Feel the Joy! (Christmas 2022 Year A)

 

What’s your favourite Christmas carol?

If you chose “Joy to the World” you picked a winner. Although the internet is filled with lists of ‘most-popular’ carols, Joy to the World is the most published. 

Surprisingly, it was not written for Christmas. The Protestant minister Isaac Watts, who also wrote “When I Survey the Wondrous Cross,” and “O God, Our Help in Ages Past,” wrote the song for a 1719 hymnal of psalms set to music.

But where it started out is not where “Joy to the World” ended up: it’s been called “one of the most joyous Christmas hymns in existence; not in the sense of merry-making but in the deep and solemn realization of what Christ’s birth has meant to mankind.”

It didn’t hurt that some of the tune is taken from Handel’s Messiah. But I suspect that its first word is what attracts so many people to this carol.

Joy is a simple word but a powerful one. It appears about sixty times in the New Testament. And it appears three times in the scriptures we’ve heard tonight: twice in Isaiah’s prophecy to those who lived in darkness, and once in what the angel said to the frightened shepherds.

Let’s take a close look at what the angel said. “Do not be afraid; for see—I am bringing you good news of great joy for all the people.”

Good news of great joy! The angel seems confident in his message. Which makes me wonder: are we? We all agree that the birth of Christ is good news—you wouldn’t be here tonight if you thought it was bad news! But do we experience it as “good news of great joy”?

Even for the shepherds, the angel’s announcement brings joy from the outset. Look how the angel begins by acknowledging that they are frightened: his first words were “do not be afraid.” But the next thing he said was “I bring you good news of great joy.”

This news overcomes the shepherds’ fear: by the end of the Gospel reading, they are heading off to Bethlehem, something no shepherd in his right mind would do without a very good reason, unless, of course, they took the sheep along—and if they did, St. Luke really ought to have told us.

It’s very clear that the angel’s words are not intended just for the frightened shepherds. The angel says he is bringing “good news of great joy for all the people.” This message is for everyone.

It’s for everyone, in the first place, because Jesus came to save the whole world. That’s precisely what St. Paul says to Titus in our second reading today: “The grace of God has appeared, bringing salvation to all.” We find confirmation of this in chapter three, verse sixteen of St. John’s Gospel, a reference which we see on signs held up at American football games: “For God so loved the world, that he gave his only Son, that whoever believes in him should not perish but have eternal life.”

But let’s be careful! “The world” and “all people” seems a long way from me. From my family. My friends.

If there’s good news for all the people, there better be good news for me—for my messiness, for my troubles, for my sins and fears.

And there is. The engaging Christian writer Rick Warren puts it this way: “Regardless of your background, religion, problems, or circumstances, Christmas really is the best news you could get.

“Beneath all the visible sights and sounds of Christmas are some simple yet profound truths that can transform your life for the better here on earth and for forever in eternity.”

And, Pastor Warren adds, “it doesn’t matter who you are, what you’ve done, or where you’ve been, or where you’re headed—this news is for you.”

So, really, the angel brought the shepherds more than good news—it was the best news. And if that’s not a reason for joy, what is?

Yet there are still some among us who view Christmas—or Christianity at least—with anything but joy. It’s about being naughty or nice—mostly naughty. Rules. Duty. Burdens.

The fact is, you can’t separate Christian faith from joy. St. Paul tells the Philippians to rejoice in the Lord always—not some of the time but all of the time. In good times and in bad, we can find a baseline of peace in knowing that we are loved, and that God has a plan for us.

It’s not a feeling, but a conviction—an attitude of gratitude rooted in belief that the Lord has come and will come again in glory. Our faith in his appearing brings the blessed hope of his final coming; and between the two, we live serene in the knowledge that God works for good in all things for those who love him (Romans 8:28).

Of course, it’s not only Christmas that gives us joyful hope. The baby in the manger, who becomes the man on the Cross, dies for us. In the most joyful moment of all history, he rises from the dead. We celebrate this at Easter with hymns even more glorious than Christmas carols!

Everything we do to serve God and neighbour, however difficult, can be joyful if we do it in gratitude for what God has done for us by becoming man. It’s been said that Mother Teresa left happiness to find joy.

In fact, Saint Teresa of Calcutta understood very well the difference between true joy and mere human happiness at Christmas. She is quoted as saying “The coming of Jesus at Bethlehem brought joy to the world and to every human heart. May His coming this Christmas bring to each one of us the peace and joy He desires to give.”

My trusty dictionary of Catholic spirituality points out that while we might experience an ecstatic kind of joy from time to time, “the principle aim of the Christian life is to serve God and neighbour joyfully.”

