Fix You

Twenty-third Sunday in Ordinary Time
    Songs have a way of touching us when mere words don’t suffice.  Sometimes they increase our joy; sometimes they commiserate with us in sorrow.  One such song for when a person feels down and out is “Fix You” by the band Coldplay.  Towards the beginning of the song the listener hears, “And the tears come streaming down your face / When you lose something you can’t replace / When you love someone, but it goes to waste / Could it be worse? //  Lights will guide you home / And ignite your bones / And I will try to fix you.”  Nothing like a mopey song to get your Sunday going, eh?
    But in all seriousness, our God did come to fix us.  We hear it in all our readings.  Jesus’ very name means “God saves.”  The word for savior in Greek is 𝜎𝜔𝜏𝜂𝜌, which, in ancient times, could also mean healer, in addition to savior.  Isaiah outlined ways that God would heal His people, and Mark shows the profound healing of a deaf and mute man.  Even St. James in his epistle demonstrates how that healing goes beyond just our physical realities, and includes the healing of our prejudices that can affect how we live the Gospel.
    But all of this presumes that we know we need healing and saving.  And to admit that we need healing and saving includes the admission that we are ill and lost.  And that can be hard to admit.  It seems much easier to live with the veneer that everything is going great, that we have everything under control.  We learn to live with our illness and brokenness, and think that our infirmity and disfunction are normal.  We put up walls and barriers to the grace of God, because in order to let that grace and healing in, we have to admit that we are not as we should be, and that might make us hurt as we acknowledge things that our mind prefers to ignore but our heart knows all too well.
    Acknowledging the salvation of God also means that we don’t treat Jesus as our preferential guru.  If we treat Jesus as simply the teacher who works best for us, while others have other teachers who help them be the best they can be, we miss the point of what Jesus taught and did.  Teachers or gurus teach a way of life, but they don’t save.  Only saviors teach a way of life, and heal, and save.  Moses cannot save; Buddha cannot save; Mohammed cannot save; Confucius cannot save.  Any teacher or guru that you name might help us in some ways, but they cannot bridge the chasm that sin created.  They cannot heal at the root the sickness that infects our hearts and souls.  Only Christ can do that.
    Admitting that we need a savior goes against what our culture wants to affirm.  In these days, we affirm however you feel you are, whether or not that is good for you, whether or not it leads you to excellence.  Society says I feel I love this person, so you have to accept my understanding of romantic love, even if it flies in the face of what God has revealed romantic love truly is.  Society says I may be morbidly obese due to bad died and lack of exercise, but you can’t tell me to lose weight because that would be shaming my body.  Society says I don’t feel comfortable in the body God gave me, so you have to refer to me in whatever way I choose, regardless of my biological sex, and you even have to provide me with procedures that either involve mutilation or hormone blocking drugs so that the way I feel can be affirmed.  All of these examples, and many more less significant ones, base themselves in a reality that I pretend I can mold to my own emotions, so that I don’t have to acknowledge the deep pain of brokenness in my life.  Because acknowledging that brokenness will make me feel sad or make me feel pain, and that’s the last thing I want to feel.  So I ignore it and try to live in a fantasy world where I live my own truth which fits standards which don’t call me higher and to a fuller form of life.

    Instead, Christ came to heal our brokenness, which might be painful at first, but brings true wholeness and holiness in the end.  Christ helps you to know that your sexual desires do not define you as a person, and can be properly ordered according to how He made the world.  Christ brings you healing from those unhealthy patterns of self-medication so that you don’t have to use food or laziness to feel better.  Christ comes to help you love yourself and how God made you, just as much as God loves you.  Christ wants to help you deal with whatever broken reality you are living now, to save you from your false realities, so that you’re prepared for the final judgement, where reality will not bend to your will, but will impose itself, whether you want it to or not.  
    Jesus did not come to make us feel better about our fallen selves.  Jesus came to heal what was broken in us; to save what was fallen in us.  Jesus did not come to help us usher in a world according to our own design, but to live in the world that He made, to start restoring us to a place even better than the Garden of Eden, where all creation lived in harmony with God and each other.  Let the Light of Christ guide you home.  Let the Holy Spirit ignite you with His love.  God has come to fix you.

