Christmas at the Cathedral

Before the first star twinkled,
Before the first child giggled and smiled,
Before the ice first froze,
or the first fire crackled with warming light,

Before all that,
HE LOVED US:

He loved us so much he gave us a garden. With every kind of natural beauty within it! And we, with Adam and Eve, sold it for an apple!
When’s the last time you stopped to see the exquisite beauty of the softly falling snow on the evergreens of the Adirondacks? When’s the last time you were thrilled by the sound of the wind through the trees, sounding like God’s voice, still whispering to his world, “I am here…all around you”? How often we ignore his beauty: the beaut of the paradise we are given, refuse the gift and sell the apple.

He loved us so much he gave us people to love. From the side of Adam he carved out another human being, so that man and woman could love each other and children could be born in a sanctuary of love. He created us to love in purity and truth, and we responded with betrayal, abuse, and abortion, and more concern for money and for passing pleasures than for life-long life.

He loved us so much he built us a Peaceable Kingdom. And we abandoned it for selfish violence and hate.
Not just in wars, for those are usually out there…but by the hatred born of callous disregard that does violence to others reputations through gossip or neglect, and the awful violence we do to each other when we refuse to love others and to care and even to listen.

Now if you were God,
and someone had rejected all your gifts,
you’d probably have done with them.
Tell them to go away!

But as we sneered at him,
as we sinned our way to selfishness,
he sent us an even better gift:
his only Son….born for us as a little child,
to lead us back…

Back to the Garden
Where everything is put at the service of God,
Where truth is not invented, but received,
Where we are not the masters, but the caretakers of God’s gifts.

Back to the meaning of love
A love that gives unto death, without thought of taking,
A love that rejoices in suffering for the beloved,
A love that is faithful, and fruitful, and ready to sacrifice,

Back to the Peacable Kingdom
Where the other cheek is turned,
Where when they ask you for your coat, and you give your shirt too,
Where shepherd are king and the poor are blessed.

A garden of joy, people to love, and a world at peace…

These are the gifts we are offered on this Christmas night…paradise restored!

And on the day after Christmas, when the gift wrap is in the dumpster,
what will we do with God’s gift?
Will we use it for his glory?
Will we take joy in all the wonders God has placed around us?
Will we be good stewards of his good creation?

And throughout the coming year, what will we do with God’s gift?
Will we vote for God’s truth or for our convenience?
Will we seek the ways of peace or of power?
Will be build up God’s kingdom or our own?

And in the car on the way back home in the car tonight, what will I do with God’s gift?
Will I forgive that stupid thing that so ticked me off on the way up here?
Will I embrace my little needs or the heart of the one sitting next to me?
Will I be the instrument of peace that begins not with worldwide negotiations?
but with me?

For you see, this story, which began with Adam and Eve and reached its climax in a little manger ‘neath the Bethlehem star, continues in Worcester tonight. It is your story! And tonight, the rest of the story just begins!

Monsignor James P. Moroney
Rector

Draw Near, O Lord!

Fourth Sunday of Advent
Homily

Almost a hundred and fifty years ago, a young student of theology, his father was a Lutheran pastor, began to reflect on the meaning of the new scientific study of the sacred scriptures. Contradictions in details about the life of Jesus among the various Gospel accounts, first attempts to trace the development of the New Testament from oral to written forms in various communities, and a growing skepticism which emerged from post rationalism, all drove young Frederick Wilhelm to begin to doubt that there was a God at all.

He would go on to be a famous philosopher and was the first to use the term Gott ist tott, or God is dead. Of course, what he meant was not that God had lived and died, but that God never was. That he was a figment of our imagination, but a fulfillment of our longings, and an incarnation of our dreams.

Such a view lies, I would suggest, at the heart of most of our society’s problems today. For if there is no God, no creator, there is no sense to it all...no cosmic or physical order, no absolute values, no objective and universal moral laws. There is nothing...nihil....only me and you.

