CHRISTMAS IS ALL ABOUT JESUS
Christmas Eve 2017 –
Sung Mass 7:00 PM
Saint Cecilia
Catholic Community, Palm Springs CA
Rev. David Justin
Lynch
Isaiah 9:1-6 Titus
2:11-24 Luke 2:1-14
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In the name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Spirit, AMEN.
Over
the past few weeks, the world around us has been going through its annual drill
getting ready for Christmas. We’ve been decorating, baking, partying, and of
course, shopping. We here at church have been spiritually preparing for the
Feast of the Nativity of Jesus by celebrating Advent, simultaneously getting
our souls ready for His coming as a child and his eventual return in glory when
the Kingdom of God has fully come. While the merchants of the world look to
Christmas every year for financial salvation, we Christians look to
Jesus as God’s gift to all of humanity. As the saying goes, “Jesus is the
reason for the season.” Jesus comes to us at Christmas to make everything new
for us, as we respond with “abundant joy and great rejoicing” to quote
tonight’s First Reading.
Who
is Jesus? People inside and outside Christianity have been trying to figure
that out since he arrived as a baby somewhere around the year four to six B-C. Our First Reading gives us some hints: “Wonderful,
Counselor, Prince of Peace.” Jesus is all of that, and more. But as important as Jesus is to us
personally, and to all of humanity, the only extensive record of the life of
Jesus is found in the four canonical gospels, Mark, Matthew, Luke and John,
supplemented by non-canonical sources, and a very few Non-Christian records
like the Jewish Antiquities of Flavius Josephus.
More likely than
not, the historical Jesus did likely exist. All of these sources, taken
together, tell us what Jesus did and what Jesus said, but they do
not establish definitively who Jesus is. I use the present tense,
because Jesus continues to live among us. His Resurrection was not a mere
resuscitation, but a proclamation that His death did not extinguish Him. His
permanent existence as God’s word began as God began, with no chronological
time of beginning, and like God, Jesus will never end. Christmas celebrates the
gift of God’s word to humanity as humanity. That is why we are here tonight
celebrating His human birth, and not commemorating someone who was, but
is no longer.
So what makes
Jesus so special? Some refer to Jesus as a wisdom teacher, someone who gave us
a great deal of practical advice to have a good life. He is that, certainly.
Others refer to Jesus as “the Messiah”, and/or as a successor to the Jewish
King David. Many view Jesus as someone who will ultimately judge
humanity. Still others call Jesus “Savior,” someone who came to save humanity. There’s
a fair amount of debate about how Jesus did that, whether by his death
or his teaching, and whether than saving is an ongoing process. There’s also ongoing debate over who
Jesus saves. Does Jesus save only good people, only the baptized, only those
who lived good lives, or simply everyone? And from what does Jesus save
us? From hell after death? From the miseries in our lives, like illnesses,
broken relationships, and other misfortunes? I say all of the foregoing, and
more. I don’t really know all the
things from which Jesus saves us, or exactly how Jesus does that. There is so
much about Jesus that will always remain as a mystery for ongoing discovery.
And despite the Council of Chalcedon which
supposedly settled the issue in four-fifty-one AD, we also hear ongoing debate
over whether Jesus is human or divine. Without going into a lot of detail, the
answer is: both.
The dual nature
of Jesus should get us to think of Jesus as a sacrament, in and of himself. The
shorthand definition of “sacrament” is “an outward and visible sign of an inward
and spiritual grace.” Jesus is certainly that. Jesus is human, Jesus is holy. Jesus
is the sacrament of God, the physical revelation of God, and it is that
physical revelation that we celebrate here tonight. But Jesus, like all
sacraments, is more than simple physical existence, and that is why Jesus does
not fall into an easily definable identity. The Greek word for “sacrament” is
“musterion”, which also means “mystery.” What is a mystery is something
ultimately unknowable, not capable of precise definition. And that’s exactly
what Jesus is for me, ultimately unknowable, definitely not capable of being
precisely defined. I am convinced of that more and more every day, as I
constantly read books about Jesus and find myself discovering more and more
about Jesus every day that I did not know previously. I don’t think I, or
anyone else, will ever know all that there is to know about Jesus, who
unceasingly continues to excite and fascinate my heart, mind and soul.
That ultimately unknowable
aspect of Jesus is why Jesus matters. The better we get to know Jesus,
the more valuable Jesus becomes to us. If we knew everything there is to know
about Jesus, we could simply forget about Him after we knew everything about
Him, and move on with our lives, leaving Jesus behind. Unfortunately, there are
some people who’ve done exactly that, both outside and inside the church. Some are
unchurched, meaning those who’ve never been to church in their entire life. Many
of them are atheists and agnostics. Others
are what I call de-churched, those who were raised in a church, but left church
behind as they grew older. There are
lots of those folks, and their number increases daily. Their existence presents
a challenge for the Church, as people no longer attend Mass as an obligation
based on fear of damnation, but as something that they want to do because they
get something out of it. The church
today competes with the many other options people have on Sundays to allocate
their time. The challenge I face every week as a pastor is, “how do I make
Sunday morning a more worthwhile option than the other choices people have?” I
try my best, but it’s not easy!
