CHRISTMAS VIGIL MASS 2016

All religions involve mankind's effort to get back into a stable and healthy relationship with God - that's why they can appear to be so similar. But Christianity is the only religion in which mankind's effort to find God is met by the unimaginable event of God himself deciding to come down into human nature so that he can be more easily found.

It's like the farmer who stayed home on Christmas Eve when everyone else went to church because he didn’t believe in Jesus. A terrible snow storm started, and outside the living room window he saw a gaggle of wild geese huddling together in confusion, trying to keep warm. He rushed out into the storm and opened his barn door. Then he went over to the geese - barely able to see them through the blizzard. He tried to coax them into the barn. Then he tried to scare them in. But they just kept jumping away from him, squawking and flapping their wings in self-defense.

After 20 minutes and no progress, he gave up and went back inside. He stood in the warm living room staring out at the geese. And he thought: "If only I could become a goose myself, then I could lead them into the barn and save them." And with that thought, he fell on his knees, right there in the living room, and started to cry. He realized that that's exactly what God had done on the first Christmas night - and that he had been spending his life squawking and flapping in the wrong direction.

I don’t know whether the first part of the gospel reading made any sense to you. A long list of names of people belonging to the ancestry of Jesus. Though we often skip over these lists of names, the Gospel writers took great pains to compile the genealogies and to make several theological points in the process. Strangely enough, the list includes a number of disreputable characters, including three women of bad reputation: Tamar, Rahab and Bathsheba. Perhaps the Lord God included these women in His Son's human genealogy to emphasize God's grace, to give us all hope and to show us that Jesus is sent to save sinners. He comes under the image of a weak human being, so that he could drive the fear of God away from us; so that we could correct our wrong concept of God and we be able to relate with Him.

Ideas affect actions. The idea that we have of another person affects how we relate to that person. If someone gives me a million dollars, I am going to think he is a great guy, and I will treat him accordingly. If I find out that a friend has been stealing from my bank account, I am going to think he is a liar and a back-stabber, and my dealings with him will turn cold. Our idea of someone affects how we interact with them. Communion with God, a relationship with God, this is what we were created for. But the quality of that relationship depends on what we think this God is like.   

Someone who doesn't believe in God at all, will have no relationship with him. Someone who thinks God is an angry, intolerant tyrant will have a fearful, unstable relationship with him. Someone who thinks God as a distant and impersonal force will have a cold, distant relationship with God. God became man on Christmas Night almost 2000 years ago because he wanted to correct our mistaken ideas about what he's like. He wants us to have the right idea about him, so that we can live in a right relationship with him. What is this right idea?

Look at the baby Jesus, wrapped in swaddling clothes, laid in a manger, smiling helplessly at his mother Mary - that is the true God, a God who comes to meet us right where we're at. He has chosen to come to us so weak and naked in order that we may each do something for Him…Mary's Son tells us that all we do or do not do for one of the smallest of His little ones, that we do or do not do for him. If Christ indeed is in our midst, from now on, wherever you go, or wherever I go, all the ground between us will be holy ground." God is among us and in us. He is Emmanuel, God with us. He understands us and can relate with our wretched life.

There was a very young minister who had been called once to minister to an old farm widow. Her husband had just died, and the minister went with all his earnest intent to be as much comfort as he could to her. Most of his knowledge of grief was abstract and academic, and so he went and said the best words he knew to say. He tried to convey his care, but while he was doing that, there came into the room another older woman about this widow's age. She walked across and without hardly a word, she embraced the grieving person and all she said was, "I understand, my dear. I understand."

Someone told the minister later that this second person had just lost her husband six months before and, therefore, she came out of a shared understanding of what his friend was experiencing. And he could almost see the bridges of understanding coming to exist between them. That woman who had shared the same experience as his grieving friend had a way of connecting, had a way of making clear that she understood, that this minister was not able to, because he had not walked in her shoes.

Christmas tells us that God came to walk in our shoes and therefore if you find him silent at times does not mean that he doesn’t understand your pain.  Christmas is special because it reminds us concretely that God is indeed with us. So let’s go home to the heart of Christmas and embrace Jesus Christ as our Lord and Savior, who will not leave us in the best or the worst times. May this year’s Christmas make you feel that God in Jesus is closer to you than you are to your own breath. May he be a comfort and consolation to you always, at every step of your life. Amen.