Holy Family - Year B

Genesis 15:1-6;21:1-3; Hebrews 11:8,11-12,17-19; Luke 2:22-40

What is a good homily? You’ve listened to hundreds, maybe thousands, of them; what is a good homily? Here are some answers I imagine you might give. A good homily is:

• short
• interesting
• instructive
• entertaining
• relevant to life
• based on scripture
• helpful
• all of the above

From my perspective a good homily is one that changes lives for the better. If someone comes to me and says, ‘You gave a homily a few years ago that changed my life’ I say to myself, ‘Well, at least I’ve given one good homily.’

The only homily that can change lives for the better is one that speaks truth; everything else is just entertainment – and usually very forgettable. Truth is powerful, irresistibly powerful, actually. Truth is the only thing that makes sense of our lives and we priests are wasting our time, and Jesus’ time, preaching anything else.

Truth is how things are and how they should be. By this I mean that truth both reveals what we are and calls us to turn back if we have gone wrong somewhere.

Truth is the instruction manual for human existence; it sets us free to be fully human and, in simple terms, this means to know, love and serve God here on earth and to be happy with him forever in heaven. A good homily always points out this end and helps us to achieve it.

Now having said all this I’m going to present you with some thoughts for your discernment. I want to present you with four thoughts from my personal observations about (holy) family life. I hope you will agree that they are simple truth.

• A holy family is always a place of silence. I don’t mean deathly silence, or an uninterrupted, spooky kind of silence - I mean helpful silence, life-giving silence, silence which allows something more to be heard than meaningless noise; silence which allows real listening to real things.
  
  Sin is not the only way of pushing God out of our lives, you know, noise can be just as effective, and I need hardly point out the sources of the mindless noise I am referring to.

• A holy family is always a place of discipline or, if you like, of good order in the relationships which exist between its various members. Needless to say, God is the first and most important member of a holy family, and all good order begins with our relationship to him. Therefore parents must obey God; I can’t stress this enough.
  
  How often have I felt like saying to parents who complain about the selfishness, nastiness, disobedience and dishonesty of their children, ‘But why should you expect to receive from your children what you are not giving to God? Your children are simply learning you. You are the first book they read and they are good readers.’
  
  When parents are truly and fully obedient to God and his Church in their lives they are living in the truth and children are generally quick to understand and imitate them.

• A holy family is a place of work. It is a clean and tidy place, a place of washed and ironed clothes, of swept and vacuumed floors, of washed dishes and made beds. I am speaking here of an ideal, of course, which we may not always succeed in reaching, but the opposite of this ideal is a disordered mess which encourages a laziness which exalts empty leisure above good order. Most catastrophically, apart from offering opportunities for idle hands, that laziness all too often reaches into the serious duty and hard work of family prayer.

• My fourth point recapitulates the other three: a holy family is a place where the Faith will be lived and taught. Listen to today’s Gospel and see how often it is said that the parents of the child Jesus did ‘what was laid down in the Law’. A holy family will always obey God’s law.
  
  Pray together as a married couple and as a family. Go to Mass every Sunday and Holy Day and never miss; get your priorities straight and teach your children to get theirs straight. Go to Confession regularly as a family and teach your children that life is built on forgiveness and fresh starts. Don’t deprive your children of their opportunity to see you acknowledge your sins before God.

A holy family is a wonderful thing; it lasts forever. An unholy family is a scourge – to its members and to the whole of society. A holy family is a school of happiness and life because God himself dwells in its midst. He teaches each of its members to love others more than they deserve because that’s how he loves us.

I hope you will make this a good homily.

Christmas Vigil - Year B

Isaiah 62:1-5; Acts 13:16-17;22-25; Matthew 1:1-25

Signs are important things, especially street signs; they tell us a lot. I notice kids love to twist signs around so they point in the wrong direction, maybe we’ve even done it ourselves, and most of us would have been a victim of that little trick once or twice in our lives. Luckily I can usually tell right away they have been tampered with so I don’t get lost too often.

