Christmas Homily, Conservations with Consequences Podcast, December 24, 2022

Fr. Roger J. Landry
Conversations with Consequences Podcast
Homily for Christmas
December 24, 2022

To listen to an audio recording of the brief homily, please click below:

The following text guided the homily: 

• Merry Christmas! This is Fr. Roger Landry and it’s a joy to have a chance to ponder with you the consequential conversation God wants to have with us as we celebrate the birth of the Lord.
• There are four different Masses at Christmas with four totally different sets of readings: the vigil Mass in which we hear again the Gospel we pondered last week of the Angel’s appearance to St. Joseph; the Mass during the Night, in which in the Gospel we examine what the angels said to the shepherds keeping watch over their flocks at night; the Mass at Dawn, the Gospel of which centers on the Shepherds’ encounter with Jesus, Mary and Joseph in Bethlehem; and the Mass during the Day, in which we meditate on the beginning of St. John’s Gospel and the theological reality of the Word of God’s becoming flesh and dwelling among us. Each of the Gospels, and the readings that complement them, merits a full treatment, but what I would like to do is to focus on St. Luke’s account of the shepherds with the angels and then with Mary and Joseph and ponder four lessons we can learn from them about what God expects of us as God’s eternal word enters into a consequential conversation with us as he is born of Mary in Bethlehem.
• The first lesson is about vigilance. The Shepherds were on watch. They were able to hear the message proclaimed by the angels because they were awake and this alertness points to an interior readiness to receive God’s word through the Angel. Their hearts were open, waiting for God and longing for God. They were in a state of Advent. They were willing to stretch their imaginations to recognize that God’s highest glory would be found wrapped in swaddling clothes lying in a manger and that such lowliness would be in turn lifted to divine heights. The first Sunday of Advent each year features a Gospel passage that reminds us that we need to awaken and remain alert for the Lord is coming like a thief in the night. The shepherds are models of what it means to be awake and alert for the Lord’s arrival. Like the shepherds, we are all called to be vigilant, to be alert and awake. One great way to determine whether we’re really alert and awake to God, whether we’re able to stretch our imaginations to embrace Christ in the real, real world, is whether we’re able to give up some of our sleep to come to be with him, like happens with the beautiful tradition of Christmas Midnight Mass, which is a bulwark against the propensity to fit the celebration of Christmas and the worship of God into our crowded life; but an annual reminder that we are called to make our lives revolve around the mysteries of faith and that those mysterious realities are worth changing sleep patterns and inconveniencing ourselves. The truth is that if we’re not awake to the presence of God with us, to his word announced through messengers, then we’re essentially living in a dream world that will make us often miss God’s promptings. The shepherds show us what should be occurring in us spiritually throughout the year, staying awake to God’s promptings, to God’s voice, with interior longing, so that when God speaks and calls, we’re listening and ready.
• The second lesson the shepherds teach us is how to respond to God’s promptings. The Gospel passage tells us that “they made haste” to go to Bethlehem. This expression calls to mind what we know about the Blessed Virgin Mary, who as soon as the angel told her that her elderly cousin Elizabeth was pregnant in her old age, she “went with haste” to care for her. The shepherds, like Mary, did not wait to respond to God when they found open time in their calendars. They responded right away. And like with Mary who didn’t need to be told or even suggested to go help her cousin, neither did the shepherds need to be cajoled: the angels told them that in Bethlehem a Savior was born for them who is Christ and Lord and they said to themselves as soon as the angels had departed, “Let us go, then, to Bethlehem to see this thing that has taken place that the Lord has made known to us.” They considered what God had revealed to them so important that they had to go immediately. There’s a very valuable lesson for this in all of us. When we recognize the essential truth, for example, that Jesus is truly present for us on the altar, do we make him a priority and rush to be with him? How many of us make haste today where the things of God are concerned? Pope-emeritus Benedict said in a Christmas Midnight Mass homily, “It is probably not very often that we make haste for the things of God. God does not feature among the things that require haste. The things of God can wait, we think and we say. And yet he is the most important thing, ultimately the one truly important thing.” Many