Fourth Sunday in Ordinary Time, cycle A

Matthew 5:1-12

You've just heard the eight beatitudes – again. If you've never heard them before, you would have to be living under a rock. Even people who don't know them at least know that there are beatitudes. One question is how to read them. Some people say that Matthew took a few of Jesus' sayings and put them all in this gospel. Others say that Jesus actually preached a sermon starting out with these statements. The second big problem is that Jesus gave the beatitudes in Aramaic; Matthew's gospel is in Greek, and even when you try to translate Greek into English, you often don't quite hit the mark. If you go to different translations of the bible, you find different words. Sometimes the beatitudes begin with the word “Blessed” as you've just heard them. Other times the word is “Happy”. I've also heard the variation, “How blest are those...” with an exclamation mark. And translators can't make up their minds wether Jesus is saying “Blessed are they” or “Blessed are you”. And the third problem with the beatitudes – what do we do with them? Are they descriptions of how we should live? Are they commandments? Are they just comments Jesus is making? Martin Luther said that they are meant to show us that we can never meet the standards that they set, and so all we can do is throw ourselves on God's mercy.

If you remember how this gospel starts, even there we have a lack of clarity. Is he speaking to the crowd who follows him? Or did he leave the crowd and go up on the mountain with his disciples? Is this a message for everyone, or just the inner circle?

One author gives an interpretation I like. Imagine that Jesus is speaking to his disciples, and pointing at the crowd below. If you look at the first four beatitudes, they describe people who are suffering, who are at the margins. Being poor in spirit are those who for whatever reason have no joy; they are the worriers, the people who have no one in their lives. She is the woman who sees no hope, who thinks suicidal thoughts, who dreads waking up tomorrow. Being someone who mourns is confronting loss. He is the man who has been told that he has to carry around an oxygen tank the rest of his life; she is the one who has lost a child and the void is always there. And the meek – he is the doormat, the person everyone kind of ignores. She is the teenager who is always getting teased, who is the object of bullying. And the ones who hunger and thirst for righteousness – the man who can't get a decent job because English is his second language and he hasn't gotten it down too well. Or perhaps she is the one who has been cheated out of her livelihood by her children, and because they are her children she has chosen to suffer rather than seek justice.

The first four beatitudes promise that God will reverse these things, if not in this world, than the next.

And then we get to the second set. Here the beatitudes don't describe something that a person is caught up in; instead, they describe traits that can be acquired. You can be merciful; you can be clean of heart, you can be a peacemaker, you can go out and try to make things right. And Jesus is saying that if you do these things, you are God's way of addressing the issues present in the first four. IF you are merciful, you will be there dealing with the bully; if you are clean of heart, you will have made yourself sensitive to the presence of God in other people, and that in turn will show you what you can do. And if you are a peacemaker, you will be a bridge between enemies, you will be the one who heals divisions. And you will notice that hungering and thirsting for righteousness is not the same as being persecuted for the sake of righteousness. Jesus is saying that the person who seeks to make things right will inevitably draw fire – because someone has a vested interest in keeping the injustice going. But such a person will achieve his goal – seeing the kingdom of heaven come about.

So Jesus says, look around you – God loves all these people who carry such burdens and you should love them too, because God will see that things come out right in the end. And if you make yourself merciful, if you seek righteousness, if you beome clean of heart, if you make peace, you will be part of that reward, and you yourself will have what you are looking for.

And finally, Jesus changes the last “blessed”. He's been saying “Blessed are they” and now he says, “Blessed are you” – he's speaking to his disciples now, to you and I – when as a consequence of your efforts on my behalf, you suffer – because as the martyrs of the early years of Christianity knew so much better than we do – you will not go unrewarded. To bring about the kingdom, identify people described by the first four beatitudes, and teach people to develop the characteristics in the second four.

One other point. Matthew has Jesus go up a mountain to deliver the beatitudes, just like Moses went up a mountain to receive the ten commandments. The commandments were meant to be a floor. They mostly say “Thou shalt not”. In other words, if you want to live together in some sort of peace, here are the minimal requirements. Jesus, on the other hand, says, “Here are goals to shoot for: A follower of Jesus is never satisfied with the bare minimum. He or she is always striving to be better. Saint Alphonsus Ligouri, the founder of the Redemptorists and a doctor of the church, died at the age of 90. Even in the last few days of his life, he was still reaching for those goals, he was still trying to live the beatitudes.

