|
And the word was made flesh, and he made his dwelling among us.
Many of you know that I love to go hiking.
I love to go hiking but I am a day packer.
In other words, I go for a day hike and then come home
because I like my bed as opposed sleeping outdoors.
Even when I do long hikes, like an 18 hour hikes,
I still want to come home to my bed.
I will do 14,000 foot high mountains and come back home.
And I love doing it.
I love even doing the long ones, but I still like to get in my own bed.
I have done backpacking, where you have to carry everything with you
including your tent and all your supplies.
But I am not as good at that.
I like the comforts of my own bed.
When you are out there backpacking, you are very vulnerable.
Your tent, your water, your food,
if you forgot something, it is on you.
It is just you and the nature.
I have been out there and I lie down and
am surrounded in this little tent and I hear everything.
I cannot sleep. I hear everything.
I think that noise must be a bear
but it was probably an ant moving across the tent.
Everything gets exaggerated because I have all this fear.
The idea that there is only this little tent between you and nature.
One can get used to it, like I did after a couple of days,
and you start to realize and relax and see and hear.
You start to appreciate nature in a different way.
But you are still vulnerable and
you really need to know what you are doing to do it well.
The reason why I bring up my experience of “tent” is
that the Gospel mentions it today.
The reading from today says “The Lord made his dwelling with us.”
A more accurate translation is “he pitched his tent with us.”
They have put it into a more, localized language for us,
but back then when it was first written,
there were a lot of Bedouins in the community.
They would have been nomads who pitch tents.
Remember also the Jewish people were in the desert for 40 years.
So they lived in tents.
This was a common phrase and
the idea that he pitched his tent with us was the way
that he became vulnerable alongside us as a human being.
That he was all in, if you would, with humanity.
And then the question we have is why is that so important?
Why did God have to become one of us in Jesus Christ?
This is the feast we celebrate today.
The most powerful feast of all is that of the incarnation,
that he became one of us in the baby Jesus.
We have to understand that God was trying to communicate
a message at a deeper level with us;
that he has been trying to communicate ever since.
He created humanity, that he is with us.
He is for us and he is within us.
He is all around us.
He is there all the time.
The world had become a darkened place.
We hear that about in last night's readings
with an emphasis of a darkened world
and how Jesus came to be the light in this world of darkness.
But we also hear in John's more eloquent way.
He said that he came to testify.
John the Baptist came to testify tonight
that he was not the light but that Jesus Christ was the light.
He was the light of the world to come into a darkened world.
What makes a world darkened is sin and pain.
Sin causes a lot of the pain, but not all the pain.
Pain sometimes comes about by circumstances in life and things that happen.
Then we become hardened and we become sinful.
The world becomes a darker place.
In coming and pitching his tent with us,
Jesus becomes one with us and says,
there is no need to lose hope in our world.
How we beat the darkness is to turn on a light.
We bring the light.
We can not fight darkness with darkness.
We fight the darkness with a candlelight.
When we turn on the light, then the whole world is lit again.
That is what Christ did.
Christ came among us as a vulnerable child.
He did not come as a king.
He did not come in a palace.
He came as a baby in a manger.
We have to understand with all the vulnerability,
and when you look at the manger, the creche set,
it is deliberate; there are animals and there is vulnerability.
The reason we are trying to emphasize
that he pitched his tent with us,
that he became one with us in all our vulnerabilities,
in all our ways.
That is the beautiful message.
That is all great. It is great theology. It is wonderful.
What does it do for us?
It comes down to the core of our being that
we are called now to be this light in this world.
Christ came into light and comes again inside you and I,
and we are called to be then that light for all the world to see.
They tell us that there are over a hundred sites of
regional conflicts and wars throughout the world right at this moment.
Of course, we know the two huge ones,
two major ones are Palestine and Israel and Ukraine and Russia.
But here is what the Lord says
in the midst of all of that trouble and all that disaster
that he is present in the midst of all of us.
That he is in the Gazen child.
And he is also in the Israeli child killed by the Hammas.
He is in the Ukrainian child killed
and the Russian armyperson killed.
He is in the homeless and the rich.
He is in the straight and he is in the gay.
That Christ is born in every single one of us.
Our role as Christians is to say yes to that identity,
say yes to that message that is within us,
and then to become the light to the world.
That is our role as Christian disciples.
It is great to be out there talking about that,
but how do we do that?
We do that inside our own families,
inside our own homes, by saying yes to the Lord, just like Mary did.
And yes is a yes to the light in the midst of a darkened world.
I love to quote from one of my favorite saints,
Saint John of the cross:
“In the evening of our life, we will be judged
not in how well we have lived,
but on how well we have loved.”
That is the ultimate shining of our light, that we love others.
We love others, not just when it is convenient.
We do not love others just when we like them.
We love others in the midst of their pain and their suffering.
When they are grumpy and unpleasant to be with.
We love them because that is where they need to be loved.
When they are in pain and when they are wounded, we loved them.
We loved them past their darkness, and we shine a light.
We do not agree with the pain that they cause.
We do not agree with those who are bombing the Gaza and children.
Nor do we agree with the bombing of the hamas militia
killing the Israeli children throughout the place.
We agree with neither, but we love them where they are at.
And we want to love them through their darkness and into the light.
And we do that in our families.
And we continue to work for peace by being people of the light,
by people who are willing to extend ourselves
and to love others where they are in their brokenness,
in their pain, and are suffering.
Today as we acknowledge that the Lord pitched his tent with us,
then we are willing to pitch our tent with others and
to let our light shine for all to see
by the simple acts of kindness, gentleness, forgiveness, and love today.
Let our light shine!
And the word was made flesh, and he made his dwelling among us.
| 
