Friday, December 24, 2010

Family Ties

The Vigil of Christmas


What a God we have!


We have been anticipating the coming of Christ into our lives these past four weeks. Tonight we hear the promise fulfilled. Emmanuel. God is with us. But what kind of a God do we have who felt it necessary to come as he did, or to even come at all? And what kind of people are we that we are so very loved?


Every year at this vigil Mass we hear the long genealogy of Jesus in Matthew’s gospel. Matthew chose to begin his gospel with this genealogy to show his listeners that Jesus is the promised messiah, the Son of David who has come to set Israel free. Matthew wanted to show the royal lineage of Jesus, but he also wanted his listeners to see the humanity of Jesus, to relate to him as a man. Because Jesus is just like us, and we are just like him. He is a king, but he is also a beggar. He is exalted on high, but still has all the baggage of the past we all seem to carry around with us.


God has chosen to get right down with us in the dirt. He chose the method of salvation for the human race from the very moment human nature failed. He chose his people, and he chose a specific family line to be born into. God chose to be so very close to us that he shared our very human lives with us. God has chosen to insert himself into our everyday lives, just where we are. God chose to share in our humanity, with all its ups and downs, love and violence, joy and pain. He could have inserted himself in history at any point in that long genealogy. He could have been born a prince in any one of those royal households. But he chose instead to be born of a very poor young girl in a very poor village in a backwater province in a forgotten country. In a stable. In the dirt, where most people spend their time.


You can’t pick your family, but Jesus did. And the family he picked is just like any other family. In it are some of the greatest figures in Jewish history, and also some of the most reviled. There are kings and adulterers, wise men and murderers, heroes and harlots. They lived in times of plenty and times of want, times of peace and times of war. For the most part life was a great turmoil for them, and they struggled to keep sight of the hand of God guiding their lives. Just like us. We have all sorts of folk in our families. Both saints and sinners. And they’re all coming for Christmas dinner. We may or may not like them very much, but they’re our family, and we’re all in this together.


We all go through times of joy and times of turmoil. We are buffeted by the events of our days, and we sometimes wonder if God is really there for us. Is there at all. At times of struggle we sometimes think that God has distanced himself from us. We look hard but cannot find him. Sometimes we hide him ourselves, covering up his presence in a mountain of inconsequential stuff. The routine of our lives, the quest for more and more material goods, our own personal pain and suffering. But if you look at Matthew’s genealogy, look at the lives of the people in Jesus’ history, it is at the times of greatest peril that God has been most strongly present. He has always been there when we needed him most. It is out of our most challenging times that our greatest saints emerge.


What a God we have, who came to save his people from their sins. He came to offer us a glimpse of heaven. He came to show us that no matter what we’re going through, there is always hope. There is always forgiveness. There is always a light at the end of the tunnel. Because no matter what unsavory characters were among Jesus’ ancestors, no matter what horrible wars and exile and famine and death they had to endure, at the end there’s Jesus. In the end there’s always Jesus.


Well I hope you can see that the first Christmas was anything but idyllic, anything but perfect, anything but comfortable. I do not deny that there is a place for sentimentality but, truth be told, our sentimentality often sets us up for disappointment. We want Christmas to be Hallmark perfect. And then Uncle Joe shows up at Christmas dinner drunk, and son Ben is away in Iraq, Mom died last June, and instead of snow, it is warm. But guess what. Jesus wasn’t found in a perfect Christmas either. If you’re looking for a perfect Christmas, Jesus is not there. He is in the imperfect one. He’s in your actual Christmas not your imagined Christmas.


Find him there.

Sunday, December 12, 2010

Hope

3rd Sunday of Advent
Cycle A
Is 35:1-6a,10
Ps 146:6-7,8-9,9-10
Jas 5:7-10
Mt 11:2-11


Last Thursday we celebrated the feast of St. Juan Diego, canonized by Pope John Paul II in 2002. Juan Diego had been declared Venerable in 1987. Under normal circumstances, for someone to be beatified there must be a miracle that has been thoroughly studied and approved by the Congregation for Causes and Saints and accepted by the Holy Father. In the case of Juan Diego, John Paul II decided to beatify him without the approved miracle. There was a miracle for his canonization, however. And it is quite a story.

Juan Jose Barragan Silva, of Mexico City, had been a drug addict since he was a teenager. He and his mother had been abandoned by his father when Juan Jose was young. On May 3rd, 1990 Juan Jose got drunk and high on marijuana with a friend, then went home and started to cut himself on the head with a knife. His mother, Esperanza, tried to get the knife away but failed. She implored him to stop abusing himself and give up the alcohol and pot. He shouted that he didn’t want to live any more. Juan Jose threw himself off the balcony of their third floor apartment.

