How God Meets Us at Christmas

 

I still have fond memories of taking pictures of Father Robert in San Antonio after his was ordained by Bishop John. But after the beautiful ordination service, I was asked to take more family pictures. Father Robert with all his brother priests, then with his parents and friends. However, what I would call the most stunning photo that I would print on a vocation flyer was the family portrait of Fr. Robert’s with his wife McKensie holding their 2 year old son JJ beaming with pride and what I also learned that mom was expecting another child in June. The young couple shared that they picked the name Emelle (pronounced “in-mell”) if it was a girl and no name yet for a boy.

As this young couple looks forward to the birth of another child. Christmas is God’s answer to our waiting, God’s response to the centuries of prayers that lay hidden in our groaning, in our sighs, our frustrations, each of them a plea, mostly silent, for a divine intervention, all of them asking God to come and rid the world of injustice and our hearts of loneliness and heartache. Something people around the world are all craving for: rid the world of injustice, war, deportation, loneliness and heartache of all kinds.

But God’s answer didn’t exactly meet our expectations even as it surpassed them. What was born with Jesus’ birth and what still lies seemingly helpless in mangers all around the world wasn’t exactly what the world expected.

What the world expected was a superstar, someone with real talent, sharpness, and raw muscle-power to out-gun everything that’s bad on this planet, someone charismatic enough to make everyone who opposes him slink away in defeat. it appears that’s exactly what some are expecting in our country today. However, what is God’s answer to that: A baby lying helpless in the straw!

Why?

Why would God choose to be born into the world in this way?

The power of God revealed in Christmas is the power of a baby, nothing more.

Because you can’t argue with a baby! Babies don’t try to compete, don’t stand up to you, don’t try to best you in an argument, and don’t try to impress you with their answers. Indeed, they can’t speak at all. And that is the Savior who was born in Bethlehem, and that is how God is still basically in the world. Like a baby.

God does not outgun anyone, out-muscle anyone, threaten anyone, or overpower anyone. The power of God revealed in Christmas is the power of a baby, nothing more, nothing less: innocence, gentleness, helplessness, a vulnerability that can soften hearts, invite in, have us hush our voices, teach us patience, and call forth what’s best in us.

But we have always been slow to understand this. We want our messiahs to possess more immediate power. And we are in good company here. The messiah that people longed for during all those centuries leading up to Jesus and Bethlehem was precisely conceived as a human superhero, someone like a power ninja someone with the earthly muscle to bang heads together and purge the world of evil by morally superior muscles.

But that’s not the Christmas story, nor the power revealed in it. An infant lying in the straw in Bethlehem didn’t outgun anyone. He just lay there, waiting for anyone good or bad to come to him, see his helplessness, feel a tug at his or her heart strings, and then gently try to coax a smile or a word out of him.

That’s still how God meets us.

Lord, I pray for all my Sonshine Friends that we take a moment to really look at the infant at our manger at home or in our church.  See his helplessness and then feel a tug at your heart that says you my chosen one and I love you.

 

Looking for Directions

 

You know, I have to tell you about something that happened just this week. On Monday, my good friend Fr. Erick drove us to Sedona, Arizona so I could take a few landscape pictures to add to my portfolio. We had just completed 9 services for the Feast of Guadalupe – what a wonderful, prayerful experience with his beautiful Hispanic community. Now it was our time to relax and hit the road.

In advance of our trip, I contacted the park rangers for suggestions on the best photo site locations. We needed directions because we only had 24 hours and my goal was to find the best sunrise and sunset locations. To our rescue comes angel Kimberly. Kimberly is a US park ranger and she knew exactly where we needed to be throughout our journey. We needed a sign, some guidance to be at the right place at the right moment.

And that got me thinking – how often do we ask God to give us a sign? When we reflect on that question, it probably happens more often than we might initially think. "God, what am I supposed to do with my life?" "Lord, is this the person I'm meant to be with?" "Should I go there and do this?" "Jesus, give me a sign that you love me" – and that one's usually followed with a suggestion on how He might do that.

It's understandable, really. We're told that God loves us. That He answers every one of our prayers. So in a way, we admit that maybe we're a little dense. Perhaps we might have missed that answer or not clearly understood His plan when things aren't going the way we think they should. So we want some clarity, some understanding, some reason brought into whatever situation it is we find ourselves in. We look for more clues, more evidence of God's presence, His activity in our lives. We ask for a sign.

Now, in today's Gospel, we know that both Mary and Joseph had an angel tell them and explain to them how Mary was going to become the mother of Jesus even though Mary and Joseph had been betrothed but not had relations with one another. But there's a detail about this that kind of fascinates me.

