Homily: I Am Here

Year B / Christmas Day

Readings: Isaiah 52.7-10 / Responsorial Psalm 98.1-6 (R/v 3c) / Hebrews 1.1-6 / John 1.1-18

I can see her face still, after all these years. It is Sunday morning. We are on the 17th floor, in the psychiatric ward where I am training as a hospital chaplain. Outside, the downtown skyscrapers of New York City glistened in the sunlight. Inside, the Catholic patients are gathering for a Communion service I’m about to conduct. 

She is twenty-six years old, an African-American, a veteran of the Iraq war. She is recovering from a failed suicide attempt. She had tried to end her life because of guilt: she had accidentally killed a 16 year old whom she mistook for an Iraqi insurgent. She comes up to me, her eyes tearing. In a voice pregnant with longing, she asks, “Where were you?” 

Every time I remember her haunting question, I am reminded poignantly of another question we all struggle with from time to time: “Where are you, God?” “Where are you, God, in my pain and suffering?” “In our illnesses and deaths?” “When my expectations are unfulfilled and our love is unrequited?” “When our plans are laid to waste and my future looks bleak?” 

Whether we cry out “Where are you, God?” or “How long, Lord, how long?” we do so thinking that God is absent, remote, distant, apart from us. Yet, we believe that God is “always and everywhere present.” And today, more than any other day, we celebrate that God is with us: “the Word became flesh and made his dwelling among us.” What then?

Not for us anymore the “what ifs” of who God is, or what God does, or where God is. What the Word made flesh, in Jesus, offers as the correct answer to this question are these truths: God is here with us; that God is here for us; and God is here because God loves us. This is why the outstretched arms of the baby Jesus is God’s invitation to you and me to enter the embrace of Emmanuel, God-with-us.

How can we do this? By surrendering ourselves to our God who is “always and everywhere present.” But our surrender must be as childlike, as God is childlike in coming to us in Jesus.

The final stanza of John Shea’s poem, “Sharon’s Christmas Prayer,” gives us a glimpse of the form this childlike surrender ought to have. When asked who the newborn baby is, Sharon said, “God.” Then “she jumped in the air / whirled around, dove into the sofa /and buried her head under the cushion / which is the only proper response / to the Good News of the Incarnation” (The Hour of the Unexpected). Sharon’s delightful response is to throw herself in trusting abandonment into the Good News God is. 

Isn’t this how the shepherds and the wise men in the Christmas narratives of Luke and Matthew come to Jesus too? Don’t they surrender themselves in confident submission to the joyful Good News that God is amongst us? 

Like Sharon, the shepherds and the magi show us that there is no only other way to savor the wonder of Jesus, God’s gift, but to surrender. When God bids us come to God, be it through angels singing “peace on earth” or a bright star that leads all to Bethlehem, how can we not come?

And so, surrendering ourselves we must, and we can. For as the poet, W. H. Auden explains “Because of God’s visitation in Jesus, we may no longer desire God as if He were lacking; our redemption is no longer a question of pursuit but of surrender to Him who is always and everywhere present” (For the Time Being: A Christmas Oratorio). 

Yes, God has come and God continues to come, to answer our question “Where are you?” with the gentleness of Jesus’ gurgle; his is a little noisy din that resounds loudly as the Word of God breaking into our lives to console, accompany and uplift us, saint and sinner alike. 

Perhaps, this is why we have come to worship the child Jesus today: he is God-with-us. We know the joyful song the angels sang and we recollect how the shepherds proclaimed God’s glory after visiting this child in the manger. And we know – no, we believe – that we too are called to come, to see and to go forth singing the same angel song and announcing the same shepherd testimony to the world.

So, let us come to the Christmas Crib to look for Jesus who we must never lose sight of amidst life’s attractions and distractions. Finding him, let us kneel before Jesus who comes as our Saviour not just today but always. Then, let us go forth to announce this Good News.

Only when we dare to do this will the world and we experience God’s immediacy and intimacy in each other’s words and actions. In another’s warm embrace in your disappointment. In the family’s thanksgiving for your kindness. In the forgiveness of others for mistakes made. In a faraway friend who emails to celebrate “Merry Christmas” this morning. In a mother’s delight for a child’s success. In hands clasped as a father passes on. In the first “I love you” a couple clumsily utters to each other. In the honest challenge to one’s vocation. In our care for one another as we journey through life and faith.

These are our human ways of expressing why God became human: so that God can be with us. As we become more and more aware of these God moments, we should be more enlightened that in Jesus God’s embrace is wider, broader, and deeper than any sin committed, any evil done, any refusal of God made. 

Surrendering ourselves with an “Amen” is the Christian way to better hear God’s answer that God has come to our question, “Where are you, God?” 

But what if “Amen” is the very response God hopes to hear from us who come to Jesus today? Our “Amen” as the most appropriate human response to God who is asking us through the child Jesus, “Where are you?” “Where are you, Barney?” “Where are you, Audrey?” “Where are you, Therese and you, Philip?" "Where are you, and you, and you?” “Where are you, Adrian?”

I can still remember this female veteran sitting with the others around an ordinary table that Sunday morning. I can see their expectant faces. The consecrated hosts rests in a ciborium on a hand towel that is laid out like a corporal. We pray the Our Father. 

Then, all receive Holy Communion, including this young lady who has not had communion for the longest of time. She receives the Body of Christ, in the littleness of a host, once again. As it is placed into the cradle of her hands, she responds, “Amen.” And so it is: God has come, and God will be here, always. 

Preached at St Ignatius Church, Singapore.

artwork: Adoration of the Shepherds by Gerard van Honthorst