And everything, in such a vast wasteland, is up for grabs. My behavior is determined not by trying to do what is right, but by what is expeditious. My goal is not giving, but taking as much as I can. My purpose in life is to die with the most toys and have the most fun whole accumulating my fortune.

Such a hellish secular wasteland is characterized by alienation, aloneness, and a seething sense of rage....is that all there is? ....cultural referents....

Is there anything more desperate, pathetic, or fearsome than to see myself alone and afraid, the breath sucked out of me by the meaningless of it all, my future filled only with the prospect of fear and trembling and sickness unto death.1

Which is why we so desperately need Christmas. For it precisely into the cold, stark desolation of the darkest nights of our souls that God comes. And not just as a visitor or a stranger. No, he takes on human flesh, he becomes one of us in all things but sin in the ultimate act of love.

Nietzsche was wrong. Dead wrong. For God is as close to us as the breath he created, the heart he makes to pump with blood, and the desires and joys which flood every sinew of our being.

God not only is, but he is Emmanuel. He is God with us. We have seen him and heard him and he has touched us. We eat his body and drink his blood. He forgives our sins and anoints us with healing oil. He joins us in marriage and ordains us as Priests, he baptizes us in the saving waters and saves our lives. He destroys death and sin and sadness and will raise us up on the last day.

Last week I spent some days in a pre Christmas retreat. And one morning, sitting on the hard wooden pew of a Church I've been visiting for the past forty years, I stopped my prayer and I stared at the little red light by the tabernacle. I've been staring at that light for most of my life. As a curious little kid about to make his first Holy Communion, as a rumpled long haired teen, as a searching young adult, as a seminarian in a country far from home, as a young priest, and all through the years. I've changed, the world has changed, everything around me has changed, except for that little red light and he who dwells in the tabernacle beside it. He lives here in this Church and in my heart and in my life. I know his consoling presence and the challenge of his Gospel. He is my life, my hope, my salvation and my joy. I know him and he lives!

He is Emmanuel. As real as a baby in a crib. As real as a man on a cross. As real as the Lord risen from the dead. As real as the Christ who will return on the last day to lead us home.

Which is why this season is such a wonder. In the depths of winter, when darkness and cold and black ice are all around us, threatening us, tempting us to despair, and trying to convince us that Gott ist tott, the sun of justice rises and leads all wise men to a little child in a virgin's arms. And suddenly we see his light at it's rising and we know that we are not alone...that we will never be alone, ever again.

For the last ten years of the nineteenth century, Frederick Nietzsche suffered a series of mental breakdowns, finally dying silently in the care of his sister Elizabeth. While no one will know if his mental state was genetic or related to his philosophical speculations, one of his contemporaries lamented at Nietzsche’s death that a man who makes himself God can only go mad.

May God have mercy on Frederick's soul. And on all the lost souls who continue to believe that God is gone, and we are alone.

For we profess not simply happy holidays in the midst of a cold spell, but Emmanuel, God incarnate, the Christ, the Messiah, the king of the universe, who became flesh for us in Bethlehem, who was deified and rose for us in Jerusalem, that we might know how to live and love and cling to in Worcester all the days of our lives.



Monsignor James P. Moroney
Rector

Lights for Saint Lucy

A Homily for Saint Lucy's Day

Each year, just twelve days before Christmas, we celebrate one of the most ancient feasts of the Church.

The commemoration of the martyrdom of Saint Lucy goes back to Fifth Century, and she is one of the first Saints to be remembered in the Sacred Liturgy.

Her story dates from the early Third Century, when the practice of the faith was still banned in most of the Roman empire. Few dared to profess a belief in Christ, lest they be tortured and killed by Emperors like the cruel Diocletian.

Few, save the martyrs that is, and one of the bravest of them all was Saint Lucy. Lucy, it seems, was forcibly married to a non-believer, who turned her in to the authorities for her belief in Christ. When they came to kill her for refusing to the worship the Roman gods a strange thing happened. While she was but a wisp of a girl, they could not move her. It was like she had been glued to the floor or that she weighed a few tons.

