Friends,
what a joy it is to celebrate this great feast with all of you as we declare
with new joy and fervor that Christ our King has been born and, thus, that
salvation from the everlasting darkness of sin and death has come to us. We have been preparing for this day for the
last four weeks—a full four weeks!—and rightfully so: for when a big
celebration is to take place, there is much to do to prepare.
Therefore,
before I go any further, I feel like I should make a confession. When it comes to all the hype and buildup of
Christmas, I’m a curmudgeon. Advent is a
season to which I look forward and I look forward to it because it is an
invitation to slow down, to be a little more quiet, to reflect, and to begin
again. Every year, however, the season
is drowned in lights, winter holiday music, and the pressure to do more
things. Every year, I hope that this
year will be different and every year I am disappointed that the world hasn’t
decided to conform to my idea of Advent (“How rude!” am I right?).
I
am disappointed, also, because I always have big hopes of being more ready and
more prepared for Christmas, hopes that, although sometimes unrealistic, almost
never pan out the way I imagined. That
extra time in prayer that I hoped to spend was difficult to take and was often
found unfruitful. That creative idea for
gifts for my family proved to be too time-consuming to be realized. Christmas cards? Yeah, I thought about it… a lot… for like
three weeks… and I still didn’t send them.
After four weeks of disappointment, I often find myself approaching
Christmas feeling a little… let’s say… crabby.
(Anyone else out there with me?)
The
thing that tops it all off for me is that I always want to be well-prepared
spiritually to celebrate this great feast day, and being crabby doesn’t make
that easy. Like most of you, I suppose,
I take time to examine my conscience well so as to make a good confession
during Advent. Try as I may, however, to
bring my soul in a pristine state of grace to the celebration of Christmas—so
as to make of my heart a beautiful gift to Jesus on his birthday—I often find
that I fail; and thus my heart, ever desiring to be lifted up in joy in this
celebration, is weighed down by the weight of my sins. I’m embarrassed that, on top of all of the
other things that didn’t go my way in Advent, I couldn’t do even that much for
Jesus.
With
this on my heart, I reflected again on this passage from the Gospel that we just
heard and a glimmer of hope caught my eye.
It says there, “Now there were shepherds in that region living in the
fields and keeping the night watch over their flock.” These shepherds received the shocking and
disorienting visit from the angel of God who brought the good news that the
long-awaited one, the Messiah, had been born.
They—the shepherds “living in the fields and keeping night watch over
the flock”—were given instruction for how they will identify this child, the Christ
King, who had been born. They then went
to find him to pay him their homage.
“Why
is this a glimmer of hope?” you might ask.
These shepherds were living in the fields, watching over the flock when
they received this good news and went to find this newborn King. My guess is that they didn’t stop at home to
shower before finding him. They came to
him as they were; dirty from their work in the fields and with the smell of the
sheep clinging to them. They came to
offer him their homage and the Holy Family received them without fuss or
condemnation (they were in a stable, after all!). They returned to their fields rejoicing that
this royal family had received them, in all their uncleanliness and
imperfection. The hope that I felt—and still
feel—is that Jesus our King is just as ready today to receive me and my homage,
in all my uncleanliness and imperfection, in a similar way: without fuss or
condemnation, just joy that, in my devotion, I have come.
Friends,
too often we think that we can only come to Jesus if we are perfectly clean and
put together. Certainly, this is an
ideal for which we should strive! More
important for us to remember today, however, is that Jesus wants us to come to
him, regardless: even in our uncleanliness and imperfection. This is hard, because so often we’re
embarrassed by our failures. Don’t
worry, he sees us. He wasn’t embarrassed
to be born in a cave among livestock.
Therefore, he’s not going to be offended if we come to him with sin on
our consciences, yet love in our hearts and a humble desire to give him homage.
Let
us come to him, then, in our imperfections and offer them to him as our gift,
for in doing so we are offering him our most true selves. I assure you, Jesus delights in this
gift. In return for this sign of humble
devotion, he will give us his true self, which is life, and light, and the
peace of knowing that we are loved by the God who created us and who is close
to us even now. Therefore, come, all you
faithful; come, and let us adore him.
Given at Our Lady of Mt. Carmel Parish: Carmel, IN –
December 24th, 2022
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