And so should we. Because the message of Jesus is that what is wrong will be made right, sooner or later. But those of us who are members of Jesus' body have the opportunity right here and now to begin this process. And he holds out an awesome promise that should make us rejoice.

Do a beatitude today. Find someone who needs you and be merciful, clean of heart, seek righteousness, make peace, and begin to right the injustice of the world. And you will notice your heart rejoicing because you are doing what Jesus calls you to do.

Third Sunday in Ordinary Time, cycle A

Matthew 4:12-23

About a year ago I was approached by a man who was a friend of one of the patients at the Jewish Geriatric Center. They were both members of the same church, and were casual friends. Because he had come into the nursing home to visit his friend, the reality of disability probably intruded on his day to day consciousness; I know in my own case, despite a lifetime of taking care of cancer patients, I had very little idea of what went on in a nursing home until I became active in that ministry.

In any event, the man was very enthused about music therapy, and referred me to a few web sites about this. It was another area I wasn't familiar with, but as I explored it, I could see why he was interested; to believe the studies that have been done, music therapy has a positive effect on alzheimer's disease, stroke, parkinsons disease – you name it and music probably helps in some way or another. It turns out there is a whole scientific discipline which studies the effects of music on the human brain.

This gentleman wanted to do something. He wanted to help the people in the nursing home with music. I spent some time with him working out a project that would demonstrate whether or not this would be a good thing to introduce. After all, the nursing facility has limited resources. And I told him that he would have to get the permission of the director, as well as appropriate consent, in order to do this project. I met with him once or twice more, and then he more or less disappeared from view.

We human beings are designed to look at a situation and come up with ways we could make it better. That's kind of what my friend did. That is the very bedrock of civilization; that's the reason we make progress not only in our material world, but even in things like politics and law and religion; we are constantly trying to tweak what is so it will be better.

The Kingdom of Heaven is God's way of harnessing that tendency in us. If we are trying to know God and love him; if we have an active prayer life; if we have a relationship with Jesus Christ, then we know what the kingdom of heaven is all about; there is no more poverty; there are no second class citizens; people don't let other people go hungry, or sleep under bridges, or be deprived of an education. When there is evil in the world, the kingdom of heaven is constantly calling us to do something about it. And of course, we can ignore it, we can fail to do what we are supposed to do, and maybe someday we reach the point where we settle down in our armchair and say, “it's none of my business” or “I can't fix the problem so why bother?” But if we are at all sensitive, if we have listened even a little to the message of Jesus, we should feel a little guilt, we should feel a little of that call that Jesus gave his apostles “Come after me”.

My friend heard a little of that call, and even set out to answer it – in a very narrow, specific way. Because any time we can make the lives of our fellow human beings more human, we are bringing about the kingdom of Heaven, or I should say, Jesus is bringing it about through us.

But he didn't follow through. Because the biggest barrier to bringing about the kingdom of heaven is not really that we don't stick to our resolutions, its that we don't put down something else so that we can devote ourselves to the kingdom. That's what Jesus teaches us in this gospel. He says in effect, I will make you fishers of men, but first you have to stop being fishers of fish. And for most of us who already lead busy lives, we take it as a personal failure if we give up something good in order to take on something else. We can obviously do this once or twice, but you can see that if we keep this up, we burn out, or alternatively, we don't accomplish what we set out to do. And both of these results lead away from the Kingdom.

Every Christian should be consciously working to bring about God's kingdom – which is pretty much the same thing as fishing for men. After all, the kingdom involves moving this person or that, this group or that, a little closer to Jesus Christ. But what prevents us, what discourages us, is that when we try, we forget to put down another burden. Most of us, I think, could put down a few burdens. There's television, the internet, maybe a hobby or sport that is consuming our time and energy. Or maybe what is holding us back is that we are already working for the kingdom but that work is not what we are meant to do. Mother Theresa realized that her vocation to be a nun was not getting her where God wanted her to be – and she was in her forties when this realization hit her. She had to lay down that vocation and take up another before God could use her for the great work she accomplished.

