Homily, Christmas 2023
From The Pastor
Seeking and savoring. We seek and long for things we feel we need and want, perceiving we do not have them. Savoring is realizing and treasuring what we have longed for with deep gratitude and love. In worldly ways we seek things we believe will make us happy and secure. We savor things which give us pleasure or meaningful peace. Love and faith, food and friendship come to mind.
Spiritual seeking and savoring are different. Spiritually, we seek knowledge and understanding of the presence of God. We seek God’s favor and blessing. We seek with hope the fulfillment of all God promises. To spiritually savor is to ponder, value, and love the things we have received and experienced from God. Savoring is a deeply felt experience of sitting with God’s love.
Advent is for seeking while Christmas is for savoring. In the frame of the Fourth Sunday of Advent, Mary seeks to understand the mystery of God’s Word to her through the Angel. Mary believes with ardent hope in the coming Messiah. Her life is fully identified with God. Her heart and soul are seeking to know and do God’s will. In her body, she must hold the mystery of a pregnancy by the Holy Spirit who will be called the Son of God.
This is spiritual seeking at its finest. Mary deeply desires God and wants to do God’s will. Yet, she is perplexed and troubled by the unknowing of God’s plan. In one way or another, that describes all of us. We are all seeking God with varying degrees of both hope and consternation. Advent is for longing, hoping, and waiting for Divine promises to be fulfilled.
Christmas is for savoring. Christmas savoring has many faces that hold different meanings but point to the same source. On one level, I can say that I am able to readily savor the memories of Christmas past. It is a lived and felt experience. As a child, I remember the mystery and grace of the crib my Dad always built in the fireplace. The manger scene, the angels, Mary and the baby Jesus, cows and donkeys, and the angel at the peak of the crib. I remember the Christmas lights, like the manger, as having more meaning than for putting light in the room. They held and expressed a mystery beyond themselves. Piles of presents, making Christmas cookies, turkey for dinner, with favored relatives for company. These were days to savor not only for the fun and the goodies, but because they spoke of and relayed a mystery. You can only savor a cookie, or turkey and gravy for so long. The crib and the newborn baby who would be the Savior you can ponder forever. This side of Christmas was an easy entry point of experience for a maturing adult faith.
Another way to savor Christmas is to realize and accept the deepest longings of humanity fulfilled in the birth of the child Jesus. We savor because what we have so long desired is now with us. It is one thing to know the details of the story, and quite another to realize and deeply embrace what it means for us. God has come to earth and is already here. God is with us in real and personal ways. Redemption is now accomplished in the infant child who became the adult Christ. We have freedom now from the disorder of sin and the fear of death. Jesus, the longed-for Christ, has died to defeat sin and death and he is now alive and living in every one of us. This is the reality and gift of Christmas now fulfilled in God’s gift of our salvation.
Prayer is a good place to discover and awaken to this mystery of the Christian truth. Prayer is the place to ponder and experience in deep and confirming ways what Christmas means and what is now fully ours in the Lord Jesus. The deepest and most precious gift of prayer is to allow ourselves to feel the embrace of the Lord Jesus with and within us. Prayer is the time and place to surrender to the love God freely gives to us in the Lord Jesus. Once this experience is known, savoring begins. You will not feel this deep love every time you pray, but you will remember the experience of when you did deeply experience God’s love. That is why we savor. We recall the encounter and we sit with it in the same way I might ponder the crib in the fireplace, or the cookies, or company on Christmas. It is all of the same piece as it relays different edges of the same mystery.
Take some time to pray with your Christmas memories. They might be like Mary’s seeking and pondering in troubled ways the mystery of God’s plan. Not all memories will be friendly or peaceful. It was like this for Mary too. Deep faith carried Mary through the sorrow and confusion of a mystery that offered much pain as well as great joy. In both pain and joy seeking and suffering meet.
As you pray, savor the great gift you have been given along with all humanity and creation. Your time will be well spent. Savoring takes quiet and listening. It is not seeking and digging. It is surrendering, realizing, and accepting that your redemption has already been accomplished. It will become more real when you surrender to the experience of being loved by the infant child who became the adult Christ. Jesus lives in you and you live in Jesus.
Merry Christmas.
Father John Esper
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