What Humility Is and Isn't

Third Sunday after Pentecost

    In the name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Spirit.  Amen.  St. Peter today advises us to be humble.  A simple exhortation.  A difficult execution, for a variety of reasons, including a lack of understanding of in what humility consists, as well as a deeply-ingrained American habit of self-sufficiency.  Difficult also because humility goes hand-in-hand with the Incarnation, and so the devil tries to keep us from humility at all costs.
    First, what humility is not: humility is not ignoring gifts or talents that we have, or pretending that gifts or talents are not good.  That is false humility, and it is actually pride, because we become the judges of what is good or a gift, rather than receiving gifts with open hands from our loving Father.  I think in an effort to avoid pride, it can be so easy to say, and mean, when someone gives us a compliment, “Oh, I’m not that good,” or “it really isn’t that much.”  Someone has recognized something good in you, which reflects back to the goodness of God who made us.  There is nothing wrong with acknowledging that gift, especially if we acknowledge God who gave us that gift.  Christ Himself said, “‘Your light must shine before others, that they may see your good deeds and glorify your heavenly Father.’” 
    At the same time we cannot claim that our gifts are entirely up to us.  Bragging or making sure that others know about our gifts, whether they want to know or not, goes against the virtue of humility.  There’s nothing wrong with using our gifts and talents, and if someone compliments us on them, we can certainly thank the other person for their kind words, while acknowledging that God is the source of every good gift, but we go beyond what we should when we want to make sure that others know exactly what we’re good at, or talk about our achievements and successes without others desiring to know what they might be. 
    But humility comes from humus, meaning ground or dirt, and understands that God is God and we are not.  Not that God would ever say this, but when I think about the rude awakening to the fact that we are not God, the phrase that comes to mind comes with my mother’s voice: “I brought you into this world, I can take you out.”  Again, not God’s voice there, but there exists a reality that God does not need us for anything, and the world existed just fine without us.  The fact that God chose to have us in the world is due only to His love and providence, which is pure gift.  We could not earn a spot in the world.  Each Lent we especially focus on this, as we hear in Latin, “Remember, O man, that you are dust, and to dust you shall return.”  Humility recognizes, as hard as the temptation wants to exert itself again and again, that we are not God or master of our own destiny or the universe.  Adam and Eve precisely failed on this point, as they wanted to be like God on their own terms, not His, and disobeyed His command to not eat the fruit from the tree of the knowledge of good and evil.
    Which brings up another way of living a humble life: recognizing our need for a savior.  Intellectually, we probably all agree that we need to be saved.  But do we act like it?  Or do we act like we save ourselves?  I think this is a particularly dangerous temptation for Catholics.  We have so many things that we do, so many prayers and pious acts and sacrifices that we take upon ourselves.  And those are good, and can help us to accept God’s grace and love.  But those prayers and pious acts and sacrifices don’t save us.  God saves us. 
    Humility can also be tough when we live a pretty good life.  We start to approach life as if we have it all figured out.  But if that’s the case, then why would we need God?  If we don’t need saving, then we don’t need a Savior.  And if we don’t need a Savior, then why did Jesus bother dying on the cross?  Or course, even if we are not the worst sinners, we need a savior.  And not just for years past, but at each moment of our life. 
    This doesn’t mean that we make up sins in our confession.  We may well avoid all mortal sins; praise God!  And maybe we’re not even that cognizant of many venial sins.  But certainly there are ways that we can grow in our relationship with God.  The saints are great examples of this.  As they grow in holiness, it’s not that they make up sins, or make sins out of things that are not.  But the recognize even smaller affronts to God that maybe they never noticed before.  They are sensitive to the little ways in which they draw back from divine guidance or control, and seek absolution for those things.  The saints, though from an outside view sin very infrequently, if at all, know deeply, in the very marrow of their bones, that they need a savior each moment of their lives.  And they know that any success that they have in following God and living any virtue is due only to God’s gracious love and life being poured into their hearts. 
    The humble man or woman lets God come after him or her like a shepherd seeks after a sheep or like the woman searching after her lost coin.  A person living humility knows that he or she is lost without God, and begs that he or she might stay with the fold, but if not, be found as soon as possible. 
    If you think you’re doing well with humility, I would encourage you to pray the Litany of Humility.  Does any of it bristle you?  If so, it might be a part of your life that needs deeper conversion.  I know that I am still very much working on humility.  I like self-dependency.  I get uncomfortable when others compliment me.  But praised be God who has given me gifts, and who lets me see the ways in which I still need to grow in allowing His grace to transform me to be a better disciples.  To Him be glory and dominion for ever and ever: the Father, and the Son, and the Holy Spirit.  Amen.  

