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:

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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 elde...