Peter and Andrew, and John and James, threw aside their nets “immediately” it says in the gospel. It was only then that they could follow Jesus and fulfill the glorious vocation to which they were called – to become fishers of men and heralds of the Kingdom of Heaven.

We are starting a new year. We are followers of Jesus. We can't go wrong trying to bring about His Kingdom. We know exactly what that kingdom should look like. We know what we can do to bring it about – even if it's only a little part of the whole. And maybe for this new year, instead of resolutions which add something to our already busy days, we should look at what we can subtract, what we can leave behind, so that we can devote time and energy to more effectively creating the Kingdom of Heaven in our own homes, workplaces, and church.

Second Sunday in Ordinary Time, cycle A

John 1:29-34

When I was growing up, a good friend of my father was a priest who taught at the local catholic college in Helena, Montana. Father Mackin was short and overweight and had a great sense of humor. In those days my parents would invite him over for supper now and then and I liked to listen to him talk; he seemed to know a lot. But to me he was just another priest and the faculty of Carroll College in Helena was made up of priests. In fact in those days when there seemed to be a surplus of priestly vocations, most of the faculty lived in a dormitory and in the basements there were about sixteen altars so that the priests could offer their masses every morning.

One day when I was a teenager Father Mackin asked my father to show a guest of his around Helena. I went along, and the guest turned out to be the secretary of commerce for Germany – he had come to this country on a fact-finding trip and made it a point to visit Father Mackin, who was a world-renowed expert in the economic effects of worker's unions on the financial health of countries. I learned later that the union movement was growing in Germany and the government was trying to figure out how to deal with this situation. Father Mackin was widely known in economic circles for his expertise, and in Germany unions are part of the management of large companies instead of being antagonistic. This is largely due to Father Mackin's advice and expertise.

The secretary of commerce from Germany opened my eyes to something about Father Mackin that I had not known. After that car ride, I saw him with new eyes.

Something like that is happening in the gospel today. Jesus, who has been a follower of John, who probably grew up with John, since they were cousins, had been seen by John as a pretty ordinary guy, a carpenter who looked after his widowed mother. John seems to have had no reason to regard Jesus otherwise. But today we hear John exclaiming that this is the lamb of God who will take away the sin of the world. John goes on to tell his followers that this is a revelation from God, and John now sees that his whole purpose has been to prepare the world for Jesus.

I think there are two things in John's proclamation – that Jesus is the Lamb of God, and that he takes away the sin of the world.

Perhaps we think about Jesus as a sacrifice – that's been the common understanding of this passage. But perhaps John and those who listened to him were thinking of something else. In the book of Exodus, the Jews were told to prepare a lamb for the Passover supper, and smear it's blood on the door frame. If they did this the angel of death who was sent to kill all the first born in each house would pass over the houses signed with the blood of the lamb.

The second point is that the Lamb of God takes away the sin of the world. Sin is singular, not plural. We could certainly talk about the sins of the world – God knows there are an infinite number of them. But John's revelation is that Jesus will take away the sin of the world. One of the things about being human is that we are quite aware of the sin of the world. I visited a 90 year old woman yesterday, and she reminisced about her life. She missed her husband, who had passed away suddenly about eight months ago; she missed her daughter, who had moved to Illinois with her husband. She had few contemporaries and lived alone. She was in the nursing home because she had developed severe heart failure and had been told she could not expect to get any better. Her life was drawing to a close; her body was rebelling, those she loved were not at her bedside – and she had lived an exemplary life, as far as I could tell – a regular church-goer, charitable in terms of money as well as good deeds – certainly someone who, unless there was some deep dark secret, should not be barred from heaven. But her life was dwindling away. And that's the sin of the world. We lose our friends, our loved ones, our strength, our memories, and ultimately we lose our lives. And we know that deep down it is not supposed to be this way; we know that deep down we are meant to live forever, we are meant to be loved and to love, we are meant to be complete. The difference between what should be and what is is the sin of the world. So Jesus doesn't just forgive your sins and mine, his life, death and resurrection set in motion the work of God to restore everything to Him. Because of Jesus, the world will be the way it should be. It is an incredible promise, but in the redeemed world, nothing will be lost, no dear ones will be separated, and we will never lose our bodies or our minds. The blood of the new Passover lamb will spare us from all those things which we take for granted – the sin of the world.