Needing Jesus

 Solemnity of St. Matthew
    [In the name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Spirit.  Amen.].  You all are probably aware that I’m a big fan of country music.  And I would argue that the first couple of country music right now are Tim McGraw and Faith Hill.  In 2007 they released a song together called, “I Need You.”  And the refrain goes, “So I need you. // Like a needle needs a vein / Like my Uncle Joe in Oklahoma needs the rain / I need you. / Like a lighthouse on the coast /…I need you.”

    Do we need Jesus?  As we celebrate our parish patron, that is the question that our Lord asks of us today, and which St. Matthew exemplifies.  What was it that made Matthew drop everything to follow Christ?  What allowed Matthew to put on a dinner in his home for our Lord?  He realized that He needed Jesus.
    No doubt, St. Matthew had tried to fill up his life with other things.  He was a tax collector for an occupying government, which probably meant that he didn’t have a lot of Jewish friends, at least not the kind that went to synagogue.  Perhaps Matthew thought that, as long as he had to be under an oppressive government, he would at least get a little ahead by working for them.  Recall, too, that tax collectors generally made their money from charging more than the taxes, so they could pocket the difference.  But that money did not satisfy him fully.
    We don’t know if St. Matthew was married, but, by tradition, only John was unmarried.  Let’s hope that Matthew had a happy marriage, maybe even had a few kids.  But he knew that even those goods of family life could not fully satisfy him.
    Matthew was a man in need of a savior.  He knew it, even if he couldn’t put his finger on what would satisfy that need until our Lord came and called him.  But once Christ did call Matthew, everything was changed, and Matthew had to leave behind everything else and follow our Lord.
    Christ said today that He did not come to call the just, but sinners.  What is it about the just that tends to leave them outside the call of Christ?  They don’t feel they need Him.  Does that mean that Christ did not come for the holy?  How can one be holy without God’s help?  Those who are convinced of their own righteousness do not look for a savior, because they feel they have saved themselves by their own good deeds.  Those who are models of holiness, the saints, always recognized their need for God, and that they could not be holy without Him.  They mourned even their venial sins because they recognized how even those small sins hurt God.  The saints knew throughout their lives that they needed a savior, even as they advanced in their relationship with God.  
    The fulfillment of the realization that Matthew needed a savior was so powerful that Matthew wrote a Gospel about the God-Man who changed his life by a simple call.  He wrote down the stories that we have learned from childhood: the visit of the Magi; the Sermon on the Mount; the call of St. Peter to be the first pope; part of the words of Institution in the Mass; the great commission to “Go and make disciples of all nations, baptizing them in the name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Spirit.”  He organized his account of the Gospel in a way that people would see in the Lord the fulfillment of the promise of Moses that God would raise up another prophet, to whom the Chosen People needed to listen.  Indeed, it seems to be divided into five parts, just like the Pentateuch, the first five books of the Tanakh, the Jewish scriptures.
    That fulfillment that St. Matthew found also made his passion and martyrdom worth the price.  Nothing was more precious than the gift of a savior that Matthew had found in our Lord.  Everything else, to use the words of his fellow apostle, Saint Paul, was as rubbish when compared with the treasure Matthew had found in Christ.  
    So, do we need a savior?  No matter what our virtues or the ways we say yes to God, do we still recognize that we need Him?  Do we still cry out to Him for mercy that justifies us, that puts us in right relationship with God?  Or do we feel like we can handle things on our own without God?  
    Do our hearts still yearn for a deeper relationship with God to fill the holes in our hearts that no material goods can satisfy?  When our Lord calls us in our custom’s post, are we ready to respond because we know we need Him?  
    And as we find that fulfillment, do we then respond by sharing that good news, that evangelium, with others?  Is the joy in our heart from knowing Christ so great that we can’t help but share it with those we meet?  Or do we keep our light under a bushel basket, and allow our salt to grow tepid?  Would we be willing to give up our lives for our Lord, or do we serve other lesser gods in our life?  Do we need Jesus?  If so, then together, as a parish, let us follow Him, who with the Father and the Holy Spirit reign, unto the ages of the ages.  Amen. 

