncaring.
Jesus comes especially to express solidarity with the forsaken and poor of the world.
When God decided to join our human race, he chose a people who were very small (i.e., as a nation) and preoccupied. He joined a lower income family who could only afford the offering of the poor when they went to the Temple (Luke 2:24). He choose to be born not in a nice hospital or home, but in an abandoned cow barn. Just imagine the Creator of the world choosing to be born in a cow barn. His first visitors were not the important people in town, but lowly shepherds from nearby hills. Shepherds were considered outcasts. Talk about God’s ways not being our ways. As an infant his parents had to flee with him to a foreign country not in fancy transportation, but on a donkey. For the first few years of his life he, Mary and Joseph were immigrants who spoke with a ‘funny accent’. Our God who could literally have enjoyed the lifestyle of the rich and the famous, chose instead to live as an outcast.
How could we ever even think he doesn’t care and love us madly. The late spiritual writer and monk, Thomas Merton writes:
“Into this world, this demented Inn,
in which there is absolutely no room for him at all,
Christ has come uninvited.
But because he cannot be at home in it,
because he is out of place in it, and yet must be in it,
his place is with those others for whom there is no room.
His place is with those who are discredited,
who are denied the status of persons,
who are tortured, bombed and exterminated.
With those for whom there is no room,
Christ is present in the world.
He is mysteriously present in those for
whom there seems to be nothing
But the world at its worst.
Catholic newspaper columnist and best selling author, Fr. Ronald Rollheiser writes:
Christ is born into the world of the marginalized more than into the world where power and influence reside.
This goes against our common conception.
But the point is made consistently and without
compromise throughout the Gospels.
The baby who’s born at Christmas
grows into the Jesus
who tells us that there’s a privileged presence
of God within and among the poor,
that the cross is erected where the outcasts are found,
that the one who is rejected by society is central to the community, and that the quality of our faith is to be judged by the quality of justice in the land
and the quality of justice in the land is to be judged on the basis of how the weakest, not the strongest, fare.
The birth of Jesus reverses Darwin’s evolutionary principle:
God’s concern, unlike nature’s,
is not about the survival of the fittest
but about the survival of the weakest.
God has a privileged presence in the powerless.
Not because the poor are morally superior
to the rich;
but, if Scripture is to be believed,
because the poor more easily make a place for
God in their lives.
Their stables and mangers are more available for
God’s birth than are our homes, condos and hospitals
Not to mention our boardrooms, talk shows, college classrooms, sports arenas and
other centers of influence.
Within virtually everything that our world judges to be important, there is no space for Christ to be born.
That’s a message our culture needs to hear.
It’s not so much that we’re insincere,
ungenerous or morally deficient.
Sincerity, generosity and moral fiber abound,
even among the rich.
Overall, we’re good-hearted.
The problem is more that we are star-struck,
celebrity-obsessed, too much convinced that God’s
real blessing lies in being forever…
young, rich, good looking, healthy, talented, important, busy, productive, admired and entitled to have
something interesting to do.
The seduction of all of this, which drives our culture
and our souls so much, is the most powerful narcotic
the world has yet produced.
Like all narcotics, it’s not so much a question of
morality as of reality.
It tends to make everything far, far, from real.
And it also makes the crib hard to find.
As the Christmas stories make plain,
the God who was born into this world at the
first Christmas and who is still trying to take
on real flesh in our world
cannot easily be found in the places where we
the young, rich, attractive, important, busy,
productive, healthy and talented—do our stuff.
It’s more our busyness than our badness
that’s the problem.
In our lives and in our world, perennially,
there’s no room at the inn,
No place to welcome the God who wants
to be born there.
The Christ Child then, as at the first Christmas,
must be born outside our city,
among the poor, in places where we can find him
only by letting ourselves be led
by the poor, the children,
or by some other guiding star.
I think the above two quotes are very powerful and worthy of our prayerful reflections.
The Christmas event and story most of all call us to show solidarity with the poor and forgotten members of our society wherever they may be found. If we miss out on this piece of the Christmas event, we really miss out on the central meaning and message of Jesus’ coming. We may not all respond in the same way. Some will give time and talent to helping the poor, others will give money to support ministries that daily seek to lift up the lot of the poor. If we are parents and grandparents, we should do what we can to help our children to grow up with a real desire to help the less fortunate members of our global family.