John's revelation shows Jesus to be someone who is not what everyone thought he was. And on the strength of that revelation, as we know, many people including some of John's own disciples, followed Jesus.

And maybe that's the whole message of today's gospel. The role of Jesus in God's plan for the world is central. You and I have been invited to participate in this plan – we are like the Israelites who were spared from death because of the blood of the lamb. But there are many people who haven't heard the invitation. And they haven't heard it because we haven't proclaimed it. We haven't said to them, “Behold the Lamb of God, who takes away the sin of the world”.

What a wonderful thing it is to be taken up into this new world, this redeemed world, this world where sin and death have been conquered. And what a tragedy it will be for those who never learn about this.

So let us listen to this gospel and understand that we have been given the same revelation that God gave John, and that it is our task to proclaim what we know. Whom have we invited into the world where sin will be taken away, where the Lamb of God will make all things new?

Feast of the Epiphany, 2017

Matthew 2:1-12

I once visited a dying hospice patient. He belonged to no religion and never had. He was married to a Catholic lady and his children had all been raised in the Church. In the course of my getting to know him he revealed that in his younger days he had done a lot of things he wasn't proud of, and had hurt his wife and family over and over again by his actions. And although he had very little in the way of a spiritual life, he knew he was going to hell. And he meant it; he was extremely saddened by this.

In separate conversations with his wife and one of his daughters, it seemed as though allthough they corraborated his history of alcoholism, abuse and abandonment, over the past fifteen years he had been an exempliary father and husband. They couldn't figure out why he was so despondent, or why he believed he was going to hell. He soon passed away, still unconverted, still in despair.

Today we hear about two kinds of people. The Magi, of course. They are restless – they know something is missing – or they would never leave their homes and their place in society to travel to a little backwater capital of an insignificant people to seek out their king. They knew nothing of the Hebrew scriptures, but somehow their studies back in their pagan land led them to believe their restlessness would be relieved if they could come into the presence of the newborn King of the Jews. They traveled probably for at least a few weeks braving various dangers and discomforts. They followed a star, whatever that means, and whenever we see this re-enacted in movies, the star stops leading them when they hit Jerusalem. The GPS fails and they have to look at a map; they have to consult with the locals. And eventually they find what they are looking for, they do him homage, they give him gold because he is a king, incense because he is holy, and myrrh because he will have to suffer and die. And they are finally satisfied; they do not continue to search, they go home, having accomplished what they set out to do, having found a savior.

The other group of people include King Herod and his advisors. When asked, the advisors reply that the king will be born in Bethlehem, its right there in the prophecies. And in fact, if they were to spend a little more time with their scriptures, and who is to say they didn't, they could have told you that right now was about the right time for this to happen. And they go back to their scrolls and prayer books and continue to study how far you could walk on the Sabbath day and how you could tell whether an animal was unblemished enough to be used in a sacrifice. The momentous event was to take place 8 miles away, but for them it was too much trouble. And Herod's reaction is worse. He does not deny that the baby will be the King of the Jews; he does all in his power to make sure that it doesn't happen. And later he will murder all the boys under two years of age, as we know. Herod and his advisors all know something predicted by the prophets, something ordained by God himself, is happening – and they ignore it, or in Herod's case, actively oppose it.

I think we human beings can see ourselves in one of the two camps, sometimes even if we are members of a church, if we are religious. It's quite possible to be a pillar of the church and at the same time have no sense of restlessness, of incompleteness. And it's quite possible for people who aren't religious at all to feel that restlessness and incompleteness, and to look for ways to reduce those troubling feelings.

Some of us learn that we need a savior. Some of us never learn that. The man I told you about would probably have agreed that he needed a savior; or perhaps if told that a savior existed (and he was told that many times) he might have answered that he did not need a savior, he did not want one.

