The Nativity of the Lord
Readings:
Vigil || Dawn* || Midnight || Day
(*Assumption did not hold a Mass at dawn)
Preached at the Church of the Assumption in Bellingham, WA
Previous Years: 2022 || 2021 || 2020 || 2019 || 2018 || 2017 (Day) || 2017 (During the Night) || 2017 (Vigil)
Recording
https://moorejesus.podbean.com/e/god-with-us-in-the-eucharist/
Transcript
Edited by J.Y.
Of the two great Christian celebrations, Christmas and Easter, Christmas is the one that seems to have maintained best its religious nature. Easter people now will just reduce to a bunny. But at Christmas, even if you turn on the secular radio stations, you are still going to hear O Holy Night. And I think it’s because Christmas more obviously fulfills the deepest desires of the human heart. What is that desire? Well, it’s to know that we are not alone. It is very easy to feel burdened by this life, by this existence. It’s easy to turn on the news and feel disheartened. It’s easy to feel like somehow we are surrounded by the darkness, and we want to know that we are not alone in that darkness. We want to know that there is somehow a light shining in that darkness that we can receive, and that we can follow. Every single human being desires this. Every single one. All of us want this. And Christmas most obviously shows us the truth, because at Christmas we receive Emmanuel, who is God with us. God is with us. He desires to be with us. He desires to be with us so much that He took upon Himself our flesh, our nature. God is not some Creator who spun us up and let us go. God is a loving Creator who knows us personally, who desires to be with us personally, who loves His creation so profoundly that He chose to enter that creation.
But it goes deeper than that. God isn’t just with us. God is for us. We speak in Christianity of charity. It’s our fancy Christian word for love, but it gets more accurately at what we’re talking about. Charity is giving yourself for the other, pouring yourself out for the other. God didn’t just decide to come down and be with us. God came to be with us for a reason, and that reason is your salvation. He knew that we were burdened by the darkness. He knew that we felt the weight of this existence. He knew that we struggled against sin and death. And so, He didn’t just want to be with us in that experience; He wanted to save us from that experience. That small child in Bethlehem, lying in the manger, will grow up to go to the cross for your sins so that He can die and rise again to defeat death. God loves you so deeply, so profoundly, that He didn’t just want to be with you. He wanted to save you. And it gets even more inspiring, even more miraculous than this. God doesn’t just want to be with you. He doesn’t just want to save you. He wants you to be with Him in all blessedness for all eternity. Yes, Jesus conquered the enemies of humanity—sin and death—but He also gave us a path to eternal life by taking upon Himself our nature.
He bridged the gap between us and our Creator. That’s an impossible gap. The One who was never created, the One who has existed since before time itself, cannot be connected to His creation. He’s too different from us. And yet somehow God took upon himself a human nature, so that now we can enter into a relationship with Him in His humanity. And in so doing, we can receive His divinity. There’s a bridge by which we now have the indwelling of God in ourselves, by which we can now receive the incredible outpouring grace of God whenever we want it, whenever we need it. God is with us, not external to us, not as one human being among many. God is with us, not simply as a Savior—though there’s nothing simple about that—but God is with us, in us. God has bridged the gap so that we can dwell with Him for all eternity.
Now we face a dilemma. The beautiful thing about Bethlehem is that it’s tangible. If you were there in that cave in the backwater of the Roman Empire, you would have been able to look down and see the infant. You would have been able to hold the child Jesus. You would have been able to bless His mother, shake hands with His father. If you are in Palestine 2,000 years ago, you could hear, directly from the mouth of God, His teachings, His counsel. You could experience your salvation in real time. And so, as Christians today, we might think that we are somehow disadvantaged. Oh, if only I were in Bethlehem. If only I could be there with the Christ child. If only I could gaze upon Him in the manger with His mother and His father right there with me. How beautiful that would be. My friends, the good news of this evening isn’t just that Christ is born in Bethlehem, but that it was His plan from the very beginning to be with us for all eternity.
When He ascended into heaven, He did not abandon us to the darkness once again. He had a plan from the very beginning to remain with us, just as He was with us in Bethlehem. My friends, that plan is the Eucharist. It is not an accident that the city of David in which Christ was born is named Bethlehem—translated literally from the Hebrew, it means “house of bread.” It is not an accident that the Christ child was lying in a manger where animals chew their food. My brothers and sisters in Christ, from the moment of His birth, it was God’s plan that He would remain with you corporeally—which is to say that His body would be as present to you now as if you were there in Bethlehem. Yes, the name of the city may be an accident; the manger may be an accident. These may seem to be coincidences until you get to the sixth chapter of the Gospel of John where Jesus says, unless you eat my flesh and drink my blood, you have no life within you, and until you get to the account of the Last Supper where our Lord Jesus Christ took bread in His hands, and He said, This is my body. We take Him seriously. If He said that’s His body, then that’s His body. Which means that the body that was in the manger in Bethlehem, the body that we so long to gaze upon and to touch, you can gaze upon and touch every Sunday, every day, if you want to, right here on this altar. This house that you have entered this evening is quite literally Bethlehem, because this is the house of bread. If you want to sit at the manger and gaze upon the body, the humanity of your Lord Jesus Christ, all you have to do is enter that chapel and look upon the tabernacle, which is the manger in our midst.
My friends, the Lord desires to be with you. He has always desired to be with you, and that desire did not go away when He ascended into heaven. He was with us in Bethlehem 2,000 years ago, and He is with us today at this Mass on this altar. It is a beautiful desire to receive the Lord in Bethlehem, but I promise you that Bethlehem is also present here in Bellingham in the Eucharist, which is the Body and Blood of our Lord Jesus Christ—as present to us today in Anno Domini 2023, as it was 2,000 years ago in Bethlehem.
Fr. Moore 