Richard Bollman, S.J.

HOMILY for Christmas, 2008

A lot of gifts come into the chapel at Christmas time

and then go out again. Many of them come from our Giving Tree custom,

and thanks to so many of you who take part, taking the tags,

bringing back the wrapped packages.

And others are assembled by the staff

for some of our own parish members who might be ill or in grief,

and some gifts are bought from our outreach budget

to follow up with people in the neighborhood

who call the Chapel about Christmas.

Jeff Campbell and Kathy and Liz in the office keep this flowing,

and for several years now these packages have been delivered

by our junior high school parishioners. Sue pulls that together.

The gift deliveries, barely a week ago,

are a kind of gift to the young people who take part.

And, of course, to their parents, who get called in to drive.

You don’t know what to expect at first.

Like one mom who said she signed up very reluctantly since her own schedule was already full, and this was a Friday night.

But she ends up glad she said yes,

meeting parishioners in mourning for a family member who died,

or some of our membership who are really in need

and besides that just glad for the visit!

You know how this goes: it’s one of the parts of Christmas

we take for granted, this reaching out,

but I’d like to dwell on it just a little.

I was struck by the voices of our teen-agers the most,

how they had never been in apartments with people who had so little.

They listened to family stories, and remembered them.

Sometimes they sang carols at the door

and were greeted with milk and cookies inside.

They noticed how the visits awakened them to our own neighborhood,

Evanston and Norwood and Avondale around us,

places you don’t notice much when you are just headed for the campus.

One group encountered a man who is blind, who was receiving from us

a CD of the Bible being read aloud, so he can listen now.

He engaged our young people in a conversation about the Bible, the Word.

Another group of four stopped off at the St. Leger apartments.

That’s the vast building at the six-corner junction

of Woodburn, Gilbert, and Montgomery Roads, not a very agreeable place.

Most of the people in the apartment are transitional,

on their way up, or down, and not wanting to stay there long.

One of our staff led the way on this, and here’s what she said later:

"We were buzzed into a building with dark,

claustrophobic stairways and uneven floors.

When we got to the top of three flights,

we were surprised to be greeted by a cheery door

wrapped in shiny Christmas paper.

A woman welcomed us in, and was so proud of the decorations,

all handmade of wrapping paper and ribbon, all around the apartment.

Every plant pot and stand was wrapped.

In the corner, up high, was a tiny tree.

We saw a young boy peek around the corner and smile, then disappear again. His mother coaxed him out, and when he did reappear,

he was wearing a Santa hat,

just like the ones worn by the teens who were with me,

and he was grinning from ear to ear."

That’s it. Meeting the stranger, meeting the poor,

essential to the Christmas story, isn’t it,

partly because of the way the story is told in the Gospels,

and because of the way our customs have grown up through the years,

inspired by the same Gospel or course, and by countless stories in between.

But it’s bigger than Christmas. That’s what I want to say.

We’re touching here the essentials of what we believe about God,

how these encounters are sacred, and you can feel it right away,

even though you don’t talk or think about faith,

even though you are more interested just in being with your friends,

nevertheless you are suddenly somewhere new.

And at first it’s strange, but rapidly it becomes welcoming,

and you find we have a lot in common with people

who are in some way poor, marginal, different, hidden away,

there are still these strong bonds of hope for children,

potential to make good choices, trust of the stranger, gratitude.

This is the deep well of Good News announced this night,

in the Gospel you just heard,

where the marginal people become the chosen people,

caught up in a sacred meeting that now changes them, and changes us.

If Jesus could speak, there in the manger,

he’d say "The Kingdom of God is at hand."

But at the moment he can’t speak.

He is the Word of God, become flesh and dwelling with us,

but as yet we have to take in that word through the flesh itself,

through the most ordinary of encounters:

giving gifts, sharing food, talking of the weather, hoping for better times.

And in the silence between the words the deepest truth is this:

The Kingdom of God is here: at Bethlehem, at St. Leger apartments,

in your own living room these days, wherever you reach out to one another.

And this can happen with the newly discovered strangers in our own family!

That is the powerful good news of Jesus become one with us.

So I’m passing on these brief accounts

not so much in praise of the gift givers,

but more to remind us of the holy ground we walk on

we who are of that humanity in which God resides.

We know well how badly we treat one another at times,

even in systemic ways at war, in prisons or asylums,

how badly we cheat in the greed of the marketplace, we human beings,

we know well how unappreciative we are of those we most love.

God joins us there in the suffering, in the emotional loss,

God joins us in the poverty of heart and mind,

as surely as God joins us in the events of Bethlehem:

God whose word is so often silent, but wanting to break out:

I am here out of my intention to love and to create and never to stop.

The grace of God which has appeared

is not some occasional thing that shows up when we are good;

it is the mystery of God beyond imagining, bigger than our thoughts and acts,

that always intends to be with us, and discovered.

The story is told of a monk in an old Greek town, a monastery,

who begged regularly in the town, and saved his coins for years,

out of a call he felt to visit the birthplace of the Savior,

to go to Bethlehem and walk three times around the basilica,

and to return home with that blessing.

At last he had collected enough for frugal travel,

and he gathered some food and his coin purse and and set out.

And before he had gone a long away from the enclosure,

he met a beggar at the town gates, an intent man, not very old,

who asked him where he was going.

"I'm going to Bethlehem," the monk explained.

"I feel I have a call to visit the birthplace of Jesus,

to walk around it three times, and to return with the blessing."

And the beggar only said, "Do you have enough money for this journey?"

"Yes," the monk replied. I've been saving for some years,

I have forty pounds by now."

And the beggar said to him: "Well, you could go, or you could do this.

I have a wife and a young family, and no work, little to eat.

I beg here while my wife cares for the children,

and we don't have much chance to break out of this.

But you could leave the forty pounds with me.

You could walk around me three times, and go back to the monastery."

And this is what the monk did.

He set down his coin purse, reverently walked around the beggar,

as if he were walking around the holiest of shrines in the world.

And he went back to the monastery, a changed man and radiant,

because he knew and believed he had seen the Christ.

This is how it shall be for all of us. Happy Christmas to you.