What Family Teaches: Homily for Sunday, December 31, 2023

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This Christmas, we celebrate the mystery of the Incarnation.

What Family Teaches

When I was a little boy, I lived in an apartment building with my parents in what was affectionately known as the Green Block. And it was called the Green Block because essentially this apartment building was a big green block. It had green asphalt siding and it was square. There was nothing really artistically wonderful about it at all.

And one of the features of each of these apartments is that the kitchen was what you first came into when you entered the house. I don’t know why it was designed that way, but it was.

There was one day, I think I was maybe four or five, and I was outside playing. And one of the other kids who was a year younger than I, he and I were having a water gun fight, which on a summer night when it’s warm was pretty wonderful.

That is, until I had a great observation and insight, why use a little tiny water gun when you spy the garden hose? And so I took the garden hose and started spraying this little boy and he ran and ran inside to his kitchen thinking that he would be safe. What he didn’t realize is something that I knew, which was that standing behind a screen door in the kitchen was going to offer no protection whatsoever.

The kitchen became one big mess of water. It was soaked. I don’t know how my day of doom arrived, but I do remember my father coming outside and, of course, he was angry because the neighbor’s kitchen was filled with this water. And I remember him yelling, but I also remember him bringing lots of towels and having to go into the kitchen to help clean up the water.

Now, how much help a five-year-old really is in cleaning up water, I don’t know. But then I had to go to my room and think about what you’ve done. Well, I don’t know that five-year-olds think much about what they’ve done in that particular context. I just regretted that it had happened.

But that’s not the most important point of this story. The most important point of this story is that what I remember is that the evening concluded by going out for ice cream. We had a Howard Johnson’s restaurant, and there was, I don’t even know how many flavors of ice cream, but that’s what I remember.

What I also remember are the two lessons I learned that night. One, I could not do whatever I wanted to do. There were limits. There were rules. And I had to make amends if I broke one of those rules. So that was the first lesson, that I was subject to a certain way of living.

But I suspect in his reaction, my father, who had what I would call a rollercoaster temper, he got mad in a hurry, but the good news was he was not mad in a hurry. And I suspect that maybe he thought he had overreacted a little bit. My parents, I do remember, were inside painting the hallway. And maybe he thought he should have given more attention to a five-year-old than letting him run outside. I don’t know.

But the second lesson I learned was that I would be forgiven. That my house was a house where I was loved. There was never a doubt in my mind that I was loved by my mother and my father. Today we celebrate the Holy Family. And I think the pattern for our lives is quite similar.

Namely, we look at the characteristics and the qualities of the Holy Family and ask ourselves, how is it that we live out of those qualities? We know that Mary had to be a very strong woman. We get glimpses in the Gospel right from the very beginning. No room for them. They have to leave their refugees or exiles, but at any rate, they have to leave for Egypt because the safety of their child is threatened.

We have today’s event, which should have been kind of a happy event, presenting their first born son to the Lord. But they are given this warning by Simeon, who is telling Mary that a sword of sorrow will pierce her heart. We see in other instances throughout the Gospels that Mary doesn’t understand her son Jesus.

There is one passage in the Gospels that says that she came to get Jesus with his relatives because they thought he was out of his mind. And then, of course, how horrible it must have been to witness the execution, the public and shameful execution of her son. But what does she do in the face of all of this? She reflects on it.

She’s always asking herself, where is the Lord in the midst of all of this? Where is God in my life? How is God present in these particular circumstances? And Joseph, an upright man, a man of prayer, a man who obviously is familiar enough with the Lord that he’s able to ascertain that the Lord speaks to him in dreams. Not once, but twice do we learn that in the Gospels.

Today, as we celebrate the Holy Family, we are first reminded that because of our baptism, every single one of us has a vocation. Every single one of us has been given by God a way to live out the Gospel. Today, we have the example of the Holy Family with characteristics of faith, so that just as I learned lessons from my family, which I hope was holy, so too we can look to Mary, Jesus, and Joseph, and find the characteristics of faith that lead to eternal salvation.

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