But that did not stop them. They tortured her on the spot with unspeakable torments, even blinding her. But still she did not renounce the Lord she loved. She professed her belief in him even unto death.

So Lucia, whose name means light, had her human sight taken from her, but even without her bodily eyes, she never stopped seeing the light that shines from the face of Jesus. It is the light which God created from the darkness and the chaos at the beginning of time, the light that led the chosen people from slavery into freedom, and the light which will illuminate the streets of the heavenly Jerusalem at the end of time. You remember that from the Book of Revelation: There will be no need for the sun or the moon or the stars, for the Lamb will be the light which will illumine the golden streets.

It was Lucy’s ability to see the light, even once she had lost her physical eyes, which inspired the tradition, observed even to this day by young Scandinavian women, of wearing a wreath of evergreens adorned with lit candles on their heads on Lucy’s day.

It’s not unlike the tradition of placing lights on an evergreen tree, real lights...real candles, as I used to observe when I was a seminarian forty years ago traveling through Germany on Christmas holiday. There was a little bed and breakfast by the train station in Munich where we used to stay...and every morning the daughter of the innkeeper would come down to the breakfast room and light the little white candles on the ends of each branch of the Christmas tree.

The evergreen, of course, was used in the medieval passion plays at which they would tell the story of Adam and Eve. That’s where the ornaments come from...from the red apples which would hang on the tree, ready to serve as the forbidden fruit for those taking the parts of Adam and Eve.

But even after the story of the Fall was over, the tree would remain on stage, as the birth of Jesus was acted out, for which the stage manager would add little lit candles to the branches already adorned with red apples....signs of the light of Christ come into our life under that star-studded sky in the fullness of time.

The evergreen is the only tree to keep its needles all through the winter snows. So then does it become a sign of the life which endures even through the passion and the winters of our lives, awaiting the resurrection on the last day. All because it is covered by the victorious light of him who defeated death by death on a tree...he who is our light, or in the words of the ancient Collect for midnight Mass at Christmas:

O God, who have made this most sacred night
radiant with the splendor of the true light,
grant, we pray,
that we who have known the mysteries of his light on earth
may also feast on his joys in heaven.

So, too, do the girls whose heads are surrounded by evergreens and lit candles in Churches throughout Sweden today anticipate the light of Christ which will soon dispel the longest hours of darkness that the Scandinavian people would have to endure during the entire year.

So, too, Saint Lucy reminds us who dwell in all kinds of darkness (the darkness of sin, the darkness of fear, the darkness of death) that the light of Christ will soon shed its warmth upon us once again. We need only see it with the eyes of faith, and we will know the beauty of his face.

Like the magi, the ones to whom the prophet Balaam today promised a star, may we seek his coming by looking for the star which will rise at his coming, not just in the skies to be seen by these eyes, but which will rise in our hearts and lead us to him who is our Savior and our Lord. Come Lord Jesus!

Monsignor James P. Moroney
Rector

Rejoice and Be Glad!

While I am on retreat this weekend, I offer a copy of last year's homily, in which I lament those who lament and recommend joy!

Homily
Third Sunday of Advent

Scrooge couldn’t stand it. Now, as Dickens told it, there were a lot of things that Scrooge couldn’t stand, but this song in particular drove him crazy. That’s why we read that "...at the first sound of — "God bless you merry, gentlemen! May nothing you dismay!"— Scrooge seized the ruler with such energy of action, that the singer fled in terror, leaving the keyhole to the fog and even more congenial frost."

Scrooge, like the Grinch, hated Christmas, the whole Christmas Season. And while Dr Seuss may not have quite known the reason, I think it’s quite clear. All the Scrooges and the Grinches of the world, indeed the Scrooge and the Grinch in each one of us, is allergic to and offended by the Comfort and Joy.