of us don’t give the things of God priority. We postpone prayer, studying his word, learning our faith, doing works of charity, squeezing them in if we have time left over after we do all the other things on our agenda. The shepherds’ example teaches us the freedom that comes from faith, the freedom that helps us to put everything else in second place to God, so that we may always respond promptly to God’s inspirations. The Israelites had waited centuries for the coming of the Messiah, but when he came the vast majority of the Israelites were not alert and were not prepared to change their priorities to be with Him who had taken on our nature to be God-with-us. The inn-keepers had no room for him. The scholars of the law around Herod had no room for him. He came to his own, St. John will tell us at Christmas Mass during the day, and his own people did not accept him, but those who did, he gave power to become children of God. The shepherds accepted the message, made God their priority, went without delay to be with God, and received this power. Mary and Joseph and the wise men also responded in the same way, totally adjusting their lives to the reality of Christ’s coming into the world. They all show us that it’s possible according to our circumstances to do the same.
• The third lesson the shepherds teach us is that, in order to encounter the Lord as he wants, we have to move, we have to change. By God’s designs, the Holy Family could have been directed to the cave where the Shepherds were dwelling so that the Shepherds would not have had to move at all. But even though the eternal Son of God traveled the great distance from heaven to earth to be with them, he was born a short distance away, so that the Shepherds, likewise, would have to get up and move. They needed to rise and gp to Jesus. They needed to make a sacrifice. They needed to dare to go beyond their limits. They needed to travel in the middle of the night at the words and songs of angels. The lesson is that we, too, need to get up from where we are and go to Bethlehem. At no point in his public life did Jesus ever say to us, “Stay where you are!” He always told us, “Come, follow me!” Our faith is dynamic. We need to be willing to change. We need to be willing to journey. We need to be willing to go to the Lord where he is, rather than try to get him to accommodate himself to our own preferences. That requires conversion. That requires faith. But those are gifts that God wants to give us at Christmas, if only we respond.
• The final lesson we learn from the shepherds is that if we really live Christmas well, if we’re vigilant, if we leave where we are and go without delay to the Lord where he is to be found, then we will be changed by him forever. In the Shepherds’ case, St. Luke tells us that after having adored Jesus, they returned, “glorifying and praising God for all they had heard and seen.” They became evangelizers, taking the good news of great joy that the angels had announced to them, out to others. They became, essentially, like new angels singing glory to God in the highest and peace on earth to all those on whom his favor rests. That’s what happens when we really encounter Christ at the depth he wishes.
• During this first year of the three-year Eucharistic Revival that the Church in the US is living, I would encourage you to to act on these lessons that God teaches us through the Shepherds to the privilege we have of adoring the same Lord Jesus in the monstrance that the shepherds, Magi, Angels, animals and Mary and Joseph adored in the manger, and to the even greater privilege we have of receiving him within at Mass each day. The greatest thing that ever happened to the shepherds happened because they didn’t go back to bed when the angels appeared but went with haste to Bethlehem. Likewise the greatest blessings we’ll receive will come when we truly make God-with-us, the Word-made-flesh-who-dwells-among-us, our priority, and seek to live with him full-time as did Mary and Joseph.
• As we prepare soon to adore on the altar the same Christ whom the Shepherds adored in swaddling clothes in the manger, we ask the Lord, born for us, to work in us the same miracle of faith and love he worked in the Shepherds, so that we may always be alert to how God-with-us is still and always with us, to convert from our present habits and go to him without delay, and then, having been transformed by this encounter, become angels from whom others will be able to hear from on high. The Lord Jesus will become truly present on our altar just like he was in Mary’s arms. And he will come to our parish Church, just like he came to Bethlehem, out of saving love. O Come, Let us Adore Him! And let us never cease adoring Him so that one day, with St. Joseph, the Blessed Mother and all the saints, we may have the privilege to worship him forever in the eternal Bethlehem. Merry Christmas!

The Gospel passages on which the homily was based were: 

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