A Christmas homily

[This homily comes from “functionalist” sociology. Question: what are the functions of religion? What purposes do religions serve for people? Answer: Religions provide meaning and belonging.]

    Jesus saves. That is the meaning of his name. Savior. What does Jesus save us from?

    There are two evils that every human being faces, and from which every human being needs to be saved. The two evils are 1) lack of meaning, and 2) lack of belonging.

    We all need meaning in our lives. We need to perceive every event as meaningful. Meaning is the story that surrounds an event or object.

    I have a pen with a small rubber tip on the upper end of the pen. What is the meaning of that rubber tip? Answer: it is intended to be used as a stylus for typing letters and numbers into a cellphone. When I see the pen, I think of the story of how it is used.

    We all need to see our lives a part of a story that is shared by others. The birth of Jesus begins a story that all of us are invited to become a part of. Actually, the story did not begin with Jesus, but goes back all the way to Adam and Eve.

    I like to think of how I first learned the story of Jesus. I am sure my parents, and maybe especially my mother, told me some of the story of Jesus. But I really learned his story when we went to church together and heard the Gospels and sermons about the Gospels. Then I went to St. James School in Decatur for eight years and heard more and more of the story of Jesus.

    I became a participant in the story because I was part of a group of people who were involved with each other and especially with me. When those people shared the story of Jesus with me, I became involved with those people, and sharing the story told me who I was and where I belonged. So I had both meaning and belonging.

    I think of children growing up in today’s world who have no coherent life story given to them by others. Their story gives them no sense of direction for their lives.

    And along with that deprivation, many children suffer from a lack of belonging, a lack of involvement with some other person or persons that is life-giving. They do not experience involvement that is passionate, respectful, vulnerable, and faithful. Perhaps one parent has abandoned the family, and the other parent is so stressed out by work and other pressures that she does not have time to foster a life-giving involvement with her children. Or perhaps she does not know how to foster such an involvement.

    Pope Francis, in his encyclical letter Evangelii Gaudium, says that there are structures in the Church that promote involvement with other Christians and with God. The parish is an important one, one that should be strengthened.  

    Quincy University is one of those other structures that the Pope refers to. Just by continuing to call itself a Franciscan Catholic institution, it is a standing invitation for people to become part of the story of Jesus and the community that is centered in Jesus.

    One of the most important things about the story of Jesus is the way the story images God, or, to use less religious terms, reality. What is my place in the universe? Does anyone or anything care? The story of Jesus says that God cares, that each of us matters in the eyes of God, and that God even loves each of us. That is a powerful story.

    That story invites us to be involved with other human beings who are equally loved by God. If they are loved, they must be lovable, no matter what they look like right now.

    So I think this Christmas calls us to be marketers of meaning and belonging.

 

    Let me start this over.

    I sit in my room and look out the window. Even though at night I cannot see the stars, I know that science tells me about how many billions of stars there are in our galaxy, and how many billions of galaxies there are in the universe that we can observe. Then science tells me that this whole universe began 13.8 billion years ago from a mass millions of times smaller than  a pinhead, which exploded and continued to expand till now and is still expanding.

    And I say to myself: something or someone caused this. That seems obvious to anyone who takes science seriously. The next question is: what is that something or someone like?

    Somehow, on this tiny planet which has spun around the sun for the last several billion years, life emerged and eventually human life. With human life came love. This says to me that whatever or whoever started this universe must be loving. We call that someone God.

    The stories we have about how God dealt with us humans developed over several hundred years. Then came Jesus of Nazareth, whose birth we celebrate today. We Christians say that this person Jesus was God become human. That statement is the first statement in a story that has exploded out into human history the way the Big Bang exploded to become our universe. My story is part of the story of Jesus, and so is yours and the stories of all the people who have ever lived.

    We all feel pretty helpless in the face of things that are going on in the world these days. St. Francis tried to dramatize the helplessness of God by presenting the story of Jesus’ birth in an outdoor peasant setting. He was demonstrating how God works.

    So God is working in our world today, which is just as messy and primitive as the place in Greccio where Francis put on his demonstration. We humans are in the process of turning the world into the lifeless place that it once was, by destroying species after species, and making our environment less livable. Yet God built up the world once, and Jesus showed us how God’s love can change history. We hope that God’s love can change the future of our planet in coming years, even though we will not see how that will work out.

    What we are called to do is to help people see their life stories as part of the story of how God loves all of creation, and to see how that love calls us to belong to one another.

    Redemption for human beings is experiencing meaning and belonging.