A Concord Pastor Comments: Christmas Homily 2014

Homily for Christmas 2014
(Scriptures for today's Mass)

Audio for homily

There is, every year at Christmas, this curious reality

that we celebrate Christ’s birthday by giving gifts to everyone else

– but not to the Birthday Boy himself,

not to the guest of honor, not to Jesus.

When we think about whom we need to buy for at Christmas,

most of us don’t add “Jesus Christ” to the list.

The closest we come would be the gifts we buy and give,

the checks we write, to provide a joyful Christmas for those, who,

for all kinds of reasons,

can’t provide a merry Christmas for themselves

or for their own families.

And in addition to falling short on bringing gifts to Jesus,

on his birthday,

many of you might come to his stable as I do:

I come to the stable hoping Jesus will have something for me,

something wrapped and tagged, To Austin, from Jesus…

Of course, he invites us to do just this.

Jesus was born into our humanity, our flesh and blood,

precisely to give himself to us, to empty himself out for us:

to be broken for us, as a loaf of bread, to satisfy our hunger;

to be poured out for us, as a cup of wine, to slake our thirst.

He came to us in the dark of night, to be our light.

He came to us in obscurity, that we might find him in every place.

He came to us as a helpless child, to meet us in our vulnerability.

He came to us as one like us, that we not miss him.

He came to us in poverty, that we might know he came for all.

He came to us and suffered, that in him we might find all our hope.

Our hope…

I wonder if there’s any gift Christ has to offer us this night

more precious than the gift of hope.
And what is hope?

Let me share with you how the Brazilian theologian, Rubem Alves,

answers that question.

He’s from Brazil

and you’ll pick up a South American agricultural reference

in what he wrote…

What is hope?

Hope is the presentiment
that imagination is more real
and reality is less real
- than it looks.

Hope is the hunch
that the overwhelming brutality of facts
that oppress and repress us
- is not the last word.

Hope is the suspicion that reality is more complex
than the realists want us to believe;
that the frontiers of the possible
are not determined by the limits of the actual;
and that in a miraculous and unexplained way,
life is opening up creative events opening the way
to freedom and resurrection.

But the two – suffering and hope – must live from each other.
Suffering without hope
produces resentment and despair.
But, hope without suffering
creates illusions, naïveté and drunkenness.

So let us plant dates -
even though we who plant them will never eat them.
We must live by the love of what we will never see.
- Rubem Alves

Alves’ words are thick with substance and dense with meaning

and may seem too much to digest on a Christmas eve.

But if we are to understand

who is the Child whose birth we come to celebrate,

if we are to receive the gifts he offers us;

if we are to grasp what his birth portends

for the hopes and fears of all the years

in the heart of each of us tonight;

if we are to grow as human beings

through Christ, with Christ and in Christ:

then we cannot allow ourselves to get stuck in the stable,

gazing on an infant’s face.

That’s the danger of Christmas.

We can so easily get stuck in the stable.

We forget that the stable was temporary housing

for the Holy Family while they were in Bethlehem.

Then it was back to Nazareth where life went on

and Jesus grew up and began to teach and it’s in his words

that we find our hope.

And what is hope?

Hope is the presentiment
that imagination is more real
and reality is less real - than it looks.
Hope is the hunch
that the overwhelming brutality of facts
that oppress and repress us
- is not the last word.