Dec. 18th, 2016: Fourth
Sunday in Advent, Year A - Mt. 1:18-24.
AIM: To help the hearers
recognize God=s presence in their lives today.
A Sunday school teacher told a class
of young children the Christmas story of the shepherds and the Wise Men. At the
end she asked them: AWho do you think was the first to know about the birth of
Jesus?@
A girl=s hand shot up: AMary,@ she answered.
Well, sure. How could anyone miss
that? That=s just the kind of thing, however,
that we adults often do miss. We=re looking for more complicated
answers. Lacking the simplicity of young children, we associate God with things
that are dramatic and spectacular, like the choir of angels appearing to the
shepherds, and the star which guided the Wise Men to Bethlehem
That explains why so many of Jesus= own people failed to recognize him
as their long awaited Messiah. The popular expectation was that the Messiah
would come dramatically, and unexpectedly. Jesus= people had a saying: AThree things come wholly unexpected:
the Messiah, a godsend, and a scorpion.@ No one expected God=s anointed servant to come as a
normal nursing baby born to a young girl in a small village. People expected
him to drop unexpected from the sky, full-grown in his royal regalia and power.
What more fitting landing place for the Messiah than the Temple
mount in the holy city of Jerusalem Temple
How could people raised on such
expectations reconcile them with this man Jesus who been born and raised in
their midst? AWe know where this man is from,@ they say in John=s gospel. ABut when the Messiah comes, no one
will know where he is from.@ (Jn 7:27) Matthew reports a similar reaction to Jesus.
When Jesus returned to Nazareth
It is easy to criticize Jesus= contemporaries for failing to
recognize him. But are we really more clear sighted than they were? When God
first came to us in human form he did so not dramatically on the clouds of
heaven, but through the nine months= pregnancy of a simple country girl,
and through thirty years of the normal human process of growth, infancy,
adolescence, and adulthood. That tells us something C or at least it should. It tells us
that God comes to us today as he did then: in ways we would never expect. More C God comes to us, and is with us, when
we think he=s not there at all.
In the days after the terrorist
attack on the World Trade Center
in New York twelve years ago, one of the
television networks showed a group of people in New Jersey
AWhere was God on September eleventh,
2001?@ people ask. God was there in the
countless acts of heroism, large and small, which were so widely reported in
the days and weeks after the attack, and which still remain reason for
gratitude, admiration, and wonder.
God comes to us in more ordinary ways
too C not only when tragedy strikes. He
comes to us, again and again, in the normal events of everyday life, in people
we know and love C but also in those we dislike and find difficult, sometimes
impossible.
God came to me almost sixty ago
through a child=s voice on the other side of the confessional screen saying: AI stamp my foot at my mother and say
No.@ That hit me hard. That little one is
so sorry for that small sin, I thought. My own sins are worse B and I=m not that sorry. I believe that the
Lord sent that child into my confessional to teach me a lesson. I never knew that
child’s name. He or she is probably a grandparent now. But I=ve never forgotten what that little
one taught me.
The Lord came to me more recently,
and spoke to me, in words of a woman, a daily communicant, who said to me after
many years of married life: AFather, when you walk up to the altar on your wedding day,
you don=t see the Stations of the Cross.@ Preaching recently to a group of men
preparing for ordination as permanent deacons, and to their wives, I quoted
those words. As I did so I could see heads nodding all over the chapel.
An African proverb says: AListen, and you will hear the
footsteps of the ants.@ God=s coming to us is often as insignificant as the footsteps of
ants. God is coming to each one of us, right now. He is knocking on the door of
our hearts. He leaves it to us whether we open the door. How often we have
refused to do so, trying to keep God at a distance because we fear the demands
he will make on us. Yet God continues to
come to us, and to knock. He never breaks in. He waits for us to open the door.
As long as life on this earth lasts, God will never take No as our final
answer.
Refusing to open the door means
shutting out of our lives the One who alone can give our lives meaning; who
offers us the strength to surmount suffering; the One who alone can give us fulfillment,
happiness, and peace. Keeping the door
of our hearts shut to God means missing out on the greatest chance we shall
ever be offered; failing to appear for our personal rendezvous with destiny.
Opening the door to God, letting him
into our lives, means embarking on life=s greatest adventure. This is the
most worthwhile thing we can do with our lives C at bottom the only thing worth
doing. When we open the door to God, when we say our Yes to him, we place
ourselves on the side of the simple Jewish girl whom we encounter in today=s gospel. When she opened the door to
God and said her Yes to him, she was able to speak words that would be the
height of arrogant conceit were it not for one thing: they were true:
AAll generations shall call me
blessed.@ (Lk 1:48)
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