Sirach 3:2-6, 12-14 | Colossians 3:12-21 | Luke 2:22-40

Oh God, who are pleased to give us the shining example of the holy family, graciously grant that we may imitate them in practicing the virtues of family life and, in the bonds of charity and so in the joy of your house, delight one day in eternal rewards.  Through our Lord Jesus Christ, your Son who lives and reigns with you in the unity of the Holy Spirit, one God forever and ever, amen.

This Feast of the Holy Family is very interesting in terms of the offering that the church gives to me, a preacher, teacher: two sets of readings.  One set focuses primarily on the family, the holy family, Jesus, Mary, Joseph, and their life together.  And there is another set of readings that is an option, and it develops around the theme of the bigger family, when God first called a community of people together through Abraham.  And that family has certain qualities and aspects to it that are important for us to understand, as does the holy family, but I think it’s the first year, in 53 years or whatever, that I’ve decided to use the readings from Abraham.  I’m not sure why, but I am.  And so it’s not so much focusing then, these readings you’ve just listened to, on the nature of the, what I would call, the core family, mother, father, children, but on a much broader, bigger family of God, God the Father and his people and his people’s relationship to each other.

And so I’d like you to join me then in reflecting upon this mysterious thing that we call community, unity, oneness.  It’s impossible to talk about Christianity without talking about community.  It can never be an isolated, individual experience of just you and God, and even though we have people who seem to separate from community, normal community life, live in a monastery, have a very unique role of being there almost as individuals but part of a community, but mostly their life is dedicated to prayer, and they’re not the example that we would use for what would be called the normal Christian life.  The normal Christian life is the most fascinating thing, because it deals primarily in relationships.  And so instead of focusing on the home in Nazareth of Jesus, we’re going to focus on God calling for the first time after he created Adam and Eve — he enters into history, and he said, “I want to create a family of human beings that live together, work together, grow together, die together, change together.”  So that’s what we’re going to focus on in this homily. 

So let’s look at basically some of the major themes.  The most interesting thing starts with, with the first reading with Abraham, that he has a longing, as a human being, to be effective, to have an impact on people, and one of the things that’s interesting about the Old Testament is there’s very little reference — especially in the Torah, the first five books of the Bible, there’s very little emphasis on life after death as we, as Christians, understand it, going to a place either like a place of purification, purgatory, or a place of heaven, a reward, or possibly we could choose to refuse the forgiveness of God and end up in a place of destruction, in hell.  God never sends people there.  People choose to go there and refuse forgiveness.  But basically we have in that image a people who are destined for something, and their destiny is somehow connected to the inter-flow of life between each of them.  So we see in this figure Abraham that he has a longing to accomplish something in life where he has some kind of lasting effect, some kind of influence on the world, like more than just his own little life.  He said, “I want to have posterity.  I don’t have anybody coming after me.”  And that’s interesting, because in the Old Testament, when there wasn’t an emphasis on life after death, the most important thing was you would continue to live in your descendants, in those that you created, and Abram was without any descendant.  So God enters into his life and said, “I am here to create for you posterity.”  And the way he does it is to give him a miraculous birth through a — the way God does things, I can’t describe him enough to say that, when he really wants to make it clear that he’s the one doing it, he does something that doesn’t make any logical sense, a woman in her 90s having a baby after she struggled all her life to have children.  So what this is about, this promise, is that God is a God who is dedicated to awakening in human beings and empowering human beings to create life.  We’re here to have an impact beyond just our own life.  We’re here to have a long-term impact on the world, and that isn’t something that God tells us we should do.  It’s something deep inside of us that we know we long to do.

It’s funny.  I’m now in my 80s and thinking about things like, “Gosh, I’m going to die sometime soon, and I want to leave something to my sisters, to my family or whatever.”  And I never thought about that before, but there’s something about human nature that, when we think about leaving this world, we don’t want to leave it without having a sense that we have had some impact, some influence on it.  And we long for the influence to be powerful and to be good and to be life-giving.  That’s just in our DNA, and so the story of Abraham and the story of God creating this family is a story about saying there is a responsibility in all of us that we have an impact on one another that brings life to the world.  And that’s a beautiful description, I think, of what’s in the heart of every human beings.  It’s called love.  “I want to be of some kind of grace, goodness, effectiveness to other people.”  And when you think about that, it’s a beautiful way to imagine a drive that’s in us that is there in seed form that needs to grow and develop, and how does it grow and develop? 

