Sunday Homilies:

Dear Friends in Christ,

Today we come to the end of the Christmas season with the celebration of the Epiphany of the Lord.  The word “Epiphany” comes from the Greek epifania, which means a “manifestation” or a revelation” of God to humanity.  It is the feast of the Glory of the Father in and through the birth of the Baby Jesus, but it’s not simply a celebration of the birth of a child, rather it is the revelation of God becoming man in the Baby Jesus.  This is the first event in the Father’s plan to restore all humanity, and in fact all creation to communion with Himself through His direct intervention.  We are, one can say, now “caught up” in this descent of God to us in the Word becoming Flesh and dwelling among us and led in the movement of raising up, forgiving, restoring and returning humanity to God the Father.  This is the Mystery that is revealed to us, but far from a spectacular event that overwhelms us, God enacts His love and manifests it to us in the silent Infant born into total poverty in an ordinary, unremarkable way to relates to all of our everyday lives.

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Dear Friends in Christ,

The Church says farewell to the old year and rings in the new year with the Solemnity of Mary, Mother of God. Along with Mary, we too “ponder all these things” within our hearts: the events of this past year, Our Lord’s presence within these, our life of faith, our struggles with sin and the challenges we continue to face in a world all too filled with violence, blindness to the violations against value and dignity of human life, a mindset that encourages us to sleepwalk through life and passively accept things as they are instead of reflecting on how things can be from God’s point of view.

To be human means to be thoughtful, reflective, considerate and sensitive. Mary the Mother of God is all these things to the point of perfection – she is the Mother of God and the Mother of new humanity which we call baptismal grace. Not only Jesus, but we too are truly her children. And we are such, not by any effort on our part, but simply because her grace is also ours. This means each of us, our families and our communities can live out our authentic and renewed humanity as we enter the new year.

The Christmas narrative today proclaims that “when eight days were completed for his circumcision, he was names Jesus, the name given him by the angel before he was conceived in the womb.” The angelic giving of the Holy Infant’s name now enters into history and the realm of the human by Mary. His name is his identity, just as our baptismal names are our identities united to Jesus. The new year gives us the opportunity to renew our identity with the Christ Child – how easy it is for us to dismiss God when we think he is too distant or aloof from our life. How impatient and impetuous we are in this regard. But Mary lived only to give birth to and welcome the Messiah. The peace, silence and solitude came from saying “yes” to the angel’s announcement. Nothing less could give her joy, for she lived without a shred of compromise or vanity. She surrendered herself fully to God’s word. We too can be untied to Mary’s “yes” but we can only discover it in the silence, solitude and peace of Christmas.

Let us pray as we being the new year, 2012:

Lord Jesus, empty us of ourselves. Rid us of our willfulness, our sinfulness, our pride. May we never be seduced by the false ideas of the world. May the truth of your birth be our glory. Let our lives be governed by your holy peace. May we live hidden in you as once you were hidden in the womb of your mother. Amen.

Today, we arrive at the fourth Sunday of Advent, and with it, the Liturgy invites us to focus and meditate on the role and the response of the Blessed Virgin Mary in God’s plan of salvation.

In the office of readings from yesterday, St. Leo describes very eloquently the role of Mary. He says:

“For unless the new man, by being made in the likeness of sinful humanity, had taken on himself the nature of our first parents, unless he had stooped to be one in substance with his mother while sharing the Father’s substance and, being alone free from sin, united our nature to his, the whole human race would still be held captive under the dominion of Satan. The Conquerer’s victory would have profited us nothing if the battle had been fought outside our human condition. But through this wonderful blending the mystery of new birth shone upon us, so that through the same spirit by whom Christ was conceived and brought forth (by the Virgin), we too might be born again in a spiritual birth.”

It was Mary’s “yes”, her “let it be done unto me”, that joined Heaven and Earth and enabled Abba-Father, through Christ, to retrieve humanity from the realm of Satan, sin and darkness, and place us in the realm of grace. We who are reborn by baptism, though, must take care to do nothing that would remove us from the center of grace, who is the Christ child unborn, and return us to the realm of Satan. The liturgy of the Eucharist during Advent takes on this “cosmic” and “big-picture” dimension and it is absolutely crucial to see our relation to God, the Virgin and the Child, otherwise it’s easy to just view this all as a story, a comforting fairy tale, or something that has nothing to do with your life.

As we begin this fourth and final week of Advent, we look to Mary, not only as our model, but truly as our mother.  She is the one who brings us to the Messiah; she is the one who brings us to God. He is of the House of David, the fulfillment of all hope. We take all of this in this week, realizing that God (who becomes man) invites us to take the same steps Mary did, and in doing so, rediscover our own humanity and the authentic humanity of each and every human person, while we reject all that dehumanizes us and everyone else; renounce all that reduces our humanity.

In a culture that can’t bring itself to even say the words “Merry Christmas”, we have the responsibility to make the “Christ-Mass” a reality and something of consequence. The Virgin shows us the way.

-Rev. Todd Molinari

Dear Friends in Christ,

We have been reflecting together on the section of St. Matthew’s Gospel that deals with the life of the Church and how we can be as responsive as possible as mature and loving disciples in following our Lord.  The last two weeks we looked at St. Peter as a figure or as a “stand-in” for every disciple.  Both in the profession of faith as well as the obstacles that hinder us from fully embracing the Cross are aspects of our life that we need to pay attention to and to address.

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