Don't Forget to Rejoice
Homily for Sunday, December 15, 2024: Third Sunday of Advent
My Dad had a game for long road trips, when I was young. Whenever we went on a long drive to someplace familiar, usually my grandparents’ house.
He’d start out telling us we’re nowhere near Grandma and Grandpa’s house, we still have a long way to go. “If we were getting near,” he’d say, “we’d be crossing over a bridge right about now.” As my sister and I would shout from the backseat that we were, in fact, crossing said bridge right about now.
And it would go on – Dad naming off the various landmarks we’d be driving by and my sister and I loudly pointing it out as we drove by.
And so it is in the spirit of my Dad’s old game that I say now, if we were getting near Christmas we’d be lighting our pink candle by now.
That pink candle represents a landmark, a sign that we have crossed the halfway mark of Advent. We’re into the home stretch. We recognize that, as Saint Paul tells us in the second reading today, “The Lord is near!”
He goes on to tell us to “have no anxiety at all!” And I can just imagine many of us hearing those words and saying, is he kidding? Doesn’t he know it’s almost Christmas?
This time of year we can so often find ourselves caught up in how our culture of worldly values celebrates this season, that we might forget to be joyful.
We get caught up in the rush of buying presents and planning parties and the stress of making sure everything is just right and perfect and who has time right now for the peace of God that surpasses all understanding?
But the Church in her wisdom recognizes that this might be just what we need at this point in time.
It can be difficult, because of course the cultural, secular celebration of Christmas does use our spiritual ideals of peace on earth, goodwill to all, of generosity and joy in the season. It presents us its own ideal of conspicuous consumerism all gift-wrapped in these nice sentiments, so we can sometimes lose sight of the true spirit of the season.
We all remember, I’m sure, all the old Christmas specials from childhood – Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer and Santa Claus is Coming to Town and the rest. I remember once when I was young, my mother complained that she didn’t like all these specials because they all had the same basic plot – a villain who hates Christmas has a change of heart in the end.
After a pause she added that the Grinch has the same basic plot but for some reason she likes that one more than the others.
Years later it occurred to me what the difference was: in the old Rankin-Bass puppet-animated specials, the bad guy’s change of heart comes about when he gets the perfect Christmas present. In the Grinch, it happens when nobody gets any presents, but they celebrate the joy of Christmas anyway. One reinforces the cultural value of Christmas Consumerism; the other shows that this thing we celebrate still comes, without ribbons, it comes without tags, still comes, without packages, boxes or bags.
Like Charlie Brown, seeking out a Christmas tree for their pageant, we have to remember to look past the big brightly-colored artificial trees to find the true meaning of Christmas in the small and humble pine branch.
Like those Wise Men – we’ll hear more about them about a month from now – but let’s recall how when they went looking for the newborn King they went first to Jerusalem, to the palace of King Herod. Meanwhile it was a humble band of shepherds in the field, seeking out a simple and humble stable, who were the first to welcome the Christ child into the world.
Last month when we were at my Mom’s for Thanksgiving, we got to recalling years past when the holiday didn’t exactly go as planned. We remembered the time I was in college and got a late start heading home for Thanksgiving, and ended up spending Thanksgiving day stuck at a bus station in Albany having my dinner out of a vending machine.
Or the time a couple years ago when my Dad was in a rehab facility, about a month before he died. Mom joined him there for a lunchtime turkey dinner; I got there a little later. After visiting for the afternoon we went back to Mom’s, where she served me a meals-on-wheels frozen turkey dinner. It might not have been the most exciting or glamorous Thanksgiving dinner, but that’s not what I was there for. What mattered was being together.
So “have no anxiety at all.” Easier said than done, perhaps, but Saint Paul gives us more. “But in everything, by prayer and petition, with thanksgiving, make your requests known to God.”
He doesn’t promise that God will fulfill all our requests. What he does promise is that “the peace of God, which surpasses all understanding, will guard your hearts and minds in Jesus Christ.”
As we bring our requests in prayer to God, we can begin to gain some perspective on what we want versus what we truly need. We might begin to look more to the joys of the holiday, re-structure our family celebrations around those joys, setting aside what causes anxiety.
With thanksgiving, make your requests known to God, and God will help you remember that Christmas, perhaps, doesn’t come from a store. Maybe Christmas, perhaps, means a little bit more.