But there is
another large group of people who’ve cut themselves off from Jesus, and that
group does go to church, often every Sunday. That group is the
know-it-alls, who think they know everything about Jesus, those who’ve put
Jesus in their own little box, and use Jesus for their own purposes, often
using Jesus as a tool, or even as a weapon, to achieve political and economic
goals that benefit themselves. To invoke Jesus to support gun rights,
capitalism, military buildups, invasions, mass incarceration, racism,
homophobia, and sexism, illustrates the moral and intellectual bankruptcy of
much of today’s religious establishment. People who do that have obviously never read
the Gospel of Jesus, or do not take it seriously, and are notoriously
close-minded to new information.
Reducing Jesus
to a neat, simple little definition, no matter who does it, diminishes the
importance of Jesus, because it reduces Jesus as mystery. The very mystery of
Jesus is what makes Jesus sacred, that which makes Jesus holy, that which makes
Jesus a sacrament, and therefore significant to us. While our own experience as
human persons may be neatly circumscribed in many circumstances, Jesus is
different. Jesus is infinite. Jesus cannot be reduced to anything. Jesus is
too vast. Jesus knows no limits. Jesus was born in the humble circumstances of
a manger, the feeding place of animals. Yet His origin did not limit or define
him.
That is because Jesus
by His very nature is not someone to be defined, but someone to be experienced.
The true experience of Jesus to us cannot be found in books. It cannot
even be found in the Bible itself. It cannot be found in the Church. The ways
in which we do so are infinite, both in church and in the world. We, of course,
experience Jesus at Mass, in His Body and Blood, when receiving Holy Communion,
when we hear about Jesus in the readings, when we pass the peace, and when we
pray intercessions. But we also experience Jesus in a more general sense as a
Church community. Jesus is the incentive that stimulates our coming to be with
one another, and it is Jesus that holds us together and keeps us going as an
organization. Our love of Jesus is why
we do things for the Church, like being musicians, readers, altar servers, and
coffee hour hosts, and all the other things that makes church possible. Our
love of Jesus is also why we do community outreach, like bringing food for
hungry people and getting involved in other community activities to live out
who we are as Christians.
At Christmas,
Jesus is there to call us away from “godless ways and worldly desires’, the
phrase used in today’s Second Reading. What are “godless ways and worldly desires”?
God created all humanity in God’s image, yet sometimes we treat other people as
if they were created in the image of the Evil One. Listen to the rhetoric in
our political system. Much of it demeans
other people. Its usual goal is directed towards maintaining the power of one
group or another. To demean other
people, to focus one’s life on obtaining and keeping power, is both godless and
worldly. It denies the status of others as children of God and is directed
solely towards maintaining one’s grip on one’s little corner of the material
world. When we build up, rather than tear down, other people, we experience our
own lives as God-filled, rather than godless.
And when we turn
on television, we experience a medium that now piggy-backs two to three minutes
of commercials at a time, for no other purpose than to stimulate whatever
appetite we may have for cars, garage doors, beds, sheets, food, and clothes,
but never any appetite for God, or anything spiritual. When we take the
time to spiritually nurture ourselves rather than chase money and material
goods, we move beyond the desire for material things, and we experience God
both in our souls and our lives.
The only way to
get off the godless and worldly track is to experience the reality of Jesus.
After Mary and Joseph, the first people to experience Jesus, according to
today’s Gospel, were the angels and shepherds. They reacted with joy, which
tells us something about what they were feeling and experiencing. As we worship
here tonight, we will experience some of that feeling, and that feeling will
likely be with us at least through Christmas night. But what feelings will we
have on Tuesday morning, December 26th? Will we go back to a purely
secular life without God, focused on worldly concerns? Or will we, in the words
of the Second Reading, live “temperately, justly, and devoutly”? As you go back
to the secular world, remember the experience of Jesus you felt at Christmas,
that sense of awe and wonderment. Keep it going. How? Pray, always. Come to
Mass. Read scripture. Those things will keep you centered on Jesus.
But it also means
experiencing Jesus in a very tangible fashion, in ways that do not even involve
mentioning His name. Aim to make your experience with Jesus permeate everything
you do, all of your relationships with others, be it your intimate partner,
your co-workers, your friends, even strangers. That means forgiving mistakes
and insults. It is being a servant. It is being like God, who anticipates what
we need before we ask. It is being like the restaurant server who sees a diner
with an empty water glass and fills it before being asked. It means speaking up
when you see injustice. It means civilized mediation of conflicts instead of lawsuits.
In doing all of that, we are experiencing Jesus becoming a permanent part of
who we are as individuals and as a society. When we experience Jesus as we go
about our lives, we become a community of disciples, preaching Gospel with actions,
not just words. When you experience Jesus, He will be with you to guide you, strengthen you, and give you
assurance to endure suffering.
The song that
began the prelude to our service tonight was, “King Jesus hath a garden full of
divers flowers.” It is my favorite Christmas song, because it reminds me
of the diversity of humanity, and it is that diversity that makes humanity
beautiful. We can expect to encounter Jesus in the entire diversity of
humanity, not just in people like us, and to remind us that there is no place
for bigotry or prejudice for Christians.
Try to see the
face of Jesus in every person you meet. To do that, you must allow Jesus to be
part of who you are. As you leave here
tonight, be like Mary. Ponder Jesus in your heart, and keep Him there! AMEN.
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