Homily for Thursday, 5 January 2023– Christmas Weekday

Readings of the day: 1 John 3:11-21; Psalm 100:1b-2, 3, 4, 5; John 1:43-51

Today John’s Gospel picks up just as Jesus has chosen Andrew and Peter to be his first disciples. And immediately after choosing Andrew and Peter, Jesus decides “to go to Galilee.”

I find it interesting about this beginning of our Gospel reading today that Jesus’ choice “to go to Galilee” after calling Andrew and Peter to be his first disciples immediately suggests that Jesus is not in Galilee, the region of Israel that includes his hometown, Nazareth. And neither are Andrew and Peter, Galilean fishermen whose calling to be Jesus disciples Matthew, Mark, and Luke all situate on the Sea of Galilee—John differs from the other Gospels in this respect—near their homes when Jesus chooses them to be his disciples in John’s Gospel.

Andrew, Peter, and also Jesus are away from home when Jesus’ call of his first disciples takes place. So are Philip and Nathanael, the next two people John says became Jesus’ disciples.

Sisters and brothers, I think that here John is suggesting that to be Jesus’ disciples will occasionally (if not frequently) mean being called beyond our homes, figurative if not literal and physical; beyond our comfort zones.

We hear that this is true of Andrew and Peter. This is certainly true of Jesus. His being called outside of his home, his comfort extended all the way to his being called to die on a cross outside of Jerusalem, the city at the heart of Israel, yet so far and different from Galilee’s peace and tranquility.

To have been called outside of their home, their region, their comfort was true of Philip and then Nathanael. This is clear from Nathanael’s response to Philip’s invitation to be the disciple of this “Jesus, son of Joseph, from Nazareth.” Nathanael asks Philip, “Can anything good come out of Nazareth”?

Nathanael is called at that moment beyond the comfort of his own biases. It was probably a bias against people from Nazareth shared among many people. The reason for this bias, or Nathanael’s anti-Nazareth comment, is unclear. Maybe Nazareth was the rival village to other Galilean communities like Bethsaida, home to Philip, Andrew, and Peter. Maybe this bias was like Edmonton versus Calgary today… It is hard to say.

Yet Philip’s invitation calls Nathanael beyond this bias, beyond identifying strictly with his home, his region, or any other comfortable markers of identity. Now Nathanael will identify first as a disciple, an apostle of Jesus.

But how jarring this must have been for Nathanael! Incredulous (but, as Jesus says of him, without deceit), Nathaniel’s first question of Jesus is, “Where did you get to know me”? To know Jesus is an important theme throughout John’s Gospel and letters in our Bible. Remember the Gospel reading of a couple of days ago: John the Baptist, by his own admission, did not know Jesus until God revealed Jesus to him as “the one who will baptize with the Holy Spirit.” And only then does John readily testify that Jesus “is the Son of God.”

Nathanael does something very similar to John the Baptist earlier in John’s Gospel: Jesus replies to Nathanael that he got to know him when he saw him “under the fig tree.” Nathanael gets to know Jesus at the invitation of Philip, and is then able to identify Jesus, very correctly: “Rabbi, you are the Son of God! You are the King of Israel”!

Nathanael’s correct identification of Jesus as “the Son of God” is possible, even from within a (somewhat) comfort zone. Our worship here, sisters and brothers, is good and right, yet possible from comfort. Jesus will always acknowledge our good will—our rightness and goodness in loving and serving him as his disciples, and in loving and serving one another in Jesus’ name. But Jesus will call us, little by little, beyond our comfort, until we are ready, he says, to “see heaven opened and the angels of God ascending and descending above the Son of Man.”

In these days in which our Church mourns the death yet celebrates the life of a true Servant of the Servants of God, Pope Benedict XVI, I am reminded of a line from his 2007 encyclical on Christian hope, Spe Salvi. Pope Benedict says in Spe Salvi: The human person “was created for greatness—for God himself; [each of us is] created to be filled by God. But [our] heart is too small for the greatness for which it is destined. It must be stretched.”

Our hearts “must be stretched” beyond mere comfort to be true hearts of disciples of our Lord; to enter eternal life, the “greatness” for which God has created us, to be forever with Jesus our Saviour; to “see heaven opened and the angels of God ascending and descending above the Son of Man.”

Homily for Sunday, 5 January 2020– The Epiphany of the Lord

Readings of the day: Isaiah 60:1-6; Psalm 72:1-2, 7-8, 10-11, 12-13; Ephesians 3:2-3a, 5-6; Matthew 2:1-12

This homily was given at St. James and Our Lady of the Valley Churches, Vernon, BC, Canada.

This solemnity of the Epiphany of the Lord, that is, the “making known” of Jesus to the world brings us each year the Gospel account, unique to Matthew’s Gospel, of the visit to Jesus’ birthplace in Bethlehem of the wise men or magi. The story of the magi is familiar to us: Guided by a star, the magi journey from their home country to the east of Israel to Bethlehem. They bring gifts of gold, frankincense, and myrrh.

But what does this visit of the wise men to the scene of Jesus’ birth in Bethlehem mean for us today? I am especially drawn to a homily by Pope Francis of a couple of years ago in which the pope points to three key actions of the magi that make these wise men from the East relatable to us; an example to us in our lives of faith in a special way. First, the wise men follow a star to the Nativity scene in Bethlehem; second, they set out from their home country; and, third, they bring gifts.