Mary had an angelic visitor greeting her one day in her home in Nazareth. She had this dialogue with the angel and a further confirmation of this wondrous news with the incredible and miraculous announcement that her elderly relative Elizabeth was pregnant with John the Baptist.

Joseph has an angelic visitor too, but the angel comes to him in a dream. And here's what's interesting – the angel comes not to announce glad tidings to him as the angel does for Mary. The angel comes in response to Joseph being in a difficult spot. He's at a loss, perhaps sad, confused, angry even, or most likely feeling unworthy.

Matthew tells us that Joseph knew that Mary was "found with child through the Holy Spirit." There's no reason to believe that Joseph didn't believe that. He loved Mary and already knew how beautiful she was, interiorly. But after Mary tells Joseph about her encounter with the angel, the scriptures kind of just matter-of-factly tell us that Joseph was planning on divorcing her quietly.

The more you reflect on it and dig into this, you realize that Joseph must have been filled with self-doubt and unworthiness. Because Mary and Joseph were betrothed, but not living together. In ancient Judaism, betrothal was more than just what we would understand as engagement. Betrothal was the time when the couple was already legally married but before they lived together. It was a sacred time of transition. From the betrothal on, they could only be separated by death or divorce – which wasn't very accepted in ancient times.

We read: "Joseph her husband, since he was a righteous man, yet unwilling to expose her to shame, decided to divorce her quietly." Joseph, not believing he was even worthy to be Mary's husband at this point and wanting in a sense to free her of being attached to him, doesn't know what to do. It's not good. Divorce is not a good answer – but Joseph doesn't know what else to do. As much as Joseph loves Mary, he thinks this is the only viable plan. Being a righteous man, he would've prayed to God for guidance, looking for some sign that he was correct.

This is what this Gospel story is really about. God was unwilling to let Joseph move on through life believing lies about himself, of somehow being unworthy. God the Father sends an angel to Joseph in his sleep. In Joseph's dreams, God the Father invites Joseph to let go of self-doubt, to reject the voices of the devil speaking words of fear, and instead to dream His dream. Dream His dream of being a father to His Son Jesus – not just in a spiritual but a real way. Dream His dream of taking Mary, full of Grace, as his wife into his home, truly as his to love, honor, cherish, and protect all the days of his life.

St. Joseph has taught me a few beautiful lessons with this – lessons that have helped shape my understanding of God and I think are really important for each of us when we have our moments of asking for a sign.

First is that we have to be open to how the Lord wants to speak to us. Just because your betrothed gets an angel popping by the house one afternoon doesn't mean that's how God is going to "visit" you. But for us, we always have to remember that God the Father – He who made us, who knows us so intimately that scripture tells us He knows the exact number of hairs on our heads – He knows how best to speak to us. So I can't let jealousy or envy that God speaks and works differently in one person's life compared to mine enter in. Because if I do that, more likely I'm going to miss how God is speaking to me.

The second thing is to trust God. Trust His plan. Trust His plan that has been at work outside of our human time and human expectations. Trust He has always and is always at work – but that He wants that to be done not "to" us but with us. He wants to work with us.

This brings me to the final point or the final lesson that St. Joseph teaches us. We have to be connected to the Lord in our everyday lives so that we can know how to see Him, hear Him, and encounter Him in those bigger moments when we are crying out for signs. Joseph had to have been a man of great faith, and trust, and prayer. He had to already have been a man in a relationship with God to have been able to appreciate and accept this "dream." Had he not, it would've been easy to dismiss it as a crazy dream. Because Joseph knew the Lord already, he was able to hear Him speaking to Joseph in this difficult hour. He was able to trust God's plan was greater than his plans. He was able to get up and follow what it was God was inviting him into – and experience the truth of those promises.

Let me tell you how this played out in Sedona. Angel Kimberly had us visit 13 sites. My ultimate goal or "dream shot" was to take a reflection of Cathedral Rock that I saw on the internet. The only problem was that I was on the wrong side of Oak Creek. I told this to Kimberly and she recommended I drive to Baldwin Trail. So I hiked for an hour along the trail and when I finally found the creek, I again was on the wrong side and it was impossible to get a reflection of Cathedral Rock. Disappointed and exhausted, I started walking back along the trail and got lost.

However, I discovered an area with long rocky deep crevices filled with puddles of water. I walked around and noticed a reflection of Cathedral Rock in the water. This was the "dream shot" that I had been searching for, though not as awesome as the one online. 

