Homily for Sunday, 31 December 2023– Feast of the Holy Family of Jesus, Mary, and Joseph, Year B

Readings of the day: Genesis 15:1-6, 21:1-3; Psalm 105:1-2, 3-4, 5-6, 8-9; Hebrews 11:8, 11-12, 17-19; Luke 2:22-40

Today we celebrate the Feast of the Holy Family of Jesus, Mary, and Joseph. Yet our readings today invite us to a broader understanding of three related realities: Family, holiness, and blessing. The word of God invites us to see the Holy Family of Jesus, Mary, and Joseph as the culmination in human history of family, holiness, and blessing.

For Jews, Christians, and Muslims, the faithful of the three great Abrahamic religions, that history begins with Abraham. It is difficult, I think, for us not to feel badly for Abraham at the beginning of the reading we hear this evening from the Book of Genesis. God promises Abraham a son with Sarah, an ancestor to many nations, several times within a few chapters of Genesis. By the time Genesis introduces us to Abram, he is seventy-five years old. He is one hundred years old when Sarah gives birth to Isaac. So Abraham has had to wait a long time for God’s promise of descendants to become reality. Abram begins to feel like God has abandoned him and Sarai. His slave “Eliezer of Damascus” is, so far, his only heir. At this point, Abram has no family, no descendants of his own blood. “Maybe,” Abram could have thought, “I or Sarai have done something wrong. Maybe we have been less than steadfast in holiness.” God certainly seems, so far, to be denying Abram and Sarai the blessing of a child, of descendants.

So, what does God do with Abram? God does not ask Abram to look upon Sarai with love and imagine her expecting a child with him. And Genesis is clear that Abram has been nothing but faithful and patient with God. Abram’s faith and trust in God’s promise of descendants is “reckoned… to him as righteousness.” God does not ask of Abram any greater sign of his faith toward God. So, why does God continue to delay (or deny) Abram the only blessing he really longs for, a child, a family, descendants to populate all nations?

God asks only one thing of Abraham in the reading from Genesis we have just heard: Go outside; “look toward heaven and count the stars, if you are able to count them… So shall your descendants be.”

So, what does this encounter between God and Abram—God’s renewed promise (again) to Abraham of a great number of descendants—say to us about family, holiness, blessing? Sisters and brothers, family, holiness, and blessing are not things to be counted in the biblical imagination. In the Bible—the epics of Abraham and Sarah, of Jesus, Mary, and Joseph, and all the people and generations in between them—family is not limited to blood relationships. Holiness and blessing, too, are from God. So these are uncountable, infinite gifts to us of God’s grace.

God asks of us that we live according to the holiness and blessing that has been ours since the first moments of our creation. God saw that we were—humanity was—“very good”; God had created us in God’s image and likeness, blessed us, and given to us the care of everything God had created.

For Abraham and Sarah, to live according to this original state of holiness and blessing meant to trust in God’s promise of descendants, a family of nations in faith. It meant to go outside and look up with awe into the limitlessness, uncountable as the stars are uncountable, of God’s blessing to them and all people, all creation for all time. For this, Sarah’s and Abraham’s trust in God, Genesis says today twice, God blesses Sarah, places her and Abraham at the head of God’s historical family in faith.

For the people who hear the Letter to the Hebrews—for us today, hearing this proclamation anew—to live in good faith according to our original state of holiness and blessing is to recognize in God’s faithfulness to his promise to Abraham, Sarah, Isaac, and Jacob the prefigurement of God’s restoration of us to that original state of holiness and blessing in and through Jesus Christ. In Jesus Christ we have the human manifestation of “God [who] is able even to raise someone from the dead.” God has raised Jesus from the dead, giving us a share in the blessing of eternal life.

For the Holy Family of Jesus, Mary, and Joseph in Luke’s Gospel today, to live according to our original state of holiness and blessing is not so much to look up in awe at the limitlessness of the stars as Abram did, but to look and travel toward the temple of Jerusalem. In the time of Jesus, Mary, and Joseph, the temple was the centre of the Jewish faith, the dwelling place of God on earth, centred on the Holy of Holies.

Mary and Joseph set out, obedient to God’s call and their faith, to present Jesus in the temple. There is some ambiguity here: The Holy of Holies of the temple is the Holy Family’s destination, the dwelling place of God on earth. Yet Mary and Joseph hold God in human flesh, the infant Jesus, in their arms as they set out on their pilgrimage to the temple. Once the Holy Family arrives at the temple, the Holy of Holies, the baby Jesus, meets the Holy of Holies. But then the focus of this encounter of the Holies becomes the arms of the “righteous and devout” Simeon.

