Christmas, 2006

   St. James Cathedral has one-hundred candles on its cake this Christmas and I guess we could say that Jesus has more than two-thousand on his! But we don’t do birthday cakes at Christmas, do we? We don’t celebrate the immense age of Jesus – that’s not what Christmas is about. No, we celebrate Jesus who is “the same yesterday, today, and forever,” Jesus who is Emmanuel, God-with-us, newborn, always fresh, always just beginning.

    I am grateful to a contemporary spiritual writer, Dominican priest, Father Timothy Radcliffe, for that insight and it’s a good one, I think. It’s not Jesus’ age that we mark or celebrate at Christmas; it’s the simple yet dazzling fact that Jesus once came among us and is still coming among us. Because of this, we have reason for hope, we have a future.

    Radcliffe brings this thought to life with a poignant story that goes back to the time when we was serving as the Master General of the Dominican Order. He was paying a visit to his Dominican brothers and sisters in Rwanda in the wake of the terrible genocide there, and he found one of the Dominicans there, a Canadian priest, quite desolate. Nearly all his friends had died and everything he had worked so hard to achieve had been destroyed. There seemed no future at all. But then Radcliffe goes on to tell how, the next Christmas, this priest sent him a picture of himself holding two chubby Rwandan babies. Under the picture he had written the words, “Africa has a future!”

    Every Christmas when we remember the birth of the Christ child we look backwards in time, yes, but we also look to the Christ being born among us now, and for that reason we are able to say the same thing as that priest in Rwanda. We are able to say that ‘humanity has a future.’

    And isn’t that a message we all desperately need to hear – that humanity has a future? So much around us says otherwise. So much around us spells defeat. So many of our efforts come to naught. So many human enterprises collapse under the weight of the fear or the greed or the selfishness that drive them. Look at the fields of war, look at the dark ghettoes of world poverty. Look at the poverty of our own lives. But then look also at the Christ – the Christ of Bethlehem, yes, but the Christ of the here and now, too. The Christ in the least of our brothers and sisters, the Christ we carry in our hearts, the Christ whose sacraments sustain us on our journey and keep us from dying of hunger or thirst, the Christ whose gospel still pricks and prods the consciences of millions.

    My friends, we celebrate a birthday at Christmas but we celebrate so much more. We celebrate the embrace by the all-powerful and eternal God of our broken world and our broken selves. We celebrate the fact that God once came to us as one of us and that God still does, for God continues to come among us in countless ways, human ways, sometimes shockingly human ways, ways we can touch and that touch us -- in word and sacrament, in bread and wine, and also in the flesh and blood of our brothers and sisters: good people but far from perfect people, people a long way from being saints, people striving to be saints.

    That’s why Christmas is as much about now as it is about then. Oh, it’s fine to remember the then – in fact, it’s important that we do: that we dim the lights, trim the trees, sing the carols, and visit the crib. We must. But we must not stay there. We must look around us and see where hope is showing its face today: in two people falling in love, in the birth of a baby, in love showered on an aging parent; in the sheltering of the poor, in the awakening of a conscience, the conversion of a heart; in the dialogue between religions, the laying down of arms, the pursuit of justice, the search for peace. Each of these flashes of hope gives a glimpse of the face of God who first showed us his face in Jesus Christ and has never stopped doing so.

    My friends, Christmas means that God loves the human family. Loves, not loved. Christmas means that God is part of our family and that we are part of God’s family. Ever since Christ was born in Bethlehem, born in our own flesh, Christmas became an ongoing thing, not a once-upon-a-time thing. God made the first one happen but counts on us to make this one – and all the others – happen. Today. Everyday!

Father Michael G. Ryan
Cathedral Pastor

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