Saint Agnes Catholic Church

What words best describe Christmas? Humble faith? Immense hope? Great joy? Endless Peace? Perhaps, all of these?
I would like to add these earth shattering and shocking words: Out of Ordinariness and Poverty comes the Miraculous. These words convey at a very deep level, the meaning of Christmas.

Recently, I read the story of an ordinary young man named Sam Schmid, an Arizona college student who was critically wounded in an October 19th five car accident in Tucson, when a van hit his jeep head on and he went careening into a telephone pole.

The 21 year old’s brain injuries were so severe that the local hospital could not treat him and they had to airlift him to St. Joseph’s Medical Center in Pheonix where surgeons performed surgery for a life- threatening aneurysm. As hospital officials began palliative care and broached the subject of organ donation with his family, Sam began to respond, holding up two fingers on command. Today, he is walking with the aid of a walker, and his speech, although slow, has improved. Doctors say he will likely have a complete recovery. He even hopes to get a day pass from the hospital to celebrate Christmas at home. Susan, his mother who is a Catholic said: “I tell everyone, if they want to call it a modern-day miracle, this is a miracle.” “I have friends who are atheists who have called me and said, ‘I am going back to church.”

My brothers and sisters, on this Christmas Day, recognize in Jesus, that in poverty and ordinariness, miracles can and will emerge to the wonderment of a world found waiting for a sign. In her strong faith and love for God, Mother Theresa insisted on her sisters living a life of poverty because they could more easily identify with the absolute poverty of those they helped on the streets. Mother Theresa wanted to be like Jesus who was born into a poor family and in a manger because there was no room for him in the inn. Out of this beautiful love for the poor was born the miracle of many terminal lives that she and her sisters helped as they die with dignity and care.

To see our troops arriving home from Iraq after so many years is nothing short of a miracle. Especially, thinking that this war would never end. Even now instability is creeping back into the country. After 800 billion dollars spent, 4,487 of our soldiers dead and 30,000 wounded, along with 100,000 Iraqis believed to have died, it is nothing short of a miracle that they are now home. Some home in heaven and others here in the U.S.

The God who is born into our world is born into a world that has little or no room for him. It is still the same today. Our society at this moment is trying to take Christ out of Christmas with “holiday trees” and “happy holidays” instead of “Merry Christmas”. The pace of our own lives can be so busy, that we don’t have time for prayer, worship, a sincere confession, perhaps even each other at this time of year. It is easy for our priorities to get lost and for us to become distracted and confused. Because our world is selfish, sinful, in love with power, wealth and status, Jesus must come into it uninvited. Because Jesus is meek, gentle, forgiving and pure love, just the opposite of what the world wants, he cannot be at home in this world.

Yet as God, he needs to be in it, so his place is with the others for whom there is no room – the poor, the discredited, those who are marginalized as persons. That is a message our culture doesn’t want to hear, but needs to hear. The poor more easily make a place for God in their lives. Their stables and mangers are more available for God’s birth than our hotels, boardrooms, casinos, bingo palaces and palatial homes.

In our lives and in our world, so often, there is no room at the inn, no place to welcome God who wants to be born in it. As it was at the first Christmas, the Christ child had to be born in a simple manger on hay in a feeding trough for animals. So, to find him ourselves, we must let ourselves be led by the poor, the children, our own brokenness and poverty, to the mangers in our world today that hunger for Christ.

Another striking characteristic of Mother Theresa was humility, her desire to be hidden, to not seek attention, to be ordinary, to avoid the spotlight. She asked that her letters be kept secret and burned after she died. Those in charge of her affairs, however, realized that the world needed to hear about this extraordinary woman who thought herself nothing out of the ordinary. And now we learn from her letters a tremendous spiritual lesson – that God works in the dryness and ordinariness of daily life, not necessarily in sensational and spectacular ways. People thought that this woman, who was so close to God, must be experiencing visions and spiritual highs as a matter of course. Her letters reveal just the opposite – she emerges as a classic mystic whose inner life burned with charity but whose heart was tested and purified by an intense trial of dryness in prayer and an apparent absence of God for over fifty years – a true dark night of the soul.

That too, is the message of Christmas. Christmas is that out of the ordinary comes the miraculous. The birth of Christ is just that: God made himself small, in the flesh, one of us, that Jesus could show us the way to the Father and provide us with the miracle of salvation by giving his life up for us. God is also found where we live – in our kitchens, at our tables, in our wounds, and in each other’s faces. That is what Mother Theresa experienced and lived fully, in faith.

This is hard to believe and has always been hard to accept. When Jesus was on earth, virtually no one believed that he was the Messiah, precisely because he was so ordinary, so unlike what they imagined God to be. They had expected a superstar, a king, someone who would turn the world rightfully upside down. Preaching meekness, gentleness and unconditional love, Jesus did not live up to those false expectations. It is interesting that the bible does not tell us what Jesus looked like, nor even if he had any outstanding psychological traits.

In terms of appearance, he was too ordinary, not worth describing, nothing out of the ordinary. He looked like everyone else. Even after the resurrection, he is mistaken for a gardener, a cook, a traveler. Things haven’t changed much in two thousand years. Seldom does Jesus meet our expectations today. We are still often looking for him beyond the ordinary, beyond the gardener, the neighbor, the stranger, trying to find a miraculous Christ. We go to places where he might be appearing, or where his mother might be shedding tears in an apparition, yet we pass by and miss the tears shed at our own breakfast table. We are intrigued by the wounds of a Padre Pio, yet we often ignore the wounds of those we hurt in our own family, or even our own emotional wounds.

We look for Christ everywhere, except where he is to be found – in the ordinary – right around us, in our families, community and workplaces, in our own healing journeys, where the incarnation took place – in our flesh. St. John of the Cross puts it this way: “God has spoken so completely through his own Word that he chooses to add nothing. He spoke partially through the prophets, but has now said everything in Christ. Anyone seeking some new vision or revelation from him would commit an offense, for instead of focusing his eyes entirely on Christ he would desire something other than Christ, or beyond him. Fix your eyes on Christ alone for in him all is revealed and in him you will find more than you could ever ask for or desire.”

Through the Incarnation, God crawls into ordinary life and invites us to meet him there, in our own poverty and the poverty of those around us. The shepherds returned to their lowly work and obscure life. Nothing had changed, yet everything had changed. Life went on as before but with one major difference: now their hearts were filled with wonder. They now had a new vision, a new hope, a new sense of the love of God for them and of his presence with them. Their lives, which a short while ago were dim, now miraculously glowed with new meaning. The old world had become like a new country where everything glistened anew. Our challenge is to find that newness in the ordinariness of our lives.

The Eucharist we celebrate today is another powerful hint at this mystery – Christ is found in the poor and the ordinary. These poor, ordinary gifts of bread and wine will be transformed, through the prayer and faith of the priest and the community, into the Body and Blood of Christ. If we receive them with humble faith, then we are transformed into the Body of Christ, sent to be light to the world. So, may our faith and our celebration of Christ’s birth today, help us to recognize and experience Christ who is born into our poverty and our ordinariness. Christmas is about being poor enough to recognize our need for Jesus, and that out of the ordinary comes the miraculous.

May God bless us all with his forgiveness and healing; his peace and joy, this Christmas and throughout the New Year.

Fr. Mark