Christmas, Feast for the Homeless

Homily for Christmas Mass St. Patrick's Church Halifax 2011

Do we ever tire of Christmas? Every year at this time we celebrate it. For children the element of surprise, of wonder remains very strong. But some of us have celebrated this feast sixty or seventy times or more. This is my forty fourth Christmas sermon as a priest. What more is there to experience or to say? Is there not a danger of routine setting in?

In recent decades parts of the total Christmas celebration have become artificial, predictable, and in the long run boring. The feast of Christmas is now seen as a generic holiday, watered down to satisfy political correctness, and geared to the lowest common denominator. What is the lowest common denominator, you may ask. It appears to be the credit card machine. Christmas is blatantly exploited for commercial purposes. The beautiful hymns of years past are played less often, replaced by songs without real content or power to inspire, repeated over and over again. We are caught up in the rush, and we are expected to spend our quota of money to keep the economy going strong.

This superficial Christmas fails to satisfy us, but the real Christmas is genuine, full of surprises, and we are happy to celebrate it each year, no matter how old we get. We are celebrating not an event with only one dimension, but a mystery with endless facets, a mystery which becomes more attractive the more we enter into it. Love is that mystery, whether the love of God which is shown to us in the Christ Child come into our midst. or the love which, empowered by God’s love, we manage to show to one another, often slogging our way through the sites of commercial Christmas to find appropriate gifts.

An event which took place at St. Patrick’s Church a few days ago will help us reflect on one facet in particular of God’s love shown to us in this marvellous feast. Each year in one of the local Halifax Churches there is a memorial service for all the homeless people who have died in the course of the past year. This year was St. Patrick’s turn. Those present are invited to light a candle for a person they remember, and they often briefly speak about that person. Stories of heartbreak and of tragedy, but also of human dignity and resourcefulness. The homeless reveal themselves to us, but also us to ourselves, because in a deep sense we are all homeless. Like the many refugees living within our world, we are all on a journey to a better and more secure place, a place we can call home, not just for a time but forever. The homeless and the refugees know it deep in their bones, we sometimes forget it. But sometimes we do remember when the thought crosses our mind: “What is our world coming to? Can things continue this way? What will it be like for my children and grand-children to live in this world?”

Homeless persons and refugees play a key role in the birth of Christ. Christmas is a feast for the homeless. Towards the end of Mary’s pregnancy, Mary and Joseph were caught up, like refugees of today, in a politically motivated event upsetting for the poor and defenceless people of that day, a census in which you had to return to your place of origin to be counted. Mary and Joseph were homeless at a time when being at home, surrounded with familiar things needed for a birth, was most important. She was ready, but there was no place for her and Joseph, and she gave birth to Jesus in a shelter for animals.

Mary and Joseph were themselves homeless, but those who were the first to visit them according to Luke`s gospel, were also homeless. They knew what it is to be away from home. They may have had a home to go from time to time, but they spent many months with their sheep in the fields, guarding them day and night, and the comforts of home were not available to them as they ceaselessly sought for their sheep the best grazing land available. A life of poverty, of simplicity, of constantly being on the move. They are the ones who first received notice of the birth of a Saviour, and the first to visit the manger. Mary, Joseph, and the shepherds were specially favoured by God because they were homeless.

Paul tells us that when God the Son came into the world, he set aside his divine entitlement, his prerogatives, and totally shared the human condition in all its uncertainty and vulnerability. He could have been born in a palace, with trumpets blaring at his majestic entry into the world, with many slaves to attend to his needs, but instead he was born in a manger, to a couple without resources when they needed them most. And this was the pattern of his public life where, we are told, he often did not have a stone upon which to lay his head.

The question for us today is this: are we completely caught up in the comforts of our familiar surroundings, or is there a part of us which is homeless, insecure, without resources? There may be some of you here this evening who are experiencing homelessness in a painful way, struggling to find a good place to stay, whether in the literal sense of shelter or in a broader sense of relationships and community. But those of us who have a good home, a family, a community to enjoy, are called to be in solidarity with those who are homeless. Their homelessness is our pain and our concern. We are to be homeless with them. This is a season of sharing. Let us share with them something of the abundance we enjoy, and allow them to share with us something of the homelessness they experience. In the end Jesus came to lead us to a better home, a lasting home, a home with God. In this sense we are all homeless, but homeless with a sense of deep trust and confidence in Jesus who shares our homelessness that we might enter into the home of the One who sent him in our midst, the home for which we all yearn with every fibre of our being.