At that point, Simeon has nothing more on earth to live for. God’s Holy Spirit had “revealed to him… that he would not see death before he had seen the Christ of the Lord.” God’s promise, God’s blessing to the holy Simeon has been fulfilled. So Simeon is able to praise God, Luke’s Gospel says, with one of the most beautiful prayers in all of Scripture. For those of us who pray the Breviary or Liturgy of the Hours, at Night Prayer (Compline) the Church still prays Simeon’s prayer: “Master, now you are dismissing your servant in peace according to your word; for my eyes have seen your salvation, which you have prepared in the presence of all peoples, a light for revelation to the Gentiles and for glory to your people Israel.”

This moment of prayer is a moment of encounter: Blessing, holiness, family all meet in this moment. Now, Simeon may depart this life for eternal life in heaven. He who has looked upon the presence of God, who has held God in the Christ Child in his arms, is an heir to God’s promise to Abraham, who looked up at the limitlessness of God’s promise, God’s holiness, God’s blessing of family: “Look toward heaven and count the stars… So shall your descendants be.”

There is only one thing on earth left for Simeon to do as he returns the baby Jesus to Mary and Joseph: Simeon blesses the Holy Family as he sends them on their way back to Nazareth, their hometown. It is a strange sort of blessing, I imagine unnerving if we had been Mary or Joseph in that situation. “This child,” Simeon says, “is destined for the falling and rising of many in Israel, and to be a sign that will be opposed so that the inner thoughts of many will be revealed—and a sword will pierce your own soul too.”

What is Simeon talking about? And how are his words to Mary there a blessing? Simeon’s words are a blessing, but with a dose of reality. God has given us every blessing possible under heaven. God has created us with holiness, in God’s own image and likeness. And God has given us the gift of a Saviour, who has restored us to the dignity of being called members of God’s holy family, the People of God.

Yet our mission is to accept these gifts from God. Our mission is to hand on these gifts to still other people, so that all people for all time become heirs to God’s blessing, God’s holiness; all become members of God’s family of peoples and nations. The Christ Child, the Holy Family of Jesus, Mary, and Joseph stand as “a sign that will be [and to this day continue to be] opposed” by many who want to exclude from God’s blessing, God’s people on the grounds that these are somehow not “worthy” of God’s grace, God’s blessing, being called God’s people: The poor, refugees and migrants, people whose relationships are irregular by Church law, and so on. This is the cruel reality present in our world. Yet the encounter between Simeon and Anna and the Holy Family in the temple, prefigured by the encounter of Abraham and Sarah with God, shows us that God’s grace, God’s blessing, God’s holiness, God’s call to us to be universal family of God’s chosen people, will not be so easily limited.

The leaders of Jesus’ own people, of his own time, would try to limit God’s grace, God’s blessing by crucifying the Lord of all grace and all blessing: “A sword will pierce your own soul too.” But life, grace, blessing overcame even that violent attempt to limit it, to limit God. So God continues to call us forth, now from this place of encounter with God to be heralds of God’s blessing, God’s holiness with which we have been created and that is our original state of being, in God’s image and likeness. In the name of the Holy Family of Jesus, Mary, and Joseph, God invites us to bless the world, to exclude nobody from God’s blessing, so that we become ever more perfectly and universally the holy family of the People of God.

Homily for Sunday, 27 December 2020– Holy Family of Jesus, Mary, and Joseph

Readings of the day: Genesis 15:1-6, 21:1-3; Psalm 105:1-2, 3-4, 5-6; Hebrews 11:8, 11-12, 17-19; Luke 2:22-40

This homily was given at St. Joseph's College, University of Alberta, Edmonton, AB, Canada.

If we were to take a little survey, what would we say is the most important part of the Mass? Would most of us say that the most important element of the Mass is the words of institution or consecration pronounced by the priest over the bread and wine, such that they become the body and blood of Jesus Christ: “Take this, all of you, and eat of it, for this is my body… Take this, all of you, and drink from it, for this is the chalice of my blood”? We could not go wrong by presuming that these words of institution are the most important part of the Mass, right? After all, they are Jesus’ own words from the Last Supper before he died for us. And the Church considers these words the sacramental form of the Eucharist, the essential words for the validity of this entire celebration.

