We recently celebrated the Feast of the Nativity. Its beautiful liturgies with traditional Christmas carols, the gatherings of family and friends around the tree, and the sumptuous feasts are all just memories. The Christmas lights have gone dark, and many Christmas trees are already tossed onto the tree lawn. Like many retail stores, we look ahead to the next holiday.

WE MOVE ON!

But we can’t “move on.” We have just celebrated a foundational mystery of the Christian faith. The eternal Father sent his Son, who “freely chose to set aside his divinity” to share in our humanity. Through his life, ministry of preaching and healing, passion, death, and resurrection, he made it possible for us to share in the very life of God.

WE CAN’T EASILY MOVE ON FROM THAT!

In today’s reading, John assures us that “we are God’s children now.” We celebrate that reality when we gather as a community around the Table to be fed by Word and Sacrament to be more conformed to the person of Christ in a true foretaste of the eternal heavenly banquet.

Our conformity to Christ, begun at Baptism and nurtured by the Eucharist, urges us to live lives of service. We are called at each Eucharist to be broken and poured out, to reach out in love and kindness to anyone suffering from hunger or from being unhoused, to the poor, the refugee, the person worn down by addiction or mental illness, and to those people just seeking someone to talk to in their loneliness.

We can’t MOVE ON from the stable of Bethlehem for the child born there IS the absolute YES from the Father on his love for his Creation. Like the stars in the sky that night, we are to be living and radiating vessels of hope.

Let Us Pray:

God, creator, and lover of all that exists, come into our hearts so that we might be agents of hope in a world that seems so dark and broken. Amen.