 

Then hiking back to the car, Fr. Erick suggested that we drive back to Airport Mesa for a sunset shot. I thought we were miles away, but Fr. Erick was my angel – in eight minutes I found myself standing with my tripod with 500 tourists taking pictures of an awesome sunset over Sedona.

See, sometimes God's plan is different from what we imagined, but it's exactly what we need. I was looking for one specific shot, but God gave me something different – and then surprised me with something even better than I could have planned.

So let me ask you: What signs are you looking for as answers to your prayers right now? What fears and doubts make it difficult to sleep? What are the things that seem impossible – the things that seem barren, lost, dead in you right now? The things that if God himself asked you, "What do you want for Christmas?" – not any material things that we maniacally focus on this time of year, but the things that are deepest in our hearts right now that we tend to have grown indifferent to, thinking they are unanswerable, impossible?

Joseph tells us to trust God. Be open and attentive to His plan and even more to be open and attentive to the ways He is speaking to us – speaking to our fears, our doubts, our worries; inviting us into deeper love and trust with Him, His plans, His dreams for us; so that we too can make Christmas truly a celebration of His birth – for each of us, and for the world once again.

 

 

Feast of Our Lady of Guadaloupe

 

My brothers and sisters, there's something I want us to really think about today. When we hear the story of the Annunciation - this moment when the angel Gabriel comes to Mary - we often focus on the miraculous nature of what's happening. And rightfully so. But I think we sometimes miss something equally important: Mary's very human response to what God is asking of her.

Look at what happens in this passage. The angel appears and says, "Hail, favored one! The Lord is with you." And what's Mary's reaction? She's "greatly troubled." The Greek word there suggests she was deeply disturbed, trying to figure out what this greeting could possibly mean. She wasn't immediately peaceful. She wasn't instantly serene. She was troubled.

And then comes the announcement itself - that she's going to conceive and bear a son, that he'll be called the Son of the Most High, that his kingdom will have no end. Extraordinary promises. World-changing promises. And Mary asks a perfectly reasonable question: "How can this be, since I have no relations with a man?"

Now, I want us to sit with that question for a moment. Mary isn't doubting God's power. She's asking a real, practical question about how this is going to work in her actual life. She's engaged to Joseph. She knows how babies are made. She knows what people will think. She's asking, "How is this going to happen?"

And here's what strikes me: God doesn't rebuke her for asking. The angel doesn't say, "Mary, just trust and don't ask questions." Instead, Gabriel gives her an explanation. He tells her about the Holy Spirit, about the power of the Most High overshadowing her. He even gives her a sign - her elderly cousin Elizabeth is also pregnant. God honors her question. God respects her need to understand.

And then comes that moment - that beautiful, world-changing moment. "Behold, I am the handmaid of the Lord. May it be done to me according to your word." Her "yes." Her "fiat."

But let's not romanticize this too much. Mary's yes wasn't given in a vacuum. She knew what this could mean. She lived in a small town where everyone knew everyone else's business. She was engaged to Joseph, and suddenly she's going to be pregnant before their marriage is complete. She could face shame, rejection, even death by stoning according to the law. Her yes was going to cost her something.

Yet she trusted. She surrendered. She said yes to God's plan even when she couldn't see the whole picture.

Now, fast forward nearly fifteen hundred years to December 1531, to a hill called Tepeyac just outside what's now Mexico City. And here's where we see something remarkable - Mary appears again, but this time to Juan Diego, an indigenous peasant who had recently converted to Christianity.

Think about the context for a moment. Mexico had been conquered by the Spanish just ten years earlier. The indigenous people had seen their world turned upside down - their culture suppressed, their temples destroyed, their people decimated by disease and violence. Many had been baptized, but it was often forced or done out of fear. The faith hadn't really taken root in their hearts because it came wrapped in the violence of conquest.

And who does Mary choose to appear to? Not the Spanish archbishop. Not the powerful conquistadors. Not the educated theologians who had come from Europe. She appears to Juan Diego - someone the world considered insignificant, someone who was struggling to survive in a society that had been torn apart.

You see the pattern here? It's the same pattern we see in today's Gospel. God consistently chooses the unlikely, the overlooked, the ordinary. Mary herself was an unlikely choice - a young woman from Nazareth, a town so insignificant that people asked, "Can anything good come from Nazareth?" And now she appears to another unlikely person, Juan Diego, to do something extraordinary.