Christianity, of course, tells us that all human beings need a savior. All of us have a sense that we are not complete, that we are lacking something or someone to be complete. I think if we are honest we can say with the Apostle Paul, “but I see a different law in the members of my body, waging war against the law of my mind and making me a prisoner of the law of sin which is in my members. Wretched man that I am! Who will set me free from this body of death?” If we are honest we know that only through God's grace have we been spared what so many human beings suffer – hunger, oppression, discrimination, torture, poverty – and only through his grace are we spared from serious sin and its consequences. Deep inside, I know that I cannot make it on my own; and we learn as we get older that there are many things we wish we had done, had learned, had avoided; and now there is no hope of doing them. We need a savior, because it isn't just the fact that we are prone to sin, it is that we are made up of sin, because at the root, sin is incompleteness, it is missing the mark. The greatest saints, who sometimes seem almost morbid in their sense of their own sinfulness, were concerned not about great sins – murder, robbery, slander – but about things so small that most of us would consider them minor faults. They were concerned because they loved God so much that they wanted to be exactly what he wanted them to be, and they knew they were not, and could never be, by themselves. And so they learned that they needed a savior, someone who would make up for wherever they missed the mark. And when they realized that they had a savior, that did not stop them from struggling to become what they were meant to be, but they also became light-hearted, joyful – because they knew that with Jesus they would in the end be exactly what God had meant for them to be.

The man from hospice knew he needed a savior. He was looking back on his life and seeing the terrible things he'd done, and granted, he was probably clinically depressed. Saint Faustina said that even at the point of death God gives the soul a moment so that if the soul is willing, it may return to God. I hope and pray that he found his savior.

Mary, Mother of God (New Year's Day, 2017)

Luke 2:16-21

When I was a boy I enjoyed reading the Tarzan stories by Edgar Rice Burroughs. Tarzan had been raised by apes, you see. Not only was he capable of interacting with apes and other animals in the jungle, but he learned how to read and speak English, and could pass as an upper class member of British society.

Reality, however, is different. There are a few well documented cases of children who, although not raised by apes or wolves, were isolated from a very early age, usually by neglectful or psychopathic parents. And when these children were rescued, there was no hope of ever getting them to become useful members of society. Language could not be acquired; social skills were lacking; even the ability to walk and use table implements could barely be managed.

We celebrate the feast of Mary the Mother of God this weekend. The early Church spent a lot of time thinking about the nature of Jesus. Was he a good man who was sort of adopted by God? Was he some sort of spirit who put on a human body? Was he some kind of mix between God and man? After three centuries of debate and thought, it was concluded that Jesus was one person, who had two natures, that of God and that of man. He was truly God and truly human, just as human as you and I. That naturally led to the conclusion that Mary had to be the Mother of God. If Jesus was one person, Mary could not be the mother of the human nature and not the God nature. That would split the person of Jesus.

Well, that's all well and good and we've lived with that idea all our lives. Even our Protestant friends when they think about it, agree that Mary is the mother of God. But they say, “so what?” God could have used any woman to give birth to Jesus. A womb is a womb. And sometimes we Catholics are like that as well. On the one hand we have Mary carrying Jesus through nine months of pregnancy, then delivering him, and then sort of fading into the background. On the other hand we have a sort of cult about Mary, the Virgin Mother, who interecedes for us, who appears at different places, who always turns our attention towards her Son. In this second situation we argue for her privilege, the fact that she was conceived without sin, that she remained a virgin all her life, despite giving birth; that she remained sinless all her life, that she was assumed body and soul into heaven at the time of her death, sort of as a preview of coming attractions for the rest of us. Because she was selected by God to bear his Son, she enjoys the highest place in heaven, higher than the angels, higher than the greatest saints – but seemingly, through no effort on her part. What did she do to deserve this?