The problem with comfort and joy is that it’s impossible to feel them…and enjoy being miserable at the same time. One of my favorite recreational activities at various points in my life has been feeling sorry for myself. To put on the poor me sign, sit on my dung heap and pick my sores, all the while lamenting loudly how unfair life is and crowning myself king of the poor sad things.

But lamentation is a solitary art, not fit for those who choose to accept the comfort of the children of God.

• It’s impossible to be sad if I believe that God so loves me that he sent his only Son, in whose image and likeness I was made, to be born in the likeness of me.

• It’s impossible to be sad, if I truly believe that death is but a mirage, evil an empty set of adolescent seductions, and pain a passing trial which fades into insignificance in the face of the joy which awaits the just.

But still I’m tempted to reject God’s comfort and refuse to rejoice. Like a three year old on a bad day, I reject the crosses God sends me, stamp my feet, cry at the top of my lungs and threaten to hold my breath until I turn blue. You unfair God, you who has so unfairly given me all this suffering and subverts my every hope for joy, you gave that other guy over there everything that he wants, and me, what have you given me lately!? It’s not fair!

• You forgive the repentant sinner, but when’s the last time I won the Megabucks?

• You cure even the unbeliever of cancer, but what have you done about my aching back?!

• You let every corrupt politician gain power and abuse his office, but I can’t even get a promotion at work!

• You make other people, even unbelievers, to live in Hawaii or Palm Beach, or the Riviera….do you know how cold it got in my house when the power went out Lord?!

• You set it up so that the selfish and the arrogant get all the breaks, while those of us who go to Church each week have to schlep along by ourselves.

• You even make the sun shine on the good and the bad alike. You just don’t know how to treat your friends!

My child, God replies, you, my beloved child: How have I offended you? How have I let you down?

• Was it when I formed out of the dust of the earth to love in my image?

• Was it when I gave you lungs with which to breathe and arms with which to love, ears to hear, and eyes to see the beauty all around you?

• Was it when I emptied myself and took on human flesh, feeling your pains, knowing your heart, and bearing your sins?

• Was it when I taught you in parables and healed you from the ailments of your body and soul?

• Was it when I stretched out my arms on the cross and taught you how to love and to sacrifice?

• Was it when I rose from the tomb, defeating death, winning for you the promise of eternal life?

Why do you reject my comfort, my beloved child? Why do you refuse to accept the salvation I have bought for you and to rejoice with the joy of the children of God?

Hear the voice of my prophets, says the Lord:

• Rejoice! Break forth, shout joyfully together…For the LORD has comforted His people, He has redeemed Jerusalem.

• Shout for joy, O heavens! And rejoice, O earth! Break forth into joyful shouting, O mountains! For the LORD has comforted His people And will have compassion on His afflicted.

• As a mother comforts her infant, so I will comfort you.

Abandon your petty complaints, your narcissistic preoccupations, and your myopic self-indulgences. For none of it really matters!

All that truly matters is that God loves you more than you can ever know. Rejoice and be glad, for he has looked upon you in your lowliness and waits, again, to be born in your heart!

If that’s not a reason to rejoice, I don’t know what is!

God rest you merry, gentlemen,
Let nothing you dismay,
For Jesus Christ our Savior
Was born on Christmas day,
To save us all from Satan's power
When we were gone astray:

O tidings of comfort and joy, comfort and joy,
O tidings of comfort and joy.

Repent and Obey!

Second Sunday in Advent
Homily

Repent and believe, the Baptist cries, for the Kingdom of God is a hand!

Repent! Not a very good marketing slogan today. Who wants to repent. I'm quite happy the way I've arranged things in my life, already, thank you. Maybe take care of a war or a famine or something else more in your job description, God, and just leave me alone to live my little life the way I choose.

Repent and believe....the Kingdom of God is a hand!

But repentance means I have to obey, and obedience is not exactly one of my favorite things. Yeah, it's true, I knelt down over there and placed my hands between those of the Bishop and promised obedience and respect, but that was a long time ago, And I was still a kid, and It was a part of the rite. And plus, I'm not a bad person...I do a lot more than some of those other people...there are a lot worse than me...why don't you go preach to them for a while.