Doing It On Our Own?

 Twenty-Third Sunday in Ordinary Time

    A year or so I bought a grill for a young couple with whom I am friends who had expressed some interest in getting a combination grill/smoker.  I did some shopping, found what I wanted at a Lowe's in Brighton, and bought the grill.  When it came time to load it into my Jeep, I realized it was going to be a bit of a struggle, as it was much heavier than I expected.  Luckily, an off-duty State Trooper I know just happened to be coming into the Lowe's when I about ready to load it in, so he was able to help me.  This should have been my first clue that putting this grill together was going to require more than one person, given that even simply loading it into my vehicle required two of us.
    I got home, and, when I had a day off, I decided I was going to put it together.  I quickly learned that it was meant to be a two- to three-person job, because some of the parts were supposed to be held as bolts were tightened.  But, stubborn as I am, I found a way, somehow, to put it together.  With the help of another friend, I delivered it, only to notice that some of the screws I had tightened were a bit loose, due, no doubt, to the fact that I tried to assemble the grill/smoker myself.
    When it comes to salvation, we might take the same approach: I can do it myself.  And maybe even today’s Gospel seems to back us up.  After all, Jesus says, “‘Which of you wishing to construct a tower doe snot first sit down and calculate the cost to see if there is enough for its completion?’”  In other words, we may interpret Jesus to be saying, “Do you have enough to follow me?”  
    But, the fact is, we cannot follow Jesus without Jesus.  That may seem quite obvious when stated that way.  But how many times do we attempt to be our own savior, only to get frustrated when it doesn’t work?  We figure that we simply have to muscle through being a disciple, and then God will be pleased with us and we’ll go to heaven.  When we meet failure (as we most certainly will at some point), it then forces a decision: do we try to muscle through even harder (we failed because we weren’t trying hard enough)?  Or do we just give up because following Jesus is too hard?
    Of course, the better option is to allow Jesus to work within us, rather than trying to save ourselves.  If humanity could save itself, then Jesus and the Incarnation is altogether unnecessary.  If humanity could save itself, then certainly Abraham, or Moses, or David, or one of the prophets would have figured it out.  But, of course, they didn’t.  Not one of the patriarchs, kings, or prophets, no matter how good they attempted to be, could save themselves and follow God perfectly.  They all needed help from above.
    And we cannot follow Jesus without Him.  In fact, He does most of the work, and our job is to cooperate with that work and not get in the way.  When we do fail, it’s usually because we have gotten in the way.  “But Fr. Anthony,” you may say, “Jesus today said that if we do not carry our own cross and follow Him, we cannot be His disciple.”  That is what Jesus said.  But we are not meant to carry our cross by ourselves.  Jesus Himself received the assistance, albeit coerced by the Romans, of Simon of Cyrene to carry the Cross that brought us salvation.  So if even the Master receives assistance in carrying His literal cross, then why do we think that we can do it without any assistance?
    Trying to be our own savior and carrying our cross without Jesus can look very similar to someone who is allowing Jesus to be the savior and allowing Jesus to help carry our cross.  From the externals, it may be exactly the same: we pray, we make time for God, we talk to others about Jesus, we do works of charity for others, etc.  But what is different is the interior disposition.  The person who wants to save him or herself; the person who decides to carry the cross on his or her own, prays, but only because it is required.  That person makes time for God, but only out of fear that if we don’t give God some minimal amount of time, then He won’t let us into heaven.  That person talks about God, but only to increase the size of the parish by adding another member or two.  That person gives money to the poor or to organizations because it’s a nice tax write-off, or he or she likes seeing the name in a donor list.
    On the other hand, the person who allows Jesus to be the savior and help carry our cross prays because it is a chance to spend time with the Beloved, who wants to hear what is going on in our life, and wants to communicate a path forward.  That person makes time for God because that is the number one priority, and the other priorities fall into place after Him.  That person speaks to others about Jesus as a friend or spouse talks about their beloved, and wants others to know that same joy and love.  That person sees Jesus in the poor and the suffering and so does what he or she can to alleviate that suffering in the least of the brothers and sisters of Jesus.  The acts might be the same, but the motivation is totally different.
    You cannot save yourself.  You cannot carry your cross alone.  You cannot earn heaven by anything you could ever do, even in a million years.  Allow Christ to be your Savior.  Let Him work in you, and cooperate with that work, not trying to earn the love of God, but responding to it.  When we do respond to God’s love because of the love He has first shown us, then we will be the disciples that God calls us to be.