But there is something we always seem to forget. Jesus was a newborn baby. Jesus was like you and I at that time, sensitive to hunger and pain and pleasure; unaware of a world outside of his immediate experience. There was a time when Jesus knew nothing of emotional attachment; he learned that because Mary loved him out of his infantile isolation. There was a time when Jesus knew nothing of trust and security; but learned to trust from his mother. Jesus was sensitive to the feelings and thoughts of other people; you learn that from your mother. Being kind and loving towards others is not something you just pick up; you see that behavior directed at you by your mother, and you imitate it. Jesus surrounded himself with his disciples in a sort of a family, and the Church he founded resembles a family. Jesus learned about family relationships from his mother. Now granted, he learned from Saint Joseph as well. But if a little child scrapes his knee and can run to his father or his mother, guess who he runs to? For a baby, the father is the one who protects the family from the outside world, but the mother is the source of emotional fulfillment, the source of love.

So Mary is not just a vessel that God created to give birth to his Son. Mary is not that creature of divine privilege who enjoys her position because she was conceived without sin and as a result spent a sinless life. She is not where she is because her Son is God.

No, if we really believe Jesus was a human being, then those earliest days in his life,those crucial days which formed his personality, his ability to love others, his trust in the fatherhood of God, and indeed all those things that made him the person he was, were largely because of Mary's motherhood. And when Jesus tells Philip “when you have seen me, you have seen the Father” the fact that Philip can see the Father in Jesus is because of Mary.

Mary is the mother of God. She is the one most responsible for instilling in her son all those things that make him human – even language itself, because you can only learn a “mother tongue” during a certain period in your early childhood. Of all the women that ever existed, Mary is the only one given the capabilities to actualize God, to bring out God, in Jesus the God-man. And she did, and that's the greatest work any person could ever do.

So you see, God put himself in the hands of Mary and put all his trust in her motherhood, and she came through. Jesus is the result.

So on this feast we can ask Mary to use her unsurpassable skills as a mother to draw something of God out of us, to form God in us, and to help us channel divine love to all those we are supposed to love.

Christmas, 2016

Luke 2:1-14

Why do people come out in the middle of the night when you would normally be in a nice warm bed? After all, you could attend Mass at a much more convenient time if you wanted to. And yet, here we are. I don't know about you, but my reason, and just so you know I would be here even if I weren't the preacher, is because it brings back memories of other Christmases, together with the feelings and thoughts that go with them.. It reminds me of people who shared Christmas with me in the past, most of whom have passed away. But behind all these memories and feelings is a certain something – which is there when you peel everything else away. Remember this Hebrew word: Yirat.

Religion really consists of two dimensions: Most of us spend our time in the dimension that has to do with us loving God and our neighbor. We pray, we fast, we donate time and money, we come to Mass and participate in the sacraments. That's where I find myself most of the time. In this dimension we are reaching out to God, we are trying to respond to his great love.

But in the other dimension, God reaches out to us. The great mystics knew about this; that's all mysticism is, anyway, becoming sensitive to God's act of loving me. And that's something I experience, and hopefully you do as well, at Midnight Mass on Christmas.

Mystical experiences are all around us. I've had them out in nature – which is not surprising, because God is revealed in his creation, he is present in his creation, and when you aren't being bombarded by the sounds and sights of civilization you sometimes sense his presence. Sometimes when you are in the presence of someone you love you may feel God's touch. And that's not surprising; after all God is love itself, so where love is happening, God is there. Many people, myself included, sometimes experience God's presence when we are learning something and suddenly we understand something in a different way – we have an insight that seemed to come out of nowhere. And that's not surprising; God is truth itself, and as we struggle for understanding, we sometimes touch God. And some of us feel his presence when we are experiencing beauty – not surprising of course. God is the source of beauty. So remember that word, Yirat.

People who are mystics learn to cultivate the experience of God, who is always reaching out to us, who is always loving us, who holds us in his arms like a mother holds a child. And look what the Church does at Midnight Mass: First, we hold it at night – the darkness shuts out the world, it blankets us in intimacy. We change everything we can – trees with lights in our sanctuary. Music we don't hear any other time of the year. Incense. The chanted Proclamation. Most of us wear our best clothing. And we set up a manger scene.