At the same time, “in the spiritual life, God is the supreme joy and the greatest delight” (Dictionary of Catholic Spirituality, p. 578).

Four or five weeks ago I promised to give a one-sentence summary of every homily. Today, what I am saying is that the joy of Christmas is joy to the world and for every single one of us. I can make that even shorter: Feel the joy!

The angel’s message to the startled shepherds was meant for all of us: rich, poor, young, old, Christian, and non-believer. It’s a message of joy—a joy that is personal and that can give meaning and purpose to our challenges and struggles.

This joy is more powerful than our fears, because ultimately it is deeper and more real.

We’ve  heard the Christmas story so many times that we can forget it’s not a story. Nothing could be more real than what took place at Bethlehem when heaven and nature sang.

Even the first words of tonight’s Gospel are intended to remind us that this event actually happened. St. Luke does not begin “Once upon a time,” like a fairy tale. He says “In those days,” when Augustus Caesar ruled the Roman Empire and Quirinius was governor of Syria. Scholars argue about the exact date but that’s not really the point here. Luke wants to make it clear that we are talking about a historical event.

A historical event that changed the world. Tonight we ask ourselves whether we will let it change our world—our hearts, our homes, our society—even our parish. What will we do with God’s invitation to a more joyful life?

We are going to sing “Joy to the World!” tonight. As we do, will we accept the gift of joy ourselves?

Go to Joseph (Advent.4.A)

 

Whether it’s a Shakespeare play or a Broadway musical, the first page of a script or program always lists the cast of characters. Today’s liturgy presents a cast of three: Mary, Joseph, and an Angel. We will wait a week for Jesus to enter the Christmas drama.

I thought we might shine the spotlight today on St. Joseph, who doesn’t always get the attention he deserves. He appeared at the Christmas concert put on by St. Anthony’s School on Thursday, played very well by a youngster from junior kindergarten. But I heard about another school’s Christmas pageant where the boy who was to play St. Joseph took ill.

They didn’t replace him—and nobody missed him!

We don’t want that to happen as we reflect on Joseph’s role in the Christmas story. St. Matthew, whose Gospel is the only source of our information, tells us just how important he is—not just historically but for us today.

The first thing Joseph does is to conquer his fears. The Annunciation to Mary, which we hear about from St. Luke, is quite different. When the angel tells her “Do not be afraid,” he is simply reassuring her, telling her not to be afraid of him. After all, who wouldn’t be unnerved by such a strange encounter with a heavenly visitor?

But in today’s Gospel, Joseph is already in distress when the angel appears in his dream. His fiancée is pregnant, and he is not the father. In this difficult situation, the angel tells Joseph not to be afraid to take Mary as his wife. God is at work!

Sometimes we must conquer our human fears before we can do what God calls us to do. We can have no better model of that than St. Joseph.

That’s not all we should imitate. Joseph is obedient to God. When he wakes up, he did as the angel commanded; he didn’t overthink or argue but put his trust in the word that was spoken to him.

In our second reading today, St. Paul gives us a nice phrase to describe Joseph’s reaction to his call: “the obedience of faith.”

St. Joseph’s obedience was formed by faith. In the passage we’ve just heard, Matthew quotes our first reading from the prophet Isaiah.  This is typical in his Gospel, since he wrote for Jewish Christians and often quotes the Old Testament to show how its prophecies are fulfilled in Christ. I wonder if St. Joseph made the connection? While we will never know, as a devout Jew he would have studied Isaiah’s text. It’s worth thinking about—the more we know our Bible the easier it is to see God at work.

The future foster father of Jesus Christ was not only an obedient and faithful man—he was a man of commitment. Even when he thought it would be necessary to dismiss Mary, he resolves to do so quietly as a mark of the past commitment to her that he wished to honour.

Commitment is in short supply nowadays, which may be one of the reasons for the falling marriage rate, and high rate of divorce, not to mention priests and religious abandoning their vows and public figures their responsibilities.

“Joseph could have walked away from his commitment to Mary and Jesus, even after this dream, but he didn’t. Christmas is a good time to renew our commitment to our families, our vocations, our work, and our Church.”

“Maturity is defined,” one of my favourite homilists says, “not by the number of options we keep open but by the commitments we keep even when it isn’t easy.”

Joseph “is a model of adult commitment which our culture desperately needs and a reminder to us to renew those commitments that shape our life and our soul.” (Captured Fire: the Sunday Homilies—Cycle A, Rev. S. Joseph Krempa.)

I should mention that these thoughts come only from this morning’s Gospel. St. John Paul, in his letter on St. Joseph titled “Guardian of the Redeemer” lists many other ways in which St. Joseph can guide us: as guardian of the mystery of God; as a just man—a husband; a worker; and a model of devotion and the inner life.

