Christmas Eve

December 24, 2017

+ I hope this doesn’t come as a huge surprise to many of you, but I am a HUGE church nerd. Now, you may think: of course he is. He’s a priest. He should be a church a nerd.

Ah…you’d be surprise how many priests and pastors I know who are not church nerds.

But I most definitely am. The minute the church opens, usually I’m there (I’m the one who usually opens the church after all). And, while some clergy may complain about the fact that they have to work on Christmas Eve and Christmas Day, I definitely do not complain about such things.

I LOVE celebrating this Christmas Eve Mass.  (I also really love celebrating the Christmas Day Mass tomorrow)

Because, let’s face it:  here it is.

This is what it’s all about.

This is why we celebrate.

This is why we do what we do at Christmas.

This is what we hope for.

It might be dark and bitterly cold outside, but here, tonight, we celebrate Light.  And that is what I really love about this night!

We celebrate the Light that has come to us wherever we might be in our lives. We celebrate the Light that breaks through into our darkness, in the darkness we might have in our own lives.   We celebrate the Light that has come to us when we’ve been sad or frustrated or fearful.

And as it does, no doubt most of us are feeling two emotions tonight—the two emotions Christmas is all about: hope and joy.

Hope that God has come to us in Jesus as a glorious and wonderful gift. And now that Gift is here among us

And Joy—at the realization of that reality.

As we come forward tonight to meet with joy and hope this mystery that we remember and commemorate and make ours this evening, we too should find ourselves feeling these emotions—hope and joy—at our very core.

And it is a mystery.  We will never fully understand how or why God has come to us as this little child in a dark stable in the Middle East, but it has happened and, because it happened, we are…different. We are better as a result of it.

God in Jesus has reached out to us.

God—this God who truly does love us, who truly does know us, who truly does care for us---has reached out to us.

Just think about that for a moment. God loves us enough to actually reach out to us.  And by doing so, we know tonight—without a doubt—that we are loved, we are accepted, we are truly known by our God.

Knowing that, what do we feel?

Hope!

And joy!

Because God knows us, loves us, accepts us, our lives are different because of what happened that evening when God sent us a sign of that love and acceptance. Yes, we may have known fear before, we have known dread before, but tonight, with God so close and so near, everything we feared and dreaded has been driven away.  When we look at it from that perspective, suddenly we find our emotions heightened.  We find that our joy is a joy like few other joys we’ve had. We find that our hope is more tangible—more real—that anything we have ever hoped in before.

And that is what we are celebrating this evening.

Our true hope and true joy is not in brightly colored lights and a pile of presents until a decorated tree.  Our true hope and joy is not found in the malls or the stores. Our true hope and joy does not come to us with things that will, a week from now, be a fading memory.

Our hope and joy is in a God who has come to us as a Baby who, as he comes to us, causes us to leap up with joy at his very presence.

Our hope and joy is in that almighty and incredible God who would come to us, not on some celestial cloud with a sword in his hand and armies of angels flying about him.

Our hope and joy is in a God who reaches out to us right now, where we are, and stays with us in this innocent child, born to a humble teenager.

Our hope and joy is in a God who gives us love in very concrete terms—love that has a face like our face and flesh like our flesh—a God who allows love to be  born, like we are born.

Our hope and joy is in a God who comes to us  and accepts us and loves us for who we are and what we are—a God who does not leave us alone in our hurts and our pains.

God loves us.

God knows each of us by name.

Each and every single one of us.  

We are each precious and loved by our God.

That is what this night and this season of Christmas is all about.  This is the real reason why we are joyful and hopeful on this beautiful night.  This is why we are feeling within us a strange sense of longing.

God is here.

God is in our midst.

God is so near, our very bodies and souls are rejoicing.

So, let greet God tonight with all that we have within us. Let us reach out to the God who is reaching out to us. Let us welcome our God and the gift our God has given us with true hope and true joy.  And let us welcome our God into the shelter of our hearts, so that we can share God with others. Amen.