Actually, it’s a question of power. Street signs are very powerful things. They point out the direction to what we're looking for, in my case the homes I want to visit.

To change a street sign around so that it faces in a wrong direction can cause a great deal of trouble to people and sometimes, to see someone heading off in exactly the wrong direction because you have changed the sign around can be sort of amusing, so long as no harm comes of it.

So as I said, it’s a matter of power.

Do you know, some adults enjoy changing the signs around too? No, I’m not speaking about the street signs, I am talking about far more important signs than that; I am talking about the signs that point us to the most important things in life.

A common example of this is to turn the pews in some older churches ninety degrees to the right or the left, away from the front, to make them more ‘community-centred’. It was all probably well meant but now that we are thirty years further down the track we are beginning to see it for the mistake it was. We were pointing the sign away from Jesus in the tabernacle to … us! As this happened in churches people began doing it also with their theology, liturgy, ecclesiology, catechesis, Christology, and even personal prayer … turning it towards self rather than to God.

The world, too, is very good at changing the signs. For the world the sign to happiness says money, consumerism; to inner peace, drugs; to truth, popular consensus, and so on, and so on.

At this time of Christmas, to a world immersed in individualism, confusion, hedonism and violence, God gives a sign. It is a sign pointing to all that is good. It is the way to truth and life ... a baby wrapped in swaddling clothes and lying in a manger.

• A baby … human, small, humble, needy, innocent and vulnerable.

A baby is all that we are right now, no matter whether we are eight or eighty, and we’ll never be anything more. A baby is what God holds up to this activity-centred, money-making, and kingdom-building world; and the kingdom doesn’t have to be big. Anything that ‘possesses’ us, whether it be our stamp collection or our grand-children, is our kingdom. Anything which makes us believe we are a more than we really are, whether it be our house, our ‘connections’, or our job; anything at all that makes us forget who we are, what we are – God’s little baby – that is for us the sign pointed in the wrong direction.

But this baby is Jesus – human and divine, God and man, God and neighbour. He is The Baby, the only-begotten of the Father, the Beloved One, the Way, the Truth and the Life.

I read in a housewife’s blog on the internet: I grew up without getting Christmas presents. Mum liked to make sure that we remembered the 'True Meaning' of Christmas.

The thing that affected me the most at Christmas time, was the Nativity set. We'd love unwrapping each figurine and setting it up. Mum's nativity set always had a 'removable Jesus'. Then she would hide the Jesus, and not put Him in till Christmas Eve, after we'd been to Mass.

We would rush inside after Church to see if He had been born.

The memories are so lovely, as we never rushed in for presents, but to see if the Lord Jesus was born.

Reading this blog I am reminded of Jesus’ words: I tell you solemnly, unless you change and become like little children you will never enter the kingdom of heaven(MT 18:3).

• wrapped in swaddling clothes … secure, loved, cared for.

Let me repeat: secure, loved, cared for. The tiny infant is surrounded by the swaddling clothes in the same way as he is wrapped round by the love of Mary and Joseph, his parents, as he is wrapped round by the love of God. We are all God’s little children and he loves us all like that; his love wraps itself around us and he cares for us every day. However, we need to understand that his care for us extends beyond the confines of this mortal life; his care is to get us to heaven, not to keep us free from suffering on earth.

If we are God’s little baby we will allow ourselves to be bound by him; we will allow him to give us our security. We will keep his commandments and follow his ways. We will remain in his family the Church, where he can look after us, forgive our sins in Confession and feed us with his Body and Blood in the Eucharist. In other words, we will express our littleness through obedience.

• lying in a manger – poor, available.

Our Saviour was born in a stable and laid in a manger, not in a mansion, not even in a one bedroom flat. The sign is saying: happiness and peace – this way!

And we don’t really need a lot. Jesus shows us that.

Of course, the Child is not just lying there all by himself. Close by is a loving mother and a loving father. They are to the infant what water is to the fish; they are the natural environment, the eco-system each child should have.