Look at the manger scene. There is the angel reminding us that we celebrate the breaking through of heaven into our world. There is an ox and a donkey – it reminds us of that passage from Isaiah in which God laments: the ox knows its master and the donkey knows it's master's stall, but my people do not know me. And God seeks to remedy that by becoming knowable, by becoming human. We see the shepherds – who during those days were the lowest of the low – unclean and poor; and we remember that Mary prophesied that God would lift up the lowly. And of course there is a lamb frolicking – reminding us that Jesus is the lamb of God, and Jesus is the lamb who was slain and leads the nations of the world. But look at Mary. She usually wears a blue or white mantle, because she is the especially beloved of God. And she holds her hands over her breast, because we know she will ponder all these things in her heart. And she gazes at the child in the manger – the manger from which the animals eat – which now contains the bread of heaven. Remember that word, Yirat.

Do you remember the gifts of the Holy Spirit? Wisdom, understanding, counsel, fortitude, knowledge, piety and fear of the Lord. I never had a problem with the first six, but Fear of the Lord? Why does God want me to fear him? But that's probably not a good translation of the Hebrew word, Yirat. When we see the word being used in the Old Testament, it is sometimes used to describe people who are in a fearful situation, but more commonly it refers to the experience people have when they come into the presence of God. Moses experienced it when he approached the burning bush; Elijah when he heard the voice of God in the gentle breeze that followed thunder and lightning. And I suspect Mary and Joseph experienced it that night when Jesus was born – especially when the great company of the heavenly host began praising God.

Yirat is a gift, just like the other gifts of the Holy Spirit. Like the other gifts, it enhances something that is natural in us. It is a gift that allows to be more sensitive to the presence of God. It's the reaction that comes when we experience the Holy. It's one of the reasons we human beings have liturgy – we try to create the conditions so that we are more sensitive to God's touch. Because he touches us all the time, and wants us to know. A mother who holds her sleeping baby loves the baby just as much as when he is awake and smiling at her, but when that happens there is something new and wonderful – and God our Father is like that; we please him when we love him back.

So tonight during this Midnight Mass, this time when we remember that God chose to enter our world because he wants to be with us and share everything, good and bad, that goes along with being human – tonight let us experience that Yirat, that Fear of the Lord, in the mystery we celebrate.

At communion time you will hear David, our cantor, sing “Mary Did You Know..” The person who wrote the lyrics was standing before a manger scene just as you are today, and imagined himself asking these questions of our Blessed Mother. When you hear this musical meditation, make those questions your own and experience the gift of Yirat, of fear of the Lord. That is the gift God seeks to give you tonight, the gift of his presence, the gift of himself in Mary's Baby Boy.

Mary, did you know

that your Baby Boy would one day walk on water?

Mary, did you know

that your Baby Boy would save our sons and daughters?

Did you know

that your Baby Boy has come to make you new?

This Child that you delivered will soon deliver you.

Mary, did you know

that your Baby Boy will give sight to a blind man?

Mary, did you know

that your Baby Boy will calm the storm with His hand?

Did you know

that your Baby Boy has walked where angels trod?

When you kiss your little Baby you kissed the face of God?

Mary did you know

The blind will see.

The deaf will hear.

The dead will live again.

The lame will leap.

The dumb will speak

The praises of The Lamb.

Mary, did you know

that your Baby Boy is Lord of all creation?

Mary, did you know

that your Baby Boy would one day rule the nations?

Did you know

that your Baby Boy is heaven's perfect Lamb?

The sleeping Child you're holding is the great "I am"

Fourth Sunday of Advent, cycle A

Matthew 1:18-24

Today we turn our attention to Saint Joseph. We don't know a lot about him, and what little we know comes mostly from the gospel of Matthew. The only way we know what Joseph did for a living is because of a passing reference to Jesus as the son of a carpenter. In the gospels we have no quotations from Joseph; for that reason some refer to him as Joseph the silent. We glean certain things about him because of what is not said; at the Wedding feast of Cana it says the mother of Jesus was there; no mention of the father. And at the foot of the cross, Jesus puts Mary into the care of the apostle John; which wouldn't be necessary if Joseph was still alive – or for that matter, if Jesus had biological brothers and sisters.