Job and Detroit Lions Fans

 Fifth Sunday in Ordinary Time

    I am convinced that at some point in the future, the Lions will make it to the Super Bowl.  It will be the fourth quarter, and the Lions will be losing by 1 point.  They’ll be on the opponent’s 20 yard line, ready to kick the game-winning field goal, with 1 second left on the clock.  The kicker will kick the ball, and it will go straight, ready to pass through the uprights, and just as it’s about to pass through, and the refs are about to raise their hands, Jesus Christ will return in glory, and the Lions will forever be the team that never won a Super Bowl.
    As Lions fans we are used to disappointment.  There are other bad teams, but only the Lions seem to find new and exciting ways to snatch defeat from the jaws of victory.  So perhaps we can sympathize with Job from our first reading and say “I have been assigned months of misery, and troubled nights have been allotted to me.”  In case you’re unfamiliar with Job, it’s a beautiful book of the Bible.  It may be more of a parable than a literal story, but it tells the story of a man who is faithful to God, but then undergoes great trials.  His first trial is that his oxen and donkeys were grazing, and were stolen by Sabeans, who killed all the herdsmen, save one.  Lightening struck all his sheep and shepherds and killed all but one shepherd.  Chaldeans came and stole all of Job’s camels, and killed all their caretakers, save one.  His seven sons and three daughters were all killed when their house collapsed during a party, and only one servant survived.  To this Job says: “‘The Lord gave and the Lord has taken away; blessed be the name of the Lord.’”  Quite the ordeal!
 