Speaking of keeping commitments, I want to keep my recent promise to provide a one-sentence summary of my Sunday homilies. I’ll even give it to you in Latin: Ite ad Joseph. “Go to Joseph.”

These words of Pharaoh to the Egyptians in the book of Genesis are about a different Joseph, but they are inscribed at the base of the statue of St. Joseph in front of St. Joseph’s Oratory in Montreal, founded by St. André Bessette, who obtained many miraculous healings through the intercession of St. Joseph.

By declaring St. Joseph as its universal patron, the Church tells us to go to St. Joseph in our times of need, just as Pharaoh told the hungry to go to that other Joseph. 

Although I’ve left the Blessed Mother aside for now—she will take center stage at Christmas—let’s finish by recalling that her “yes” to the angel came before St. Joseph’s obedience to another angel.

Advent is the season when we too say “yes”—yes to the gift of Christ in our hearts, yes to the plan of God for our lives. Each of us also has our part to play in the joyful drama of Christmas.

Wait for the Lord (Advent 3A)

Our weather around the province during the past few years is something of a joke. We go from floods to droughts without much in between. It even seems to be inspiring jokes. 

Just this week: Q: What does daylight saving time mean in Vancouver? A: An extra hour of rain.

The weather is one of those things that we don’t think much about unless it’s extreme, but it touches every aspect of our lives. No wonder there are so many phrases and expressions revolving around it.

You can be under the weather. Or have a fair-weather friend. Sometimes, you have to keep a weather eye open. Other days, you just have to weather the storm.

It’s not surprising that weather appears often in the Scriptures. Psalm 148 says “Praise the Lord from the earth… Fire and hail, snow and frost, stormy wind fulfilling his command!”

Isaiah 29 says “You will be visited by the Lord of hosts with thunder and with earthquake and great noise, with whirlwind and tempest…”, while elsewhere the book promises that we “shall be like a watered garden, like a spring of water, whose waters do not fail.”

 Jesus himself uses the weather as an image when he says “When it is evening, you say, ‘It will be fair weather, for the sky is red.’ And in the morning, ‘It will be stormy today, for the sky is red and threatening.’ You know how to interpret the appearance of the sky, but you cannot interpret the signs of the times.”

And we see him rebuking the winds and the waves, and he tells us that God “makes his sun rise on the evil and on the good, and sends rain on the just and on the unjust.”

 Those words, by the way, inspired a Sister I know to write a very cute bit of rhyming theology. Her poem went “The rain it raineth, everyday, upon the just and unjust fella. But more upon the just—because… the unjust’s got the just’s umbrella.”

We could spend a lot of time reflecting on weather in the Bible, but let’s just focus on weather in today’s readings.

The background to the first reading is a drought—something we experienced not very long ago, as we watched lawns and even trees turn brown. Few things in the ancient world were more devastating. No water, no crops. No crops, no food or money. Animals, a rare form of capital for some, would die of dehydration.

Against that dry desert background, these words from Isaiah are all but ecstatic. What joy when the flowers appear! The prophet spends hardly a moment on this wonderful event before telling us he’s really thinking about something even more important than water—the coming of the Lord, the avenger, the just One. Salvation. Healing. An end to sorrow.

The dryness of the desert was just a metaphor. We’re talking about the dryness of our souls, parched by sin, hardship, fear, and discouragement.

Whether we are oppressed, hungry, prisoners, blind, bowed down, lonely, widowed or orphaned—today’s Psalm mentions all the major misfortunes of life—we are called to hope in the Lord who brings justice, food, freedom, sight, and protection from despair.

But in the concrete circumstances of each of our lives, how do we gain access to the liberation and encouragement of the Lord who loves us and keeps faith forever? After all, who hasn’t experienced unanswered prayer or unrelieved distress?

The second reading answers the question in a very practical way: “Be patient, brothers and sisters.”

Be patient like the heroic farmers of old and of today, who wait for rain or who endure floods without giving up. Wait for what’s coming—wait in hope for the weather to change. In our age of instant gratification, when we’re annoyed if it takes two seconds for a webpage to load, this is crucial advice. God is not a computer.

It's not good theology, of course, but I once said that God has only one fault: He has no sense of timing.

But he does—his timing is as perfect as he is. Just as nature cannot be hurried by farmers anxious for their harvest, neither can God be hurried by our expectations of instant answers to our prayers.

Which doesn’t mean we do nothing in times of trial. The apostle James, one of the most practical writers in the Bible, tells us what to do as we wait: “Strengthen your hearts, for the coming of the Lord is near.”

This, of course, is my one-sentence summary of today’s homily:  “Strengthen your hearts, for the coming of the Lord is near.”

