December 25, 2020
Paulist Fr. Rich Andre preached this homily for Christmas Day on December 25, 2020 at St. Austin Catholic Parish in Austin, TX. The homily is based on Isaiah 52:7-10; Psalm 98; Hebrews 1:1-6; and John 1:1-18.
For the celebration of Christmas, the Church gives us four sets of prayers and four sets of readings from which to choose. But in most years, I’ve felt that there really wasn’t a choice. When people come to church for Christmas, they usually want to hear the birth of Jesus as told in the gospel of Luke, with a stable, shepherds, and angels.
Well, we’re not doing that today. In this final week of this extraordinarily difficult year, we will use the readings and prayers that talk about Jesus being the light in our darkness. As we listen to the proclamation of readings that most of us usually do not associate with Christmas, let us reflect on how they can apply both to the past nine months of this pandemic and to the upcoming year. We may have more dark months ahead of us, but let us reassure one another with the words of the novelist Victor Hugo: “Even the darkest night will end and the sun will rise.”
Before I became a priest, I was an optical engineer. I studied the creation, propagation, and detection of light, working with lasers, holograms, precision lenses and mirrors, LEDs, and fiberoptics. But most people don’t understand that. When I tell people that I used to be an optical engineer, the first question they invariably ask is, “Did you work at LensCrafters?”
Once, while I was studying at the University of Rochester, I needed my friend Marie to deliver something to me in the optics labs. Since she was a music major, I had to explain the convoluted path to get to the labs: “Enter Dewey Hall on the Eastman Quad. You’ll be in the Simon School of Business. Turn left and take the elevator to the fourth floor. You’ll be in the Warner School of Education. Turn left and pass through several sets of offices, and then you’ll come to a group of unmarked green doors. That’s where the optics labs are.” That next evening, when I saw Marie, I asked, “Why didn’t you stop by?” She said, “I went to the labs, as you said, but when I got there, all the doors were closed and the lights were off.” I responded, “Well, duh, we were inside, working!” When I was creating holograms in the lab, I worked by the light of a single low-power helium-neon laser.
Often, when we face tragedies in our lives, things don’t make sense to us. Sometimes, well-meaning people try to soothe us by saying, “everything happens for a reason.” I don’t buy it. I don’t believe that everything happens for a reason. God has given us free will, which means that there are things that happen in the world that are outside of God’s plan.
But, through faith, we can find meaning in the tragedies of life. As God declared to Isaiah, “I will give you treasures of darkness, riches hidden away” (45:3). When we live in darkness, we adjust to our surroundings. We can more readily notice the small glimmers of light around us. God enters into the darkness and is with us, coaxing, weaving light and newness and goodness right there in the middle of the darkness. We can see so much by the light of a single candle!
If we have patience in the darkness, we can find beauty. For example, the more time you take in lining up the optical elements in making a hologram, the deeper and richer the image becomes. I gained some notoriety around the Institute of Optics at Rochester for producing a beautiful hologram that was displayed for years during tours for prospective students. It turned out so beautifully because I exhibited extraordinary care during my time in the darkness. It took a long time to get everything just right, but the results were worth the wait!
Pope Francis seems to understand this search, this patience required, to find meaning. His first apostolic exhortation is called The Joy of the Gospel. Joy? If Francis is talking about joy, can he be talking to those of us experiencing great sadness? Yes. He writes, “I realize of course that joy is not expressed the same way at all times in life, especially at moments of great difficulty. Joy adapts and changes, but it always endures, even as a flicker of light.”
I think of Mary and Joseph on that first Christmas night. A scandalous, out-of-wedlock pregnancy. Traveling to Bethlehem in the chaos of a world-wide census, and yet finding themselves utterly alone when the time came for Mary to deliver her baby. What did Mary and Joseph think of their circumstances? They probably felt as if they were starting their life of parenting as complete failures. Yet, there was a flicker of joy, that flicker of light in the middle of the squallor and the chaos of that first Christmas. What was the source of that light? A baby born in a barn, sleeping in a trough used for animal slop.
And that baby is also our source of light, our flicker of joy. God so wanted to show us that he loved us, God so wanted to show us that he understood that life was complicated, God so wanted to show us that he was present even in circumstances far from ideal, that he chose to make “his dwelling among us,” to walk among us as a human being. We call Jesus Christ “Emmanuel,” which means God is with us. Even when we walk in the valley of darkness, there is a flicker of light.
Pope Francis puts it in slightly different words in The Joy of the Gospel. He says, “Joy adapts and changes, but it always endures, even as a flicker of light, born of our personal certainty that, when everything is said and done, we are infinitely loved.”
So, no matter what horrible circumstances we’ve experienced this year – be it sickness, isolation, disrupted academic years, financial devastation, racial and economic inequality, wildfires, hurricanes, the worst housing crisis in 80 years, the incomprehensible death toll due to COVID-19, or grieving the loss of a specific loved one – no matter what we’ve experienced, we are not alone. The people who walked in darkness have seen a great light. We are infinitely loved. God is with us.