   But then, Job is struck by severe boils “from the soles of his feet to the crown of the head.”  Life is so bad that his wife, obviously a loving and caring woman, tells Job, “‘Curse God and die.’”  The Book of Job makes clear that Job has done nothing wrong, and yet he suffers greatly.  This story of Job is an attempt to understand why bad things happen to good people.  I encourage you to read the rest of the book (we only hear a part of chapter 7 today) to see how it ends.
    Suffering is a part of life, not just for Lions’ fans.  There are moral evils that we have to suffer with (crimes, betrayals, loneliness from others’ rejection of us); there are also natural evils that make us suffer (natural disasters, illnesses, pandemics).  People of all faiths and none struggle with this question, sometimes called Theodicy, of why bad things happen to good people, and why there is evil in the world.  In case you’re wondering, there is no easy answer.
    Jesus, as He so often does, turns the question on its head.  What does He do?  He heals; He grants wholeness; He saves.  Our Gospel today relates healings that Jesus did, exorcisms, and preaching.  Jesus shows us that He enters into our evils, some of our own making, some that we have no control over, and He brings healing.  The very word for savior in Latin, Salvator, is connected to another word, salus, meaning health.  The Salvator is the one who brings salus.  
    But Jesus, our Savior, doesn’t do so extrinsically, outside of all our sufferings.  He doesn’t watch from afar and offer us health while social distancing.  He enters into our pain, our suffering, our illness, and brings us delight, wholeness, and health.  And that’s part of the beautiful message of the Gospel: Jesus defeats sin and death through His Passion, Death, Resurrection, and Ascension; but we still see it happening, until Jesus returns and ushers in the fullness of His Kingdom.  Until then, Jesus suffers with and in us; He does not abandon us.  And while suffering is not good, it always helps to know that we are not alone, that our suffering has not separated us from the One who loves us above all, as suffering often does make us feel segregated.
    I think this is so clear from our pandemic.  I’m not here to argue against science and taking necessary precautions to protect one’s health.  But one of the greatest evils in this pandemic, whether physically necessary or not, is that we are being disconnected from each other.  Whether we have symptoms, are asymptomatic, or are virus-free, COVID has sought to divide us from each other.  The age-old wounds of sin and division, that were always just below the surface, have come to the top and are festering.  And because we lack a physical unity with each other, that spiritual and emotional unity has also been stretched, or even torn.  
    In the midst of that division, Jesus continues to heal and make whole.  There are stories of heroic Catholics–priests, deacons, and lay faithful–who have refused to let people die alone, even if they had COVID.  The Church has continued to feed the poor, shelter the homeless, educate adults and children, because that is Jesus’ work, and that work does not stop just because there’s a pandemic.  My mind is drawn, by way of an earlier example, to St. Damian of Molokai, whose Belgian blood I share, who gave up his own life to bring Jesus and His healing, especially spiritual healing, to the leper colony in the Hawaiian islands.  
    But even today, through the Sacrament of Penance (confession) and the Eucharist, Jesus continues to heal, and continues to walk with us through our suffering.  He has defeated it, and suffering will end when Christ is all in all.  But until then, Jesus does not leave us orphans; He does not leave us to suffer alone, but suffers with and in us, so that we can bear our burden with Him.
    In the times when you feel most alone, most abandoned, most bereft of human interaction, turn to Jesus in prayer.  Come to the church and spend time in front of the Blessed Sacrament.  Look to the crucifix, and lay all your trials on that cross.  If you do, life, victory, and wholeness will be yours in Christ Jesus our Lord. 

A Savior, Not a President

Solemnity of the Nativity of the Lord–Mass at Night

In eleven months, we will be electing a new president of the United States.  And yet, we are all too familiar with the fact that campaign season is in full force.  It seems like every fifth commercial on the TV ends with, “I’m so and so, and I approved this message,” or “Paid for by the Elect So and So Fund.”  In recent weeks, in the wake of the terrorist attacks in Paris and San Bernardino, much of the attention of the country has turned to what the federal government is doing to keep us safe.  A good chunk of the news is also focused on the use of guns, either by private individuals or police officers.  Every candidate has his or her view on what really needs to be done to keep all people safe from all threats, whether from abroad or from within the homeland.

