Isaiah 9:2 – 7
Psalm 96
Titus 2:11 – 14
Luke 2:1 – 20
This is the homily given at St. John’s, Huntingdon, Pennsylvania on Saturday, December 24, 2022 by Fr. Gene Tucker.
“PASSING IT ALONG”
(Homily text: Luke 2: 1 – 20)
Once
upon a time, as the church service was ending, and the altar call was given to
those in attendance, a man came forward, raised his arms, and said, “Lord, just
fill me up, just fill be up!” This went on for awhile, the man continuing to
say, “Lord, fill me up, just fill me up!”, until a woman sitting in the front
pew said, quite loudly, “Yes, Lord, fill him up! He sure does leak!”
(Hope
this little story brings a smile to your face.)
In
all seriousness, though, being a “leaky” Christian isn’t a bad thing. In fact,
if we think about it, it’s a required thing.
Perhaps
an explanation is in order:
At
Christmastime, we celebrate God’s great gift in the sending of His Son to take
up our humanity. God “got in the trenches” of human life and existence as He
came in the person of Jesus. That eternal God, the One who made the heavens and
the earth and all that is in them, came in the person of the second person of
the Holy Trinity, the One we call the “Christ”. (Yes, I’m getting a little
theological here.) Put another way, God’ cared enough about the world’s welfare
and the betterment of the people living in it that He chose to send the very
best: Himself.
Christmas
is, therefore, all about gifts and gift-giving. (Indeed, the realization that
God gave the best gift He could give to humanity is the basis for our own
gift-giving at Christmastime…because God gave an immense gift to us, we, in
turn, give gifts to others.)
God’s
gift-giving isn’t meant to be some theoretical abstraction, some set of ideas
that we think about. Though thinking about God’s great gift, given at
Christmastime, is important, and though it’s important for us to learn more and
more about God’s nature and God’s will for our lives, merely thinking about
these things isn’t the goal of God’s gift-giving.
The
goal we are challenged to meet is to come to an intense, personal, one-on-one
love relationship with God through Christ. This means that the journey is an
inward one, into our very innermost self, into our minds, our hearts, and our
very souls.
When
we take that journey, we come to realize more and more fully that God’s
essential nature is to be generous with His love. If we can return to the
little story with which we began (above), we can say that God’s desire is to “fill
us up”. God’s desire is to fill us up to overflowing with meaning, with love,
with an awareness of how precious we are to Him. There is no fuller or more
complete basis for a healthy way of living than to be in such a relationship
with God.
But
this transfer of divine love and attention isn’t meant to end there. As we
receive God’s love, attention, and direction, we are called – in turn – to leak
a little, or to leak a lot, allowing the healing waters of God’s love to flow
out into the relationships with have with others. We are required to share what
we have received at God’s hand. As we do so in response to God’s command, God
will see to it that we are refilled with more and deeper love and a more
intense relationship with that One who created us and who loves us deeply and
intensely.
In
this intensely personal way, God’s kingdom comes into being, one Christian
believer “leaking” out God’s love from themselves into the lives of others, a
direct transfer of God’s healing waters from God to each believer, to another
person.
AMEN.