In that moment, Esperanza had a “flash”. Knowing that Pope John Paul was to be in Mexico for the beatification of Juan Diego, she called on Juan Diego to intercede for her son. The hope of a mother springs eternal.

Juan Jose fell about 30 feet and landed on his head on the concrete pavement. He was bleeding heavily from the mouth, nose and ears. They covered him, thinking he was dead. He suddenly sat up, rose and went to the stairs leading to his apartment. On meeting his mother coming down the stairs he asked for her forgiveness. They embraced and remained that way for another ten minutes or so before the ambulance came.

The prognosis was very pessimistic. The doctor later explained that it was incomprehensible that he was still alive. They did tests and found that he had fractured his skull, had a large hemotoma that extended from the front of his skull to the back of his neck, lacerations of the neck muscles, intracranial bleeding and air in his cranial cavity. He was given the last rites. Yet he continued to live.

The first four days he was sedated. On the fifth, doctors found that his pupils were no longer fixed and that he could move his arms and legs. On the sixth day he was released from the ICU to a regular ward. On the seventh day his feeding tube was removed. He was released on the tenth day after the fall. Subsequent tests by neurologists and other specialists showed a total recovery. Juan Jose also gave up his drug habit and started school.

It seems that his change of condition came on 6 May at the very time John Paul II was beatifying Juan Diego. The decree concerning this miracle was promulgated on 20 December 2001. Pope John Paul II canonized St. Juan Diego on July 31, 2002.

If we do not believe in miracles, we do not ask for them. If we do not ask for them, they will not be granted. Juan Jose’s mother never gave up hope for him. Even through his substance abuse and attempted suicide, she never gave up hope for her son. Her name was Esperanza, the Spanish word for hope.

Most of us never have to live through such a dramatic situation as Esperanza. Most of us don’t have to deal with such despair. But many of us do. When we find ourselves in desperate situations in life, we have a choice to make. Either we can cling to hope, however feeble it may be, or we can give into despair. There’re really no other choices. We can either turn our trust to God, or we can abandon him and abandon hope.

The ancient Israelites had their share of hopeless situations. The prophet Isaiah, who we hear from in today’s first reading, was writing to a people who were about to be besieged and wiped out by the Assyrian army. The king, Hezekiah, put his trust in an alliance with the Egyptians. Isaiah enjoined him to trust in the Lord and be strong instead. He writes today:

Strengthen the hands that are feeble,
make firm the knees that are weak,
say to those whose hearts are frightened:
Be strong, fear not!
Here is your God,
he comes with vindication;
with divine recompense
he comes to save you.

Hezekiah didn’t listen. And the northern kingdom of Israel was destroyed. The Israelites had a way of ignoring God’s prophets and putting themselves in hopeless situations. But the prophets always gave them a message of hope. Isaiah’s message of hope was fulfilled in today’s gospel. Jesus doesn’t come right out and tell John the Baptist that he is the Messiah. Instead he points to Isaiah’s promise of hope made seven hundred years earlier. He gave John proof of God’s faithfulness by his actions, not just with words.

We celebrate another story of hope today, the Feast of Our Lady of Guadalupe.
The opening of the New World by the Spanish brought with it both fortune-seekers and preachers wanting to convert the native populations to the Christian faith, by force, if necessary. Many of the natives were treated very cruelly by their conquerors. On December 12, 1531, Our Lady of Guadalupe appeared and spoke tenderly to another one of her sons, Juan Diego:

“Hear and let it penetrate into your heart, my dear little son. Let nothing discourage you, nothing depress you. Let nothing alter your heart or your countenance. Also do not fear any illness or vexation, anxiety or pain. Am I not here who am your mother? Are you not under my shadow and protection? Am I not your fountain of life? Are you not in the folds of my mantle, in the crossing of my arms? Is there anything else that you need?”

One would be hard pressed to find more comforting words to someone in despair; they are positively riveting given their intimate connection with the miraculous image of Mary imprinted on Juan Diego’s tilma, the same image that hangs on the wall of this church.

The power of Mary’s reassuring words is magnified by the fact that they came the day after Juan Diego did not follow through with his promise to meet Mary again at the appointed time and place. He had spent that day tending to his gravely sick uncle. Knowing that he just blew off the Queen of Heaven, though, he decided to take a shortcut to his destination the next day in order to avoid her. Haven’t we all, knowing our own shortcomings, or facing the hardships and demands that come with faith in Christ, taken shortcuts in one form or another? He was nonetheless greeted by Our Lady and heard these soothing words – even after she had explicitly told him earlier: “Do not forget me.”