But here's what I find most beautiful about the Guadalupe story. When Mary appears to Juan Diego, she doesn't speak to him in Spanish, the language of power and conquest. She speaks to him in Náhuatl, his own language. She appears with indigenous features. She wears the clothing of an Aztec princess but with symbols that the indigenous people could read and understand - symbols that told them about the Gospel, about Christ, about the faith in ways that made sense to their culture.

Mary met Juan Diego where he was. She honored his culture, his language, his way of seeing the world. And through him, she brought millions of indigenous people to faith in her Son - not through force or fear, but through love and respect.

What does this mean for us today? I think it means that God is still choosing unlikely people to do extraordinary things. God is still speaking to us in ways we can understand, meeting us where we are, honoring who we are.

Mary's yes at the Annunciation wasn't just a one-time event. It was the beginning of a life of saying yes to God, even when it was difficult, even when it was costly. And her appearance to Juan Diego shows us that she continues to say yes to God's work in the world, continues to reach out to those who are marginalized and forgotten, continues to bring people to her Son.

So here's my question for us today: What is God asking us to say yes to? Maybe it's something big - a major life change, a difficult decision, a call to serve in a new way. Or maybe it's something that seems small but is actually profound - being more patient with a difficult family member, reaching out to someone who's lonely, standing up for someone who's being treated unjustly.

Whatever it is, I think Mary's example teaches us something important. We don't have to have all the answers before we say yes. We don't have to see the whole picture. We don't have to pretend we're not troubled or uncertain. Mary was troubled. Mary asked questions. But in the end, she trusted. She surrendered. She said yes.

And when we say yes to God - even when we're uncertain, even when we're afraid, even when we can't see how it's all going to work out - God honors that yes. God works through that yes. God does extraordinary things through ordinary people who are willing to trust.

Lord, I pray for all my Sonshine Friends, help us to say yes to God as Our Lady of Guadaloupe did. Help us to trust when we cannot see. Help us to be instruments of God's love in a world that desperately needs it.

John the Baptist

 

On You Tube, you will find many evangelical preachers screaming at you to “repent your sins.” Nobody likes being called out or being accused. That’s the real bummer we face every year on the Second Sunday in Advent when the gospel readings confront us with this freaky mass of zeal and passion of John the Baptist. John comes as Jesus’ advance man. He’s a bizarre figure outside the mainstream, dressed in animal skins and eating bugs and looking for all the world like the prophet Elijah. Like Elijah before him, John, in our Gospel is calling out society for turning away from God and warning folks to come to repentance. I think he was more persuasive than our You Tube preachers because tons of people came out to hear him and let him give them a dunk in the Jordan when they confessed their sins.

The gospel story tells us even Pharisees and Sadducees were curious about John. I’ll bet they only came out to hear this guy because they thought he was a novelty or because they were afraid he might be telling people something which would impugn the power structure the Pharisees and Sadducees so enjoyed. When John sees these bigwigs, he really gives them an earful. He calls them snakes and goes totally ballistic on them—telling them their vaunted pedigrees don’t amount to spit and, unless they actually started doing something worthwhile with their faith, there was going to be a lot of chopping and burning in their future.

I think both John the Baptist and Elijah before him saw a nation which had skidded off the rails. Given the borderline psychotic times we live in here in America, we could certainly use a prophetic voice calling us all to repentance.

If you watch Youtube, many speakers make the very interesting point that liberal ideas and values are everywhere in the media. You don’t need to go to church to hear them. So why, they asked, would anyone feel the need to attend church or your church every Sunday? My answer? For the same reason people came to hear John the Baptist on the banks of the Jordan. Maybe the folks came for the entertainment value of hearing this wacky guy preach, but that wasn’t what drew them into the water. They came because they knew in their hearts they needed to confess and be forgiven and be transformed. Progressive ideas alone don’t bring people to repentance. The hunger for God does.

As Catholics we begin every Mass to confess our sins and claim the renewing power of Christ. We ask forgiveness for what we’ve done and for what we’ve left undone—for the sin of not producing the fruits worthy of repentance. I find I have to ask myself every day, “Have I really served the Lord today?” In the swirling chaos of this present hour—when compassion, mercy, and generosity are so needed—have I born the fruit Jesus expects of me? Could I be doing more? The Baptist calls to each of us during this sacred time to examine our conscience and wrestle with our faith. And that’s a good thing.

When the Evangelical preachers of this world try to call us out, we’ll get defensive. But when we hear John the Baptist calling, we’ll hear the truth about ourselves and gladly come with both contrition and joy to the river.

Lord, I pray for all my Sonshine Friends that they all have a blessed Advent.