Christmas Eve – 2024
Good Evening Brothers and Sisters, it’s Christmas and the Angels have invited us into peace, joy and the glory of God as we celebrate the birth of Jesus that gives us new hope. Jesus came as one of us so we can share his divine life. It is God who comes to us in a radical way, present to us in history. Christmas is the celebration of light, the way forward, new life. An experience of God with us. A sense of deeper realities of belonging to God, touching our true selves, touching our hearts. A reminder of all we believe and seek to hold on to in our lives of faith. God loving us.
The angels announced it as the Glory of God, we have this great hope that we can overcome suffering, we can overcome alienation, violence, polarization. All that the human experience has opened out to us. We have this hope why, because Jesus is born to us, a savior is given us.
We see our true nature is of God, love and mercy, forgiveness and joy. The glory of God with us.
As long as we seek to live Christ, we CAN overcome the traumas we face over and over. We can transform the human experience by Christ’s sacrificial love. That’s loving others first.
It started in the stable, this deep love of Jesus, and the beginning of all he would endure for us, living in an unstable world. God knows that’s the world today. We seek to stabilize the world by our witness to Christ. Our living Christ, preaching Christ as the way forward.
We know it is not an easy task, that’s part of the suffering we experience to insure the truth is told and held onto it. Christ come to show us how to overcome suffering and transform it into new life. That’s the gift of this Christmas eve as we approach 2025 with hope and not despair. Pope John Paul II helped us undersrnd suffering. He suffered himself being faithful to his call as Pope for so long. We too want to be faithful to where life has called us to be in faith. Here’s what John Paul said:
Suffering seems to be particularly essential to the nature of man, as deep as man himself, precisely because it manifests in its own way that depth which is proper to man, and in its own way surpasses it. Suffering seems to belong to man’s transcendence: it is one of those points in which man is in a certain sense destined to go beyond himself, and he is called to this in a mysterious way.
How profound! Because these words are the truth of our experience in Christ.
The mysterious way is the way of our life in God and with God, very personal to each of us, in our own purification, that means our transformation into Christ. As Christ redeemed us through his incarnation into our human experience. We continue to celebrate this mystery by our faith in Christ and in his ongoing life in us. We touch that Glory of God, that peace of God by our transcendence, that movement of living God’s life even now through Christ, with Christ and in Christ.
What a day of hope, a day of transcendence to all who believe in Christ. A day of Joy in the deepest sense, rich in the moment of the human struggle for fulfillment, which gives us hope and joy knowing that it is God with us in Jesus that is our fulfillment. It’s what makes this night so holy. This holy silence in our hearts holding on to the hope and joy of love at the depth of our soul, moving us to even more faith and love. Because God is with us now in Jesus. We glimpse his glory in our peace and love. It is what Christmas is all about.
What a unique life we have as Christians, being part of all who believe seeking to live each day in the light of Christ, having his life and values guide us to deeper freedom, to fill our lives with God’s grace. We have the eucharist that gives us strength, and new life and shapes our response to all situations. The Eucharist nourishes our love for others and empowers us. Let us celebrate this sacrifice in a special way tonight as this church of Mepkin gathers together.
We do it all because we know Christ in with us. Leading us at every step, he is our Savior born anew in our hearts again and again. It’s Christmas, so we are full of this blessed hope and joy. Let’s share this with the whole world. Starting right where we are.
Merry Christmas. Everyone.
