Christmas has arrived; Advent is over. We can now sing our favorite Christmas carols that some have wanted to sing all during Advent. What’s your favorite Christmas carol? I hope that if we haven’t already sung it, that sometime during the mass we will.
As some of you may know, my preferred form of exercise is racquetball. Every morning at 5:30, Monday through Friday, you will find me at the Y playing racquetball, sometimes singles and sometimes doubles. Four guys in a little racquetball court when we’re playing doubles can seem a little crowded at times, but in 33 years of playing I’ve only had to go to the hospital for stitches one time, but a couple of weeks ago I got hit in my mouth with a racquet. The result was that my upper lip hurt a little and I could feel my front teeth, which worried me a little. So after we had finished playing I went to my dentist, who told me one of my front teeth was a little loose and that I shouldn’t use it for a couple of weeks. By Christmas he told me we should know if the tooth would survive. Consequently, this year I have a new favorite Christmas song: “All I want for Christmas is my two front teeth!”
We have received many Christmas cards this year, as always, and we thank you for the many messages of good will we have received. Many of the cards use words like love, peace, and joy. They are wonderful messages, and what they convey is the result of God taking flesh and becoming a human being in the Babe of Bethlehem. When people talk about the “spirit” of Christmas, these spiritual fruits are what they are referring to—things like love, joy, and peace. Add to them qualities like forbearance, kindness, goodness, faithfulness, gentleness, and self-control and you have the complete list of the fruits of the Spirit, that is, the fruits of the Holy Spirit of God. Next year you might try to find an unusual Christmas card to send, using one of the fruits of the Spirit other than love, joy, and peace. Maybe you could design your own. Something like: “May the forbearance of Christmas be yours.” Or “May you be blessed with self-control this Christmastide.” Oh well, maybe designing Christmas cards isn’t my strong suit. But when God is present in a person’s life, the result is a manifestation of that presence breaking forth in joy, peace, love, forbearance, kindness, goodness, faithfulness, gentleness, and self-control.
Thus when we receive messages on Christmas cards with these words, we are reminded that when God comes into our lives, the result is these things. The history of the people of God that we read about throughout the entire Bible is a history of almighty God, who created all things, seeking a relationship with his people. The culmination of that seeking is his taking the flesh of the Virgin Mary and becoming a human being in Jesus of Nazareth. In other words, what we celebrate at Christmas is God, who is pure spirit, intangible, immortal, invisible, and all powerful becoming tangible, mortal, visible, and in the weakness of a helpless infant.
Thus, we need to be careful in talking about the “spirit” of Christmas, lest we miss the point. Christmas is all about all of those spiritual elements—things like love, joy, and peace—and finding them, in their ultimate perfection, in a person, the person of Jesus.
“But does that really make a difference?” you might ask. “All the difference in the world,” I submit. We Christians worship a God who is involved in his creation, for whom this life is intended to be good, and who wants us to have life that is full. We don’t believe that to reach union with him we must remove ourselves from the cares of this world, but the contrary. Just as God involves himself intimately with us human beings, we, too, must be fully involved if we are to fulfill the purpose for which we were made.
And so, Christians have always, when at our best, been involved in the tangibleness of life. Wherever human beings are in need, we seek to meet those needs. We feed the hungry, clothe the naked; we build hospitals for the sick, schools for the young, daycare centers for the homeless. When we take the Gospel to other places, we also do what we can to improve the quality of their drinking water, their care of the sick, and their education of the young. It all goes back to our belief that the God who made all things and pronounced them good, seeks a relationship with us, and became one of us in Jesus. To talk about the intangible without regard to the tangible would be a distortion of our faith at its most fundamental level.
As you and I celebrate Christ Mass, let us also remember the poor and lowly, the young and the helpless, the widow and orphan, and any who are in need; and let us in that remembering reach out as the loving arms of the God who loves us enough to become one of us.