Then again, our Eastern Rite Catholic and Orthodox brothers and sisters, I think, tend to become nervous when we speak of the most important part of Eucharistic liturgy. They tend, more than we Roman Catholics do, to emphasize the unity of the entire celebration. I think the unity of the Eucharistic celebration is good to keep in mind. Then again, I remember when now-Cardinal Thomas Collins of Toronto was Archbishop of Edmonton, used to call to mind the importance of still another part of the Mass, the dismissal: “Go, the Mass is ended.”

If we know our Mass especially well, we know that the Latin of this last line spoken by the priest (or deacon, if one is present) at Mass is Ite, missa est. This literally translates into English as, “Go, it (meaning the assembly) is dismissed.” Our word for the whole celebration, Mass, comes from the Latin missa here. Archbishop Collins would often paraphrase this dismissal rather humorously in his preaching, as in something like, “Get out of here; we have work to do.”

Now, I do not want us to get up and leave this celebration just yet; we have the entire Liturgy of the Eucharist still to go. But why, then, this emphasis on the very end of Mass; on the dismissal: “Go, the Mass is ended”; “Go in peace”?... Our readings today focus on dismissals; on people being sent forth from beautiful events, beautiful graced encounters with God, to accomplish some important and holy work, or simply to prepare, as the righteous Simeon did in our Gospel today, for the end of his life and beginning of eternal life in heaven.

Simeon’s prayer in Luke’s Gospel after receiving the infant Jesus in his arms and the Holy Family of Jesus, Mary, and Joseph in his presence in the Temple of Jerusalem is one of the three great prayers or canticles (songs) of the Liturgy of the Hours, also called the Divine Office. These canticles are all drawn from Luke’s account of the infancies of John the Baptist and Jesus. The Liturgy of the Hours is an ancient tradition that began in monasteries, by which monks would mark the passage of each day by praying at particular times of day or “hours” in community. Religious orders, including mine, diocesan clergy, and even many laypeople continue this tradition today.

At Morning Prayer, or Lauds, we pray the prayer of Zechariah, John the Baptist’s father, when John is born. This prayer begins with, “Blessed be the Lord, the God of Israel,” so is known as the Benedictus (“Blessed be”). At Evening Prayer, or Vespers, we pray the hymn of Mary from her visit with Elizabeth, the Magnificat, named for this prayer’s first word in Latin, Magnificat: “My soul magnifies the Lord”… And the last “hour” of the Liturgy of the Hours each day is Compline, or Night Prayer. During Compline we pray those words of Simeon from today’s Gospel: “Master, now you are dismissing your servant in peace, according to your word; for my eyes have seen your salvation, which you have prepared in the presence of all peoples; a light for revelation to the Gentiles, and for glory to your people Israel.” Because the Latin of this prayer begins with Nunc dimittis (“Now you dismiss”), this prayer is often called the Nunc dimittis.

This prayer is about a dismissal, an Ite, missa est moment. But Simeon is not the only person in our readings today to be “dismissed”; to be asked at some point to set out somewhere. At the beginning of today’s Gospel reading, we hear that Mary and Joseph are “dismissed”—they set out at God’s command and that of their Jewish faith—to Jerusalem, to dedicate their newborn Son, Jesus, “to the Lord.” This dismissal, if we will, is the focus of our celebration today of the Holy Family of Jesus, Mary, and Joseph. This holiest of families is the model for our families, our households, to become holy families; holy households ourselves.

Our holiness as individuals; as families; as households depends on our faithfulness to God when we recognize that God is calling us to set out: “Get out of here; we have work to do,” as Cardinal Collins would say. From the beginning, Mary, Joseph and Jesus are faithful to God in the big and small “dismissals”: To go from Nazareth to Bethlehem to register for a Roman census and to give birth to the Son of God in a humble stable or cave; to go to Jerusalem to dedicate the Child Jesus to the Lord according to the Law of Moses. And, if we listen attentively to our Gospel today, at the end of it, we hear of another “dismissal” moment related to the Holy Family of Jesus, Mary, and Joseph: “When Mary and Joseph had finished everything required by the law of the Lord, they returned to Galilee, to their own town of Nazareth. The child grew and became strong, filled with wisdom, and the favour of God was upon him.”

During their time in the Temple of Jerusalem, Mary, Joseph, and Jesus experience other “dismissal” moments: Simeon follows his Nunc dimittis prayer with a prophecy to Mary, a disconcerting one about how Jesus will ultimately be dismissed from this world, as “a sign that will be opposed.” And Simeon adds, to Mary, “A sword will pierce your own soul, too.” This, sisters and brothers, is a foreshadowing of the Cross, the Holy Family’s ultimate act of fidelity to God’s mission for them and for our whole world. The Cross is God’s ultimate Ite, missa est or Nunc dimittis moment. Jesus would have to suffer a horrific death, be “dismissed” in such a way from this world, but in a way he chose faithfully and freely, in order to save us.