How? By prayer. By actions like planning to attend the Tuesday Advent Masses and adoration. By going to confession. By some time reading the Word of God—ideally reading one or all of the Sunday Mass readings on line or from your missal. By attending Water in the Desert next Saturday evening—that especially can be the experience of joy Isaiah so beautifully describes in the first reading.

A final point. I was at Mass earlier today with the Archbishop and our permanent diaconate community. Archbishop Miller stressed that the “coming of the Lord” that is near is not Christmas but the second coming. We’re not trying to strengthen our hearts just so we have a better celebration on December 25.

We are not patiently waiting for Christmas like children eager for the arrival of Santa—not even the arrival of the Christ Child in the crib.

We are waiting for the second coming of the Son of Man, who will come to judge the living and dead. For that we must wait patiently, but like any good farmer do the best to yield a crop of holiness in hope.

SAID not MAID

Homily at the Funeral

of the Late Leo Goulet

It’s painfully clear that some of our fellow Canadians are so terrified of death that many have embraced so-called medical assistance in dying, or MAID.

Today I would like to share with you an experience of SAID, spiritual assistance in dying, because that is what Leo Goulet had. He died surrounded by the prayer of the Church and of his loved ones; he died as he lived, supported by the grace of God and the love of his family.

We should all pray to be as blessed as Leo was in his final hours.

I arrived at Inglewood Care Centre at the same time as Marylin and Denise, having heard just minutes before that Leo was nearing the end. When we got to his bedside we found Michelle, who had just finished singing him Christmas carols.

Louise was on her way from the airport, but I thought we should probably start the prayers for the dying right away. It was a good decision insofar as one more voice might have made people think we had a whole church-full in Leo’s room.

The introduction to the prayers of commendation for the dying says that “Christians have the responsibility of expressing their union in Christ by joining the dying person in prayer for God’s mercy and for confidence in Christ.” At Leo’s bedside that responsibility was fulfilled with faith and devotion.

Reflecting on those precious moments in Leo’s room I found myself marvelling at the power and splendour of the liturgy we celebrated.

We began with a series of short scripture texts that express the full range of the promises of salvation and eternal life. The Gospel the family chose for this funeral Mass conveys the same thing—the assurance of paradise for those who put their faith in Christ.

And although we were only four in number, the room then filled with angels and saints as we prayed the litany invoking everyone from the patriarch Abraham to St. Teresa of Calcutta, with the resounding response “pray for him.” We prayed “Bring Leo to eternal life first promised to him in baptism,” and “Raise Leo on the last day, for he has eaten the Bread of Life.”

We commended Leo to his Creator and prayed that his home would be with God in Zion, which is another way of referring to Jerusalem, the holy city of our first reading from the prophet Isaiah.

We prayed that he would live in peace with Mary, with Joseph, and all the angels and saints, asking that he would see his Redeemer face to face, and enjoy the vision of God forever.

Hearing is widely thought to be the last sense to go when someone is dying. Recent research at UBC suggests that people may still be able to hear while in an unresponsive state at the end of their life. I sure hope that was true of Leo.

It’s hard to imagine that he did not hear the hope echoing as his family answered the prayers and litanies as if they were cheering him across the finish line. Whatever weeping there was took a distant second place to the joyful vision of a new Jerusalem.

I might mention here that one of the litanies took us back to the beginning of the history of salvation. In a most unusual prayer, we asked that Leo be delivered from every distress as God rescued Noah from the flood and Job from his sufferings.

We prayed that he be delivered as Daniel was from the lions’ den and David from Goliath. But the litany ended “Deliver your servant, Lord, through Jesus our Saviour, who suffered death for us and gave us eternal life.”

The ritual says that the presence of a priest shows more clearly that the Christian dies in the communion of the Church, which indeed Leo did. It was my privilege to absolve him and to grant him the apostolic pardon by which the Church prays that the dying person be released “from all punishments in this life and in the life to come.”

While I do hope that Leo himself was listening, my prayerbook says that those who are praying with the dying will “draw consolation from these prayers and come to a better understanding of the Paschal character of Christian death.” I have spoken at such length about these prayers in the hope that all of you might also experience that consolation and understanding.

And although we put our faith in God’s goodness, let’s pause for a moment and think about Leo’s own goodness. It is beautifully captured in the second reading, an excerpt from St. Paul’s hymn to love. If you knew Leo or if you just listened carefully to the eulogy, you know very well just how fitting that text is.

Few of us may be blessed with his gentle temperament and loving manner, but all of us can resolve—to end with words from the psalm—to “serve the Lord with gladness,” as Leo did.

And may we all have ‘spiritual assistance in dying’ when our time comes.