God’s sign to happiness is an infant wrapped in swaddling clothes and lying in a manger. It’s up to us to stop the world from turning this sign around.

4th Sunday of Advent - Year B

2 Samuel 7:1-5,8-12,14,16; Romans 16:25-27; Luke 1:26-38

If God were to invite you to ask him for one gift which you could take along with you on the journey of life, through all the problems, challenges, joys, sorrows and unexpected difficulties you will most certainly encounter, what would it be? What would you ask for?

Well, there is one thing God promised to each man and woman he called into his service. He never asked them to do anything for him without making this promise. It was to be their greatest source of strength and encouragement and confidence and it would never fail them. It was a simple promise but an unimaginably great one.

To Isaac God said: Be sure that I am with you; I will keep you safe wherever you go, and bring you back to this land, for I will not desert you... .

To Jacob God said: Go back to the land of your forefathers and to your kindred; and I will be with you.

To Joshua God said: As long as you live, no one shall be able to stand in your way; I will be with you as I was with Moses; I will not leave you or desert you.

To Gideon God said: I will be with you and you shall crush Midian as though it were a single man.

To Solomon God said: ...I will be with you and will build you as enduring a House as the one I built for David. I will give Israel to you.

When Moses objected to God that he was not the right man for the job of freeing the Hebrews from Egypt God said: I will be with you.

When they crossed the Sea and began their long trek through the wilderness God made it abundantly and repeatedly clear to the People that he was with them. He fed them with manna from heaven and brought forth water from the rock for them. He let it be known: I am with you.

The Hebrews carried a tent with them in the desert, the Tent of the Presence. It contained the Ark of the Covenant which signified that everywhere the People journeyed God was with them.

When the Hebrews entered the Promised Land and had to fight various savage tribes for possession of the land God said to them: I will be with you.

To Samuel, David, Jeremiah, Jonah, Daniel and so many others God said: Do not be afraid, I will be with you.

This was God's greatest promise, the greatest gift he could bestow - his own presence.

To Mary the Angel said: The Lord is with you.

Surely this is the secret of the celebration of Christmas that, in the coming of the infant Jesus in Bethlehem 2000 years ago, God comes as a man to be with us.

The virgin will conceive and give birth to a son and they will call him Emmanuel, a name which means: God-is-with-us.

What did Jesus tell the disciples on the hill, after his resurrection, when he sent them out to preach the Gospel to every nation? I am with you always ... until the end of time.

My dear friends, in these last hours before the celebration of Christmas only one question remains. It is a crucial question. It has to do with us and where we are right now.

Do you remember what Jesus told us on the 1st Sunday of Advent? Stay awake!

Do you remember what John the Baptist's cry was on the 2nd Sunday of Advent? Repent, for the kingdom of heaven is close at hand.

Do you remember on the 3rd Sunday of Advent how Jesus said: Happy is the man who does not lose faith in me?

We know that God is with us but an important question remains. Are we, are you, with God? Are we awake? Have we repented? Have we kept the faith?

Each one of us must ask himself or herself this question as we prepare for the celebration of God-with-us. If we are conscious that some sin stands between us and the Lord let us hasten to the confessional before the feast dawns so that when he comes he will find us in his friendship. And if our conscience cannot accuse us then let us raise our eyes to the heavens, let us feel the yearning in our hearts for the Saviour who is coming, and let us allow the knowledge of his love-filled presence to take from us all fear and apprehension, all anxiety about the future and ourselves. Our God is with us and we need not be afraid.

3rd Sunday of Advent - Year B

Isaiah 61:1-2,10-11; 1 Thessalonians 5:16-24; John 1:6-8,19-28;

Today is called in Latin Gaudete Sunday and in English Rejoice Sunday. The theme of joy is everywhere in the readings and prayers of our Advent Mass.

The very first words of our celebration, the Entrance Antiphon, insist on the command: Rejoice in the Lord always; again I say, rejoice! The Lord is near.