Of course, Luke the Gospel writer fairly deliberately connects this event of the Dedication of Jesus in the Temple, with its “dismissal” moments, to the great “dismissal” moments that mark our entire history as a People of God, all the way back to the first moments of creation. Today, the Book of Genesis centers on Abraham and Sarah, whom God invited to “be dismissed”: To set out boldly and faithfully toward a new way of life, which would eventually bring them descendants numbering as the stars of heaven, beginning with Isaac. The Letter to the Hebrews today picks up on the dismissal-setting out of Abraham and Sarah theme. Hebrews says of Abraham and Sarah: They “set out, not knowing where [they were] going.”

When have we been called to set out, sisters and brothers, to be dismissed, into the unknown or even fearful, either as individuals or as families? I think this year of 2020 has given us a lot of practice with “dismissal” moments. It has been a difficult year, to say the least, with COVID-19, loss of health, loss of lives, loss of work for many of us, loss of the ability to gather to worship and receive communion in person… Yet still we gather to pray together here. Many of us gather as whole families, in front of a computer screen, to participate in Mass by Zoom, Sunday after Sunday, together as this St. Joseph’s College community.

Still this is a graced opportunity, an Ite, missa est moment to show our faithfulness as individuals; a College community; households; families. And this will continue after the formal Ite, missa est of this celebration. We will “go in peace” from here, because we have “work to do”: The intentional works of loving kindness, big and small, that make us, our households, and our families holy. We have already had much practice, and shown ourselves faithful to such work. May we be “dismissed” and so be blessed, to continue to act after the example of the Holy Family of Jesus, Mary, and Joseph, every moment of our lives.

Homily for Sunday, 11 August 2019

Readings of the day: Wisdom 18:6-9; Psalm 33:1, 12, 18-19, 20-22; Hebrews 11:1-2, 8-19; Luke 12:32-48

19th Sunday in Ordinary Time

This homily was given at St. Joseph's College, University of Alberta, Edmonton, AB, Canada.

Have any of us ever delayed in accomplishing a task or making a decision? What was the reason for the delay? Did we delay because of fear or insecurity in acting or deciding to act? Have we ever been afraid of how somebody might judge us for an action or decision, and so delayed acting or deciding on something important? Have we ever feared a loss of control over a situation, or maybe a relationship, and so have delayed in acting or deciding something?

Have we ever had good reason to delay an action or decision? Good reasons for delaying an action or key decision might be that we have needed to take time to consult others who have expertise in the kind of action or decision we are making, or who may be affected by the action or decision we make. We might want to delay sending that biting e-mail or social media post when we are frustrated or angry. There can be good reasons to delay important actions or decisions.

But our readings today tend to favour people who decide or act with the most conviction and with minimal delay. The Book of Wisdom today takes us back to “the night of the deliverance [of the people of Israel] from Egypt.” These Israelites were, in many ways, ready to return home, led by Moses to Israel already by the time the LORD called them to leave Egypt. Wisdom says that this “night of deliverance was made known beforehand to our ancestors” and that “the deliverance of the righteous and the destruction of their enemies were expected by [God’s] people.”

The reading we hear today from the Letter to the Hebrews takes our memory back even farther than Wisdom, to the time of Abraham and Sarah. Hebrews praises the faith of Abraham and Sarah; that when Abraham and Sarah were called by God to act “by faith,” they did so decisively. “By faith Abraham obeyed” God when God called him and Sarah “to set out for a place… not knowing where he was going… By faith he stayed for a time” in this place. This was “a land [Abraham] had been promised” by God, but only as a stopover point on their way to a more permanent homeland. “By faith Sarah… received power to conceive” and bore a son, Isaac. From Isaac, as a reward for their faith Abraham and Sarah received the promise of descendants. But even these descendants, Hebrews says, would not see for many generations the fullness of God’s reward for their faith: The resurrection from the dead we as Christians believe is made fully possible by the death and resurrection of Jesus Christ.

Still, from at least the time of Abraham and Sarah, people have been acting “by faith”; decisively and with conviction that God has promised them (and promised us) eternal life; a permanent homeland in heaven with God. We hear from Hebrews that these long-ago generations, and every generation since, has had one fundamental longing in common that has driven us to act with faith; with conviction; without delay: We long for heaven. We, like our ancestors in faith, “desire a better country, that is, a heavenly one,” Hebrews says.