Hopefully we are forming our consciences by the light of the Gospel and Catholic Social teaching so that, when it comes to the primaries and the general election, we can vote for someone who advances not so much the agenda of a political party, but the truth and policies that will help all people to live in freedom and security.

But it can be too easy for people to pin all their hope on a new president.  They are convinced that if Hillary Clinton is elected, then all will be well.  They are certain that if Donald Trump is elected, then America will be great again.  Brothers and sisters, this Christmas we celebrate and we remember that our hope is not in this person or that person who will have the highest office in the land.  We celebrate not a political solution to our problems, but a Savior!

Our burden is so much greater than high or low taxes; unemployment rates and those no longer looking for jobs; whether or not our military should be involved in a war in the Middle East.  Our burden is sin: sin which causes us to hate others, sin which causes us to take advantage of others, sin which causes us to destroy ourselves.  And no human person can save us from that.  No human person will free us from this cycle of sin.  But we proclaim, this night, that we have a savior.  We have a Person who will smash the yoke that burdens us and the rod of our taskmaster.  We have someone who will confirm judgment and justice for us, who will give light to our lives and make us rejoice.  And that Person is not the person who will occupy the most powerful office in the world.  That Person is the “Wonder-Counselor, God-Hero, Father-Forever, Prince of Peace.”  That Person, whose birth around 2,000 years ago we celebrate tonight, instituted His reign as a baby.  “For a child is born to us, a son is given us.”

The temptation is to be no different than all of our ancestors who placed their hope in earthly rulers.  How many people were sure that Caesar Augustus, who instituted the Pax Romana, the Roman Peace, was the savior who would protect and govern the whole world?  And yet, while Octavian Augustus ruled in his fine palazzo in Rome, the true King was born, in a cave, in a land that no one cared about, from a people whose glory had long since faded with the death of King David.

The solutions to our problems, as a nation and as a world, do not come from the political order.  Politics certainly has its place in promoting the common good and order among all people.  But the problems in our nation and our world come from the fact that, while the angels proclaimed a great joy for all people, someone who would truly save us, we are convinced that our salvation cannot come from a peaceful child who grew up to be a crucified leader of a small “heretical” group of Jews.  We do not have peace on earth because we do not give glory to God in the highest.  We are constantly at war–in the world, in our cities, and in our hearts–because we have been like the inn keepers of Bethlehem who, when asked to make room for a poor couple who is about to give birth to their first-born, have pushed them back out into the streets.  The Prince of Peace has come to the doors of our hearts, and we have turned him away.  

The solutions to all of the world’s problems begin here, as they began in a manger in a cave in Bethlehem.  Even with the multitude of the heavenly host praising God, the shepherds must have thought, ‘What good can this little family do?  They are so few, and the kings of the world are so powerful.’  Maybe we think, too, ‘What good would it do if I lived as Christ called me to?  Would it change anything if I truly lived as if Jesus were the most important person in my life?’

In Greek mythology, Sisyphus, the king of Ephyra, was cursed by the gods for his self-aggrandizing craftiness and deceitfulness, and was made to roll an immense boulder up a hill, only to see it roll down to the base as he approached the top.  If we place our hope for the solutions to our problems in worldly efforts of this or that political party or that, we are bound to the same results.  But tonight, as we celebrate Christmas, let us recommit ourselves to electing a new king for our hearts, a king who seems powerless, but is the only one who can save us.  

Tonight, Jesus knocks on the door of your heart and invites you to elect Him to rule over you, an election which can change the course of human history, just as He did with twelve uneducated men and a handful of followers in the middle of nowhere in the Roman Empire.  “Beloved: The grace of God has appeared, saving all and training us to reject godless ways and worldly desire and to live temperately, justly, and devoutly in this age, as we await the blessed hope, the appearance of the glory of our great God and savior Jesus Christ, who gave himself for us to deliver us from all lawlessness and to cleanse for himself a people as his own, eager to do what is good.”  Beloved: “Today is born our Savior, Christ the Lord.”