It is perhaps unusual to have someone order you to rejoice because we belong to a time which believes that joy is mostly a feeling and, as we all know, feelings can’t be controlled.

Yet we can be joyful even when we don’t feel good – even when we are suffering.

In my day-to-day work as chaplain to a large hospital I meet, broadly speaking, two kinds of patients. On the one hand I meet the frightened, confused or angry patient and his family. Why is this happening? How can there be a God? What have I (my mother, father, son, daughter, etc) ever done to deserve this?

On the other hand I encounter the patient who, in the midst of the most serious suffering, can manage a smile and say: God is so good, Father, and so wise. He has blessed me so much in my life and I trust him completely.

Far be it from me to make a judgment on people but the obvious conclusion I draw is that is possible for joy to co-exist with suffering. Which leads me to state the obvious - our joy has its origins in a person other than ourselves and our volatile feelings; our joy has its origins in Jesus.

The Entrance Antiphon tells us to rejoice because the Lord is near. The degree of our joy is directly related to our closeness to Jesus and to his closeness to us. There is a common saying which emphasises this truth - 'Joy is an infallible sign of the presence of God.'

So people who are closest to this person Jesus experience the greatest joy even if it is the crucified and suffering Jesus they are close to – it is still Jesus – and he still gives joy – even from the Cross. Joy transcends every pain and suffering, even death.

This joy, of course, is more than a happy, outward smile.

I remember well how the elderly seminary staff used to celebrate the great feasts of the Church at the early morning Mass. With their sleepy 7am faces they would mournfully proclaim: Today is a great feast which fills us with joy, let us celebrate!

I read a humorous story on a web site about a famous preacher who was trying to teach his students to make their facial expressions harmonise with what they were speaking about. 'When you speak of heaven,' he said, 'let your face light up, let it be joyful and rejoicing.' Then he went on to say 'but when you speak of hell – well, then, then your ordinary face will do.'

So, certainly, we can be joyful in the midst of suffering and turmoil so long as we are close to Christ. This is the secret of the saints. They reached such a degree of closeness to their friend Jesus that suffering only increased their joy because it made it easier for them to identify with him.

The secret of the saints must be our secret too. As we grow closer to him our joy will increase. A previous spiritual director of mine once told me there are two ways of getting warm. He said: We can jump up and down furiously on the spot or exercise our body in some other way. We will certainly warm up and stay warm as long as we keep exercising. But then we grow tired and we grow cold again. The second way is much easier – we stand close to the fire – and we warm up without any effort at all.

Jesus, of course, is the fire which warms us. We need to get close to him – to know him as our personal friend.

So let’s list again, the classical ways of getting close to him.

• Remove the obstacles that stand between us and our friend. In other words, remove sin from our lives. Sin is the only, I repeat, the only barrier to closeness with Jesus. The first step is usually to make a good confession.

• Be where he wants us to be at each moment of the day, faithful to the duties of our life. He doesn’t want a young mother at morning Mass if she should be at home helping the kids get ready for school - or a sick man to fast when he should be eating good food to recover his health.

• Be faithful to the Sunday Mass because faithfulness to Mass is faithfulness to Jesus, as well as to the community.

• Spend quality, regular, prolonged time with our friend to the extent that we can. In other words, pray! He asks it of us. It shows we love him. It increases our love for him.

• Love our neighbour - forgiving, understanding, accepting - not judging, but always encouraging. This is the greatest way to show gratitude to God for all that he has done for us.

What will be the end result of our efforts? It will be holiness, and joy, and peace in our day - even when we suffer!

2nd Sunday of Advent - Year B

Isaiah 40:1-5.9-11; 2 Peter 3:8-14; Mark 1:1-8

Two thousand years ago a prophet appeared in the wilderness of Palestine; his name was John. He wore a garment of camel-skin with a leather belt round his waist and he lived on locusts and wild honey. Obviously he was a great prophet in the class of Elijah the Tishbite who used to wear a hair cloak and a leather loincloth. There was no doubt that John had the prophetic X-factor to an irresistible degree and crowds from all over flocked to him.