Like the Book of Wisdom and the Letter to the Hebrews, Jesus’ two parables we hear today in Luke’s Gospel, those of the Waiting Servants and the Faithful and Unfaithful Servants, also favour people who are ready; who act with decisive and faithful conviction. Jesus’ parables urge us to be ready to encounter God, “the master” of his parables. Jesus’ parables are full of strong, decisive action verbs: “Be dressed for action and have your lamps lit; be like those who are waiting for their master to return from the wedding banquet… You must also be ready, for the Son of Man is coming at an unexpected hour.”

Luke’s Gospel was probably written fifty or so years after Jesus’ ascension to heaven. By that time, the faith of Luke’s Christian community, a generation or two removed from those who had known Jesus personally, had become a bit slack. Jesus had promised to return at the end of time. And, well, the end of time had yet to happen, so writers like Luke, leaders of their early Christian communities, had to rally the people, to keep their faith ready and active. If we are able to understand how people in Luke’s time may have allowed their faith to become a bit slack, not as ready for Jesus’ return as they had once been, can we not understand how this may be an even greater challenge today, more than two thousand years after Jesus walked this earth?

We “must also be ready”: This invitation to faith; to convicted decisions and actions oriented toward our desired goal, heaven, is just as timely now for us as it was in the time of Luke’s Gospel. Today’s Gospel reminds me of an experience when I was about twelve years old and visiting my father in Montreal. Dad had been in Montreal, away from home for a year, on a course needed to begin his career in meteorology. One day, like most days Dad was on his meteorology course, he arrived home, exhausted from a long day’s studies, and set his clipboard on the end table in his apartment. I was constantly fascinated by the complicated math formulas that would fill the pages in Dad’s clipboard, so I would look in awe at Dad’s clipboard when he set it down on the end table. This one day must have been especially exhausting for Dad because, when I looked at his clipboard, thinking I would see some awesomely complicated math formulas, the page was completely filled with, “Stay awake, stay awake, stay awake”… written in capital letters!

“Stay awake”… “You must also be ready.” I doubt that, on that day, Dad was anticipating the immediate return of Jesus, although the swift arrival of the end of time then might have relieved Dad’s exhaustion and boredom in that class. I may just now have given anybody here who is a student an idea for when we are bored or tired in class: Fill a sheet of paper with, “Stay awake, stay awake, stay awake”…

Whether we are simply trying to ward off exhaustion or boredom, or (at least I hope and I believe that, ultimately, we are as Christians) faithfully anticipating the promised return of Christ at the end of time, the message is the same: We “must also be ready… Be dressed for action and have your lamps lit; be like those who are waiting for their master to return.” “Stay awake”!

But to heed this call to action; to alertness to the presence of the Lord even now among us; to await heaven faithfully; to orient our decisions and actions with conviction toward the eternal life with God we desire can be easier said than done. Do we not often experience situations in our lives when it is best to delay: To “sleep on” or, better yet, give ourselves time to pray over a key decision or important message we need to communicate? In these kinds of moments, our delay in acting or deciding something important is anything but disobedience to the call of God’s Word today to faithful action; alertness; convicted orientation of our decisions and actions toward heaven. On the contrary.

And our discernment of when it is better to delay, especially prayerfully, a key action or decision, or when it is better to act or decide immediately and decisively, is often difficult. From our hearing today of Wisdom, Hebrews, and Luke, might it seem to us that it was all too easy for the people of Israel to leave Egypt under Moses; for Abraham, Sarah, and their descendants, and for the people to whom Jesus addressed his parables in Luke’s Gospel to remain faithful, convicted, alert, and not to delay unreasonably? We know from the rest of the Bible that obedience to this urgent call from God was often difficult for all these people.

It is and will always be difficult for us, too, to remain faithful, convicted, alert, and to orient our actions and decisions toward our ultimate heavenly goal. This takes a commitment on our part to depend on God; to prioritize God and our relationship with God in our prayer and our worship as a community of faith above all else. In this way, we will remain faithfully and decisively alert to how God calls us to act in the concrete situations of our lives. We will be like the people of Israel whom Wisdom describes; like Abraham and Sarah; like those who “seek an unfailing treasure in heaven,” who are “dressed for action” with our “lamps lit”; like those who are constantly alert for the Lord’s final return for our salvation. We will be the people who “Stay awake”…