The Holy Family

Intro

Getting into the Christmas spirit is hard as a priest

One of the reasons is because I’m not running around trying to buy gifts, or interacting outside, very busy around the parish during Advent.

So don’t go taking my short Christmas season away from me! Merry Christmas! Even New Years… that’s the 8th day of Christ’s birth Luke 2:21, the Solemnity of our Lady, Mary Mother of God!

Luke 2:21 NABRE

When eight days were completed for his circumcision, he was named Jesus, the name given him by the angel before he was conceived in the womb.

And so, just as a family helps you get into the Christmas spirit, so do they help you get to heaven.

And just as we start to get sick of our families this time of year, the Church gives us this feast of the Holy Family!

Being a part of a family isn’t easy! but it’s good.

Story about going away for Christmas and getting uncomfortable.

“What Christ assumed, he redeemed” - St. Augustine

2 Corinthians 5:21 (NABRE)

For our sake he made him to be sin who did not know sin, so that we might become the righteousness of God in him.

God became human in a family. (He wasn’t raised by wolves or gorillas like in Jungle Book or Tarzan). He has a mother and an earthly father. He redeems family!!!

There’s a prophecy that we heard from in Advent, Mal 3:1

Malachi 3:1 (NABRE)

Now I am sending my messenger— he will prepare the way before me; And the lord whom you seek will come suddenly to his temple; The messenger of the covenant whom you desire— see, he is coming! says the Lord of hosts.

This baby, the glory of the Lord! suddenly appears at the temple today, and Simeon is ready! The glory of the Lord was contained inside of a family.

So goes the family so goes the world.

We have to learn how to say thank you, but we can’t say thank you to our parents sufficiently for all they’ve done for us. We just try and then hope to hand on life and eternal life onto the next generation and the surrounding friends. But these people that we’ve helped form, given our lives to, that have shaped us too (especially when we are young and at our worst! our siblings bore the brunt of those bad attitudes!), they’re preparing us for our vocations, our marriages, that we each are a product of being tolerated and loved, so we become human inside of our families. Purgated within the cauldron of the love of a family.

Relationships that you form, they could be eternal, so, a very good thing to invest in.

So just as I tolerate my young nephews, I help them to become human, and in doing so, they help me become more human.

Children should turn you into saints, parents.

Patience and Gentleness.

Abraham, Sarah, and Isaac

Abraham had three great acts of faith as our second reading says:

To leave his homeland

to trust that he would have kids like stars (Whose name means Father of Nations)

To offer the one son that he and Sarah (Princess) had back to God.

He had to trust that what he had heard would be fulfilled.

Takes 5 chapters of waiting. (3800 years ago or so)

God doesn’t forget His promises! Psalm 105:8

Psalm 105:8 (NABRE)

He remembers forever his covenant, the word he commanded for a thousand generations,

He asks Abraham to do something that he didn’t have him follow through on, God followed through on it.

The son carries the wood up the hill (This name means laughter!)

But God doesn’t forget, you and I forget our family, God doesn’t forget them, even when we want to forget them!

Jesus, Mary & Joseph

But God gave us family so we didn’t have to walk alone. God could have just come down as a man, but again, what God assumes, God redeems. He gives us a family, to walk together towards heaven.

But even when our families move on and the family drifts apart and circumstances change, we always have a family, the Church, that’s why you call me, father, “please be a father to me, not a jerk!”

That’s why I love that St. Luke put this story about St. Anna in the Gospel. This widow who has spent the last 40 years in the temple? Daughter of Phanuel, the Face of God! of the lost tribe of Asher (Not lost to God!).

Coming to daily Mass, saying her prayers, doing a rosary and another one. Coming to funerals just to pray for the dead. Getting to know the younger people, assuring them of her prayers. Every parish has these saintly men and women who decide they will be pass their time with the silent and slow martyrdom, but knowing that they belong here, to this family, as a grandfather and grandmother of the parish even when they have been through sadness, that this life didn’t turn out the way they thought, they move in trust and in hope, that God will redeem everything!

God wanted to be part of a family! That He who created men and women and the idea of family, would submit himself to a family, being born in a cave, shows us that in a family is humility.

And we’re not going to out-humble God

Even when we come back home, even when we are famous and hot stuff out in the world, when you come back home you’re just “Brad” or “Julia,” a reminder that you’re special, not because of what you can do, you’re special because you are loved and were loved, and we spend our lives returning thanks to the Father for making us human and for loving us through our parents and grandparents, our siblings, not that we deserved it, but that our first identity would be child, loved into existence, given a family to teach us how to be a part of the bigger family, the Church, God’s eternal family!