[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.