What I’d like you to imagine with me is that this ability to give life to another begins when we realize that this is something that has been given to us.  The whole story of Abram turning into Abraham is that he finally gets past his fear that he has no influence or no real effectiveness on what happens to him after he dies.  He believes.  He believes that there is something given to him that enables him to do that, and it’s a son, Isaac.  And the interesting thing about his giving, been given this gift, he believes, “My gosh, God has entered into my life, and now I am able to leave something in the world that will continue my effectiveness in the world, my posterity.”  That’s the way he thought about it.  But then think about this: he had that sense that, “This is why — this is what I’ve always longed for.”  And then he sees it happening in a miraculous way.  So when God says, “Can you let go of this gift?  Can you destroy this thing that’s been given to you?”  It’s so weird why Isaac — why Abraham would be asked to give up Isaac, to kill him, but then the reason that he was willing to do it, though he was stopped by an angel, but the reason he was willing to do it, he figured out, “If God can do this miraculous thing of taking my barren wife and making her fertile and giving me an offspring, he can bring life out of things that look like death.” 

And that’s the mystery.  God can enter into things in our life that look like there’s no life there, there is something missing, and enter into a relationship somehow with us where it produces abundant life.  That’s faith.  That’s the faith of Abraham, the father of faith.  If we can believe as Abraham believed, we’d create a role in the family of man that we’re going to be here constantly.  When everything looks dark and lifeless, we believe that everything that’s happening somehow has the potential in it to bring life into the world.  That’s the promise.  What a gift, that we’re given that kind of hope.  And we see it then most fully experienced by then Jesus, who comes into the world, and he too has this longing to have an impact on the world.  He wants to change it.  He wants to radically open people to the mystery of his Father’s intimacy that he knew personally, firsthand.  He wanted people to experience it, and so his calling was, “I have to show people this wonderful gift and how amazing it is.”  And the interesting thing is the way he proves, in a sense, that he is the Son of God is that he goes through a process that is at the heart of this work of being in the family of man, meaning we’re here to always find life where it seems there’s only death.  And so it seems essential that Jesus had to go through the experience of feeling, fearing that his life was cut short and wasn’t able to fulfill its obligations, wasn’t able to be all that he intended it to be, and when in a sense, all of his human energy and action that went into trying to be the best Messiah he could be and maybe not doing it as well as he could of, in terms of the way he angered the system and made them turn against him and all of that — but at the bottom line, what we see is, when he surrendered to what seemed didn’t seem like it was going to be enough or didn’t seem like it would bring life, when it actually looked like he thought he was going to end his ministry prematurely, he gave into it and trusted that somehow in this seemingly thing that’s called death comes abundant life.  That’s the moment of faith, of trust in the work of a family, in the work of a community.  Think about it.  In all of the situations that we live in, there is always something that we can look at and say, “This should never have happened.  This was bad.  My background is not what it should have been.  I wasn’t loved enough.  I wasn’t supported enough, and therefore I can’t find a way to support others.”  All those things, we can say those are the darkness, but when we think about it in the way that Abraham’s life was unfolding and Jesus’ life was unfolding, it’s all about the mystery of how do you enter into what seems to be the worst thing and find that it’s filled with life.  That’s a way of living in community, of living in church, of living in society, that what seems to be destroying us, if we look at it carefully and work through it and grow because of it and enter into a more mystical dimension of trusting in something that we can’t understand, giving birth out of things that seem to be only filled with death — until we do that, we haven’t really entered into the family that God has called us to be, believing, trusting in the way in which God uses darkness to bring light.  That’s the gift.  That’s the mystery, and I pray that this season, this whole season that we’ve been through now, ending with this Feast of the Holy Family, that it brings about a unity and a oneness that perhaps wasn’t there before, and God bless you.

Father, we feel responsible to do the work that you’ve given us to do in this world, and yet we don’t realize fully that this is a work that you, you in us, you with us can only, you, make it happen.So help us to be more trustful in the spirit of your life within each of us so that we don’t really face any darkness without the conviction that you promise everything that is difficult brings life and fullness and joy. And we ask this in Jesus’ name. Amen.