Homily for Fourth
Sunday of Advent
December 24, 2017
Tabernacled Among
Us
There
was once a man who was obstinately against the Christian faith – he just couldn’t
understand how God could ever become man. His wife continued to invite him to
church every Christmas and Easter, but he refused, figuring he didn’t believe
any of this Christianity stuff, so why should he go to church?
It was a
dark and snowy Christmas Eve when his wife and kids went to church, leaving
this man alone in his house after dark. All of a sudden, he heard several loud
thumps on his window. He looked out into the snow, and was surprised to see
that a dozen birds had accidentally flown into his window, looking for shelter
from the snow. They looked cold, dazed, and injured, so his heart was moved
with pity for them and he tried to give them a refuge from the cold night.
He
quickly went to his garage and opened the garage door, but the birds refused to
come in. He spread straw and sawdust on the floor, but still the birds didn’t
come in. Going to his cabinet, he found some birdseed, which he sprinkled on
the floor with a trail leading to the birds. But the birds, startled by the
man, started to scatter in the snow.
The man
came outside, trying to usher the birds into the garage, but they were
terrified and ran further away. Frustrated and saddened, he said to himself, “If
only I was a bird like them, I could lead them to safety! I wish I could speak
their language and tell them not to fear, to tell them that they could get out
of this darkness! If only I was one of them!”
All of a
sudden, he realized he was describing what God did at Christmas. He fell to his
knees in the snow and accepted Christ into his life.
The
Incarnation – God taking flesh – is what sets Christianity apart from every
other world religion. All other religions are man’s search for God, but
Christianity is God’s search for man. He is the one who took the initiative; He
is the one who called out to us when we were lost, alone, afraid, dead. He took
on flesh to show us what God was like. On our own, we would never have been
able to know who God is. Yes, creation gives us a glimpse into His goodness,
and we can know a few things about Him. But it’s like the difference between
seeing a single painting of Leonardo da Vinci versus actually meeting him. The
painting reveals a lot, but it is so much richer to meet the Artist
face-to-face.
When
Gabriel explains to Mary how this great miracle of the Incarnation will come
about, he uses an interesting phrase. He says that the “power of the Most High
will overshadow you.” That has so many connections to the Old Testament,
particularly to the Ark of the Covenant. While the Israelites were wandering
the desert, they had a tent where the Ark of the Covenant was kept – this tent
was called the “Meeting Tent” because it was where God met with Moses and spoke
with him face-to-face. Whenever God would appear in the Meeting Tent, a cloud
of glory (called the Shekinah) would descend upon the tent and overshadow it,
so that Moses could converse with God.
Here we
see Mary, the Ark of the New Covenant – the sacred covenant that would be sworn
upon the Cross – who is overshadowed by the glory of the Lord. Her womb would
be the place where God and humanity met once and for all. Now, in Jesus, God
and man could no longer be separated, because God became a man. There was no way for God to disown the human race,
because He is now one of us!
In John’s
Gospel, John says that “the Word became flesh and dwelt among us.” But a better
translation would be that He “pitched His tent” or “His tabernacle” among us.
We do not need to go through Moses to speak to God in His tabernacle, His
meeting tent – in Jesus Christ, particularly in His Word and in His Body and
Blood in the Eucharist, we are able to meet with Him!
This is
why we call Him “Emmanuel” – God with us. How comforting to know that God is
with us! He never promised to make our life easy and pleasant – He promised to
be with us. How powerful that can be!
One of
the most difficult times in my life happened on December 14, 2012. I was
assigned in St. Mary’s in Bethel, which is the next-door town to Newtown. On that
fateful day when 26 innocent lives were taken in the Sandy Hook shooting,
pretty much my entire parish was affected. Almost every parishioner knew
someone in Sandy Hook. That whole day, all of the clergy at St. Mary’s were
busy comforting our parishioners. We had a powerful prayer vigil attended by several
hundred people. We couldn’t take the pain away, but we could show that God was
with us in the midst of the tragedy.
That
whole day, I had been texting back and forth with Fr. Luke Suarez, a good
friend of mine who was the parochial vicar at St. Rose of Lima in Newtown. He
had been down at the firehouse in Sandy Hook, meeting with police officers and
families of the victims. I let him know that if we could do anything, we were
at his service.
About
ten o’clock at night, he called me and asked if I would get the other priests
and come down to the firehouse in Sandy Hook. We went, unsure of what we would
encounter there. I remember being so nervous that I couldn’t stop shaking as we
drove the seven miles to the scene of the tragedy. When we got to the
firehouse, the police chief split all of the clergy up into teams with social
workers and cops so that each team would visit the house of one of the victims
to give them the official declaration of death and to comfort the family.
I was chosen
to go with a heroic cop and psychologist to the home of Jack Pinto, one of the
six-year-olds who was killed in the shooting. I have never experienced anything
quite like that grief. We went into the home, hearing only loud cries and
lamentations. We sat with the family for an hour – what could we say? What
words could bring comfort in a situation like that? It is there, sitting on the
Pintos’ floor, that I felt more closely than ever before what it means to say
that God is with us. I couldn’t take
the pain away. I couldn’t find words to heal a void that still aches to this
day. But we could love them. We could sit with them in their sorrow. We could be
there so that they weren’t alone.
And so
it is with God. We like to think that God’s job is to take away all of our
suffering and pain. But He never promised that – rather, He promised that He
would enter into our pain with us and be there at every moment. He is Emmanuel – God with us. He has so
tightly united Himself to humanity that we can claim Him as one of ours – a union
so tight that it will never be broken.
If you’re
looking for God, you don’t have to look far. He was in a crib, because He was
truly human like us. He was on the Cross, because He wanted to redeem us and
set us free from our sins. He remains in His Word to enlighten our minds; He
remains in the Eucharist to fill our bodies and souls with grace. He is not
far. He is Emmanuel.
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