But if you want to know more about Joseph, perhaps the best place to look is to Jesus. While it's certain that Mary had a lot to do with bringing up Jesus, the kind of man he became was most likely due to the influence of Joseph. Jesus may not have had a biological father, but he did have a male role model, and most sons who have good relationships with their fathers “take after” their fathers, as we say.

Joseph taught Jesus many things. I think we can identify some of them.

In the gospel Joseph is introduced as a righteous man. Some translations use the word “just”. But Matthew is writing for Jews who have become Christians, and the word he uses here means that Joseph was a very careful observer of the Law. Now the book of Deuteronomy says that if an unmarried woman becomes pregnant, she and the father (assuming the latter can be found) are to be taken outside the city gates and stoned. I guess if you couldn't find the father, you just stoned the woman. Deuteronomy says why this should be: so that Israel would remain holy. The interesting thing is that Joseph chooses to violate this law. Instead, he plans to put Mary away quietly – a man could divorce his wife for nearly any reason, including that she did not please him; so Joseph was planning to do that. He was willing to take shame upon himself. And of course, in doing so, he is again violating the law.

Joseph, in other words, knew when human beings were more important than legalism; and he knew how to decide which laws were more important. And we see Jesus with that attitude as well. He said, “the sabbath was made for man, not man for the sabbath”. He pardoned the woman caught in adultery; he did not accept the common idea that if a person was blind, it was due to their own sin or the sin of the parents. And there are many other examples of how Jesus imitated Joseph.

Another thing Joseph taught Jesus was that the will of God came first. Four times Joseph receives a divine message in a dream; you've just heard the first. Later, he will be told to take his family to Egypt. After a period of time, another dream will order him back. The last dream will direct him to settle in Nazareth rather than somewhere in Judea, which was the original destination. And when Joseph gets a message, he acts. There is no questioning, no hesitation. And we hear about Jesus going to the cross saying “not my will but thy will be done.” But perhaps even more important, if Joseph was willing to shake up his whole life because of some message that came to him while he was sleeping, he must have been able to distinguish between a true message of God and an ordinary dream. Jesus recognized that the messages he received in the desert were not from God, but from Satan. And Jesus spent hours in prayer listening to God speaking to him. That of course is how we distinguish the voice of God from other voices; we are on intimate terms with him; we pray. Would that we could learn from Joseph how to enter into that silence where God's voice can be heard.

But perhaps the most important thing Jesus learned from Joseph was something about how God works in the world. Joseph agonizes over Mary's pregnancy by what he assumes is another man; he trudged from his home to Bethlehem where he had to spend a night in a stable, and probably had to deliver the baby. He had to hike from his home to Egypt, worrying about bandits, making sure Mary and Jesus got fed. In Egypt he had to find work, any work, so that he could take care of them. And when he was finally told to return, he was told to go and live in a different region than where he had intended to go – to Nazareth where everyone would be a stranger. Joseph worried as much as Mary did when they lost Jesus in Jerusalem; and Joseph must have pondered the prophecies of Simeon in his heart as well.

And don't you think that Joseph must have asked himself every now and then, “why is doing your will so hard? You are God; is there a reason Mary and I have to go to such lengths to do your will? And you could have accomplished all these things and we could have still had a comfortable, ordinary life. Joseph might have said, with Saint Theresa of Avila, “If this is how you treat your friends, no wonder you have so few of them!” Jesus learned that God whispers, he does not shout; God gives us tasks to do, but then allows us to do them in our own way; God does not spare us heartache and discomfort, but is with us when these things come into our lives.

So Joseph teaches Jesus that there is a heirarchy of laws; it is more important to love your neighbor as yourself than it is to put her to death to keep Israel pure. It is more important to protect the innocent than to worry about how doing so might shame you. Joseph teaches Jesus that God's will comes first, and that this implies that we need to know God's will for us. And that can only come through developing a relationship with God – through prayer and meditation and spiritual direction. And Joseph teaches Jesus that God does not make life easier for us even when we are doing his will, even when we have been put in charge of a great mission; we human beings will always be subjected to material dangers because we are material, and danger from other people because we are all sons and daughters of Adam and Eve the first parents, the first sinners.

And so, like Jesus, let us learn from Joseph as well.