When the magi arrive in Jerusalem, they know already that a life-changing event, the birth of a child, has taken place. The magi ask: “Where is the child who has been born king of the Jews? For we have observed his star at its rising, and have come to pay him homage.” Is this not already a bit unusual that the magi would ask about a child “born king of the Jews” in the first place? For the most part, scholars consider Matthew’s description of the wise men as “from the East” to mean that they were neither Jewish nor Roman, but possibly Zoroastrians, a people who considered changes in the movements of the stars as signs of the divine.

The spirituality; the religion of these wise men centered on looking toward the heavens. But another strange detail, at least according to astronomers who study what the sky might have looked like at specific points in history, is that the star the wise men saw around the time of Jesus’ birth probably was not too bright a star, nothing far out of the ordinary. The magi may have had to have quite the discerning eye to detect as subtle a change in the night sky, this “star at its rising” that would guide them to Bethlehem, a village as near-ordinary as the star they saw; Bethlehem, the ordinary village God chose in which to enter our world as one like us.

The magi saw and followed this star. Yet how many of us have ever done exactly what these “wise men from the East” did; how many of us have ever simply looked up at the sky? During the day, our sun gives us just enough light and warmth to provide life on this planet. But even the sun is fairly ordinary insofar as stars go. As one who is not specialized in what to look for when I look at the night sky—I may be able to find a few major constellations—I doubt I would have the discerning eye that the wise men of Jesus’ time must have had. Sure, from my Boy Scout days I would be able to find Polaris, the North Star at the end of the Little Dipper, Ursa Minor, to point myself straight north. Lately the planet Venus has been near the brightest it ever appears to us, so it is especially easy to spot. We speak of full moons, blue moons, blood moons, and hunter’s moons, meteor showers at their most intense in August and November... If I am especially fascinated or looking for a specific star in the sky, I have an application on my phone called SkyTracker Lite.

But, in the days of the magi, there was no app for that. The wise men simply looked up. When have we looked up and, even if we have had no idea what to look for that might be out of the ordinary, simply been in awe? Have any of us ever peered into those almost fourteen billion light years of space and simply thought, “Wow! What kind of being—whom we call God—could create such magnificence”?

We, like the magi of Jesus’ time, look up and, if looking up gives us a sense of awe, then this awe sets us on a journey. Have we ever looked up and been in awe at the expanse of the universe and then, with eyes of faith, deepened our wonder at how the creator of all that expanse could, or would want to, be born into our world as one like us, and would want to show himself first to “wise men from the East” who simply began by following a star; by doing what they were used to doing, looking up to the heavens for signs of the divine; being in awe even at a subtle change in that sky?

From that first feeling of awe at looking up and seeing a star, the wise men set out from their home country. Why? Were these wise men not  perhaps wealthy, or at least comfortable with their way of life in their own country? What would cause them to set out for a land unknown to them? How were they able to encounter Herod in Jerusalem and then, on their return home, to heed the warning “in a dream not to return to Herod”? For Herod, in our Gospel, represents the exact opposite of the wise men. Herod greets the news of this child born in Bethlehem with fear that leads him to act with great evil. Herod, wealthy and comfortable, was unwilling to set out from his comfort zone, whereas the wise men were. And the wise men, upon arriving at the place of the Lord’s birth, “were overwhelmed with joy” at what must still have been to them a challenge to their comfort; to their old way of life.

Still, for the wise men to go beyond their comfort was their only way to utmost joy. The magi show us that the measure by which we are willing to set out from our comfort, from “this is the way we have always done it,” from our wealth if we have it, is the measure by which we will experience joy. It is the measure by which, in place of worldly comfort, wealth, and the way of life we know, our God is born among and within us. Our God lives among and within us in a way that, as I imagine it was for the wise men and certainly for the likes of Herod, was unnerving. But there can be no greater joy for us than this: God taking our human form and dwelling among us; God, beginning as a baby in Bethlehem, breaking down our comfort zones to take the place of greatest importance in our hearts, minds, and actions.

Yet if we are able to get so far as to look up and allow ourselves to be overtaken by awe, and then to let that awe impel us to set forth beyond our comfort, our wealth, our best-laid plans, or our existing way of life, still then, like the wise men, we are called to bring gifts.

The magi of Matthew’s Gospel brought three gifts to the newborn Jesus: Gold fit for a king; frankincense fit for God; and myrrh for the one who would die and rise to save us. What gifts will we bring to honour our king; to honour our Lord and God; to honour the one who has died and risen and will return at the end of time to save us; to bring us eternal life?

Might we begin by offering the gift of our worship, our presence in celebration here and now? We worship and we celebrate as the gifts God has already offered us, gifts of simple bread and wine, are changed and change us into the gift of Christ to our world. This urges us, then, to go forth from this celebration bearing intentional gifts of love and kindness especially toward the most abandoned, the most disadvantaged and vulnerable of our brothers and sisters: People not yet born; people of an advanced age; people who have few or no loved ones to care for them; people who are sick in mind, body, or spirit; people who are dying; people who flee violence, poverty, and persecution in their homelands for the safety of our country, and so on.

The gifts of love and kindness we bear especially to people who cannot repay us show to the world that we are, like the “wise men from the East” of Jesus’ time, a people who looks up and out at God’s world, God’s universe, with awe; that this awe impels us to set forth from our comfort, our best-laid plans, our wealth, into the unknown and the challenging.

We bring gifts freely because we have been given a gift, God’s own Son. This gift we have received and hand on, freely and without charge, is the gift that alone will overwhelm our world with joy because ours is the gift—the Epiphany, the “making known” of God’s dwelling among and within us—that we celebrate here and that will lead us to eternal life.