Repent and believe!

I'm not too thrilled by obedience, and it comes out in the strangest ways sometimes. Ask my best friend, who turned to me one day after a long period of my spouting all knowingly and said, you know James, you're the only one I know who can make me cry with frustration.

Ask your spouse how good you were at obedience to love in the middle of that argument you had over the turkey, or your mother how obedient you were when you wouldn't get out of bed last week, or your daughter how obedient to love you were when you screamed at the top of your lungs because you were so tired and you just couldn't deal with her anymore,

Better still, ask yourself what John the Baptist means today when he says to me and to you...yes you!.....repent and believe, right now! For the Kingdom of God is a hand!

We are made for obedient love, and from the moment we went down into those waters of Baptism with Christ and were joined to his death, it's all we've been about. A constant conversion to life from death, and to purity from sin, and to light from darkness.

Such a continuing conversion is rooted in a sense of self that emerges from a radical humility, an assuredness that I am not God....the Shema Israel, which heralds and caps every act of Jewish worship, says it all: "Hear, O Israel: the Lord our God, the Lord is one."1 It's a takeoff on the first commandment: “I am the Lord your God and you shall have no false Gods before me.”

Such conversion to humility, to the constant conviction that I am little and God is big, that I am child and he is father, results in a radical obedience, not to my self-actualization, but to the plan God has for me and for my life.

Yet is there anything which I fight against more instinctively than the sense that I am not God. I once heard a certain Roman cardinal utter the ultimate sharp comment to a staffer who was heatedly trying to convince him of something: Suppose, Father, just for a moment, that you were not God.

The same could have been said to our first parents, whose sin, ultimately, was not the fruit stolen from the tree, but the disordered conviction that they could be God if the just ate the right kind of fruit.

You see it in every three year old, possessed by the absolute conviction that he is the center of the universe, the ultimate arbiter of meaning, justice, and truth, in other words that he, stamping his feet, screaming, crying, and turning blue, is God.

The follower of Christ is called to the opposite conviction and the opposite way of life. For he is taught by the life of his Lord, by an obedience that does not deem equality with God something to be grasped at...but rather empties itself, taking the form of a slave, and becoming a little child, opening its arms upon a cross in perfect obedience to the Father's will.

We are made for obedient love. It is our dignity. It is our destiny. It is our purpose for being.

And its not just a question of doing God's will so I can go to heaven: obey the rules and win the prize. Its a matter of being so much more in love with God than I am with myself, that I will do his will not because I dread the loss of heaven and the pains of hell, but because I love God and I want nothing so much as to be his obedient son,

I've always been challenged by Saint Benedict's description of the three ways of loving God. At first, Saint Benedict tells us, we love God because we love ourselves. I don't want to go to hell, so I do what he wants.

At the second stage, I love God because he is lovable. I have no choice. I have so deeply fallen in love within him that I want only to do his will.

And then there's the third stage of loving God, the one which few reach but the only state in which true holiness and purity reside, wherein I love me only because God loves me. Only then does my every waking moment seek the will of God. My next breath has value only if it is part of God's plan. My fondest hopes and my deepest desires are but cinder and ash unless they are a part of his plan. In other words, it is not my will but his, not me, but Christ Jesus in me, it is I, like the John the Baptist, who must decrease and he who must increase.

That's what it means to make straight his paths, to prepare a highway for our God. The highway is me. To repent and believe that kingdom of God is at hand is to radically hand myself to God, even unto death, death even on a cross.

It's like what Saint Augustine once preached, a favorite saying of this preacher, too: God does not want your gifts. God wants you. All of you. Your mind, your heart, your entire being.

For he made you for obedient love. The kind of love that’s less interested in being God, than in being God’s beloved child child. The kind of obedient love which is the reason we are and is what we were made to be.

Monsignor James P. Moroney
Rector