Tradition tells us he lived in the desert until he was about thirty. His was the vocation of every prophet, listening to God and learning his will; that is how he would have passed his days in the desert. John was sent to announce the arrival of the One who had been foretold in the Scriptures, the One who would save his people from their sins.

When he appeared people immediately recognised him as an immensely powerful figure. They were attracted by his asceticism, his urgent message of repentance and, above all, by the humility he had learned from attentiveness to his God.

John had come to console God’s people. This had been the call of his predecessor Isaiah: Console my people, console them … speak to the heart of Jerusalem and call her… .

Isaiah promised freedom from the Babylonian oppression and a return to the Holy City, but his prophetic utterances really foretold much more; a much more radical freedom from sin and its consequence, death.

The unrestrained jubilation of his words effortlessly dissipates the thick darkness which hems in our hopes, and carries us with it right into the presence of the God whose coming is promised:

Go up on a high mountain,joyful messenger to Zion.Shout with a loud voice,joyful messenger to Jerusalem.Shout without fear,say to the towns of Judah,'Here is your God'.

Here is your God! He is truly present because he has been promised! Do you get it? His coming in word is no different from his coming in time. His word is reality and truth and it has been spoken; therefore we have every right, even a duty, to rejoice.

Here is the Lord Yahweh coming with power, his arm subduing all things to him. The prize of his victory is with him, his trophies all go before him.

This is where the true believer is separated from the also-rans. They ask ‘Ok, so where is he? Show him to me! Where is this God who has been promised?’ And the true believer responds ‘There he is, in his word, spoken by the prophet!’

Promise and fulfilment - the saints saw no difference. What God speaks he does, what he promises he is, what is foretold is present. Let us rejoice!

And so we see John the Baptist in today’s Gospel, waist deep in the waters of the river Jordan. On the bank stand God’s people – Israelites. John calls them to repent for the forgiveness of their sins: Prepare a way for the Lord, make his paths straight.

Some people begin to move, touched by the prophet’s words. They walk down the bank and into the water to John. We are told they were baptised and that they confessed their sins.

Some stayed on the banks. ‘What’s all this talk about sin?’

• Some said ‘I have no sin!’
• Some said ‘I have too many sins!’
• Some said ‘I only have little sins!’

John called on them all to repent; some did.

Two thousand years later that same call for repentance comes to God’s people.

In the person of his priests, but not only of his priests, the call to repentance comes: Prepare a way for the Lord, make his paths straight.

Now, instead of hundreds of people on the banks of the river Jordan there are millions of people all over the world, listening to the Advent invitation. Some begin to move – Africans, Asians, South Americans, North Americans, Russians, Australians, and Chinese. Prostitutes and tax collectors, rich and poor – and they confess their sins and are forgiven.

Some remain standing on the bank.

I have no sin.

I have too many sins.

I only have little sins, not worth worrying about.

And today, the modern heresy:

• I don’t need to confess even my grave sins to a priest!

Thereby throwing the sacrament of Reconciliation back into the face of Jesus.

The consoling message does not stop, however. It seeks out hearts ready to listen; hearts which don’t make excuses; hearts which see their need.

Let us allow Peter to have the last word from today’s Second Reading:

My friends … We must be careful to remember that during the last days there are bound to be people who will be scornful, the kind who always please themselves what they do, and they will make fun of the promise and ask, 'Well, where is this coming? Everything goes on as it has since the Fathers died, as it has since it began at the creation.'

...The Lord is not being slow to carry out his promises, as anybody else might be called slow; but he is being patient with you all, wanting nobody to be lost and everybody to be brought to change his ways. The Day of the Lord will come like a thief, and then with a roar the sky will vanish, the elements will catch fire and fall apart, the earth and all that it contains will be burnt up. Since everything is coming to an end like this, you should be living holy and saintly lives while you wait and long for the Day of God to come, when the sky will dissolve in flames and the elements melt in the heat. What we are waiting for is what he promised…