The Blessed Mother understands our humanity and stands ready to shower us with her maternal love. Our Lady said she came to give all her love and protection to the people, to hear their weeping, and “alleviate all their multiple sufferings.” There could scarcely be a more inviting and urgent message for an anxious, secular age – particularly one that has forgotten what matters most.

So let us rejoice on this Gaudete Sunday as we light the rose colored candle of hope. For no matter how unfaithful we are to God, God will always be faithful to us.

Wednesday, December 1, 2010

Burglar Alarm

1st Sunday of Advent
Cycle A

We have a burglar alarm at our house. It came with the house. We pay a monthly fee to have it. It’s a real fancy one that not only has a siren but has someone sitting at a computer screen a thousand miles away monitoring it so that if it goes off they call the cops or the fire department. And we never turn it on. I wouldn’t know how to if I wanted to. The little green light on the control panel by the door is always on, but I don’t know how to program it and if it goes off I don’t know how to turn it off.

We figured it would come in handy because of all the expensive tools I’ve got in the shop. And we did turn it on the first month or two after we moved in. It has hundreds of cool functions, but all we learned to do was turn it on and off. And it soon became a hassle remembering to activate it and deactivate it, and besides, we live in Oakley, where it’s quiet and peaceful and all the neighbors look out for each other. I’ve got all the right tools to be prepared for a break-in, but they’re really useless because I don’t know how to use them. And if I did, I probably wouldn’t anyway. We’ve fallen into a false sense of security because we have never been broken into.

It’s the first Sunday of Advent. New Years Day for us Catholics. Today we begin the new liturgical year, and as you can see, the colors have changed to purple from green, we have our Advent wreath all set up and lit, and the gospel readings are from Matthew rather than from Luke. The word Advent means coming, as in the coming of an event that has been anticipated.

We celebrate Advent when we do because we are anticipating the coming of a wonderful event at the same time we are remembering another wonderful event. We look forward to the time when Jesus comes again in his glory, and we celebrate his birth at Christmas, his first coming 2000 years ago. It is fitting that we link the two, because together they tell the story of the promise Jesus made to us that we will see him again just as he was seen so long ago.

But Advent is all about burglar alarms.

Jesus tells us throughout Advent to be prepared. Be ready, because you never know when he will come again. He gave us a heads-up about what is to happen. Jesus left us all the tools. We have the Church to back us up. We have tradition and scripture. He gave us the burglar alarm; he showed us how it works and how to turn it on. It’s got hundreds of cool functions, like the sacraments and devotions and saints and stuff. But we don’t use them, do we? We just turn it on and off sometimes, when we need it. We’re good people. We don’t need to worry, do we? Nothing bad’s going to happen. We have fallen into a false sense of security because it’s been so long since he left and we’ve grown weary of waiting.

We talk a lot about Jesus’ first coming, and every Sunday we hear stories about that time in the gospels. At every Mass our prayers speak of the hope we have in his coming again. What lies beneath the surface of both of these events is Jesus’ third coming, where he enters into our lives, or tries to, every day. Are we prepared to welcome Jesus when he knocks at our door today? Are we really ready?

Have you ever thought about what you’d do if you met Jesus face to face? Have you ever heard the song I Can Only Imagine by the group Mercyme? The refrain goes:

Surrounded by Your glory, what will my heart feel
Will I dance for you Jesus or in honor of you be still
Will I stand in your presence or to my knees will I fall
Will I sing hallelujah, will I be able to speak at all
I can only imagine

We spend a lot of time thinking of the afterlife, of what it will be like in heaven. But I think we often forget that Jesus is here acting in our lives every day. That third coming is the only thing we can control. It’s the only coming we can experience now.

Let’s change the lyrics of that song a bit.

Surrounded by Your glory, O what my heart feels
I dance for you Jesus and in honor of you be still
I stand in your presence and to my knees I fall
I sing hallelujah, and am unable to speak at all
I don’t have to imagine

If you knew you were to have Jesus over to dinner tomorrow night, how would you prepare? Not just all the details about the decorations and the menu. How would you prepare yourself mentally and spiritually? How would you dress? Who would you tell? Would you invite your friends to join you or would you want Jesus all to yourself? Would you think yourself worthy or unworthy? Would you go to confession first? Would you be nervous or would you be comfortable welcoming a close friend?

Well, here we are. Jesus has come to dinner.