A reading of the holy gospel according to Saint Matthew. Now this is how the birth of Jesus Christ came about. When his mother Mary was engaged to Joseph, but before they lived together, she was found with child through the power of the holy spirit. Joseph, her husband, an upright man, unwilling to expose Mary to the law, decided to divorce Mary quietly. It was equivalent to adultery.
Such was his intention when suddenly the angel of the lord appeared in a dream and said to him, Joseph, son of David, have no fear about taking Mary as your wife. It is by the holy spirit that she has conceived this child. She is to have a son, and you are to name him Jesus because he will save his people from their sins. All this happened to fulfill what the lord had said through his prophet, the virgin shall be with child and give birth to a son, and they shall call him Emmanuel, a name which means god is with us. When Joseph woke up, he did as the angel of the lord had directed him and received Mary into his home as his wife.
He had no relations with her at any time before she bore a son whom he named Jesus. And this is the gospel of the lord. And can you imagine anything in any language which even remotely approaches this for its simplicity and magnificence. You cannot match it. Now, you know, the loader I've gotten, that is after passing the ripe old age of 47.5 years, I have become more and more attached to cliches.
One of those cliches is that you miss seeing the forest because of the trees. Now, you see, the thing about a cliche is it's not a cliche to someone who's experienced it. Now there are plenty of people who have never experienced this fact, that the closer you got to the forest, walking up the mountain, the less you began to see of a forest, until finally all you saw was a tree, a tree. If you get behind an eight inch tree, you can't see anything but one tiny little old tree. Now I'm not downgrading trees, but one tree doesn't make a magnificent forest.
And there's a difference between a forest and a tree. That the closer I you know, I've experienced this several times, I mean very dramatically, is in my opinion. A lot of things are dramatic to me. But it's a crazy thing that the closer I got to the booming forest, the less I was seeing of the forest. In other words, to see the forest I had to draw back.
Another experience I'll never forget was my first approach to Chartres, and that had some background material to it too. Anyway, as we approach this city, famous over the world for this cathedral and its glass, the cathedral was perfectly clear. I almost saw nothing but the cathedral. Now I was coming by automobile from the South. In case some of you have done this, I wasn't I wasn't coming in by train and certainly wasn't coming in by airplay.
That's the way not to see anything. I saw nothing but the cathedral right up there as clear as day. And you know what? When I got closer into the town, I didn't see the cathedral at all and had trouble finding the blooming thing. The closer I got to it, the less I saw of it until I wasn't seeing it at all, even when my back was almost against it.
It's like when I would Well, won't say it anyway, I was very interested too. I asked a person where the university was and he said, You're leaning against it. The point I'm making is, it's so easy to miss the forest. Now the reason this is all on the top of my head is this, that I've been spending a lot of time, and it's tedious work. I know I'm not I may be missing the point, but it's tedious.
I've been trying to read these documents from Vatican II on the constitution of the church, Lumen Gentium, on then the the document on the laity, and the document on the church in the modern world. Skip that one. But this this one, the constitution of the church, Lumen Gentium. You know, I I spent weeks on that document, reading in French, Latin, and English. And it's tea just going.
It gives you a headache. But let me tell you, look, when you draw away from it a little bit and start seeing the forest instead of a tree, you begin to see magnificence. Then you begin to see something about Christmas. Then you begin to see something about that we have a redeemer. Then you see something about what Jesus Christ means in the concrete persona of the Jesus Christ, the son of Mary, whose conception we just read about this morning.
Then you begin to see this panorama where where a few years, like a like, I mean, two or three thousand years, become nothing, nothing. Where a lifetime is simply a dream. And that's not a very original metaphor, believe me. It's like it's that it's that idea of a ship in the in the sea making its wake. Well, when I was on that old Leviathan, we met the wake behind that ship was terrific.
It looked like the bottom of Niagara Falls. You turned your head around for a few minutes and looked on the stern, and there was nothing. Not even a bubble. So here you begin to see time in the in the in the guise of eternity, that God is God, that there is a God, that God exists. We can't talk about him.
We can't think of him. We can't form a concept of him. I mean, any kind of an adequate concept. There's no proposition you can make about God which is univocally true. Not a single one.
Even the proposition god is is not true in any human secular temporal sense, and you can't say less about anything that it is. It is. And that this god almighty, unspeakable, unimaginable, unexpressible, became a human being in the womb of a woman named Mary. And that that was prepared for, prepared for, expected, even very well described, even by some pagan poets like Virgil. These are facts, and you either accept them or you don't.
There is a god or there ain't. God became man or he didn't. Jesus Christ was God or he isn't and wasn't. Either you've got to take one of those two propositions. Now point that strikes me is this.
If men and women you take this I just told you about that article last week in the post about people going to church on Christmas and Easter. Santies and bunnies, they're called. Why do they go to church on those two days? Now look, if they go to church on Christmas, and it's just because of a good feeling they get attached to the past, it's it brings back the beautiful memories I'm not downgrading this. But if that's what it is, then someone else comes along and says, oh, that's very nice, but, you know, this isn't the Kennedy Center.
We are here to celebrate the the the fact fact, f a c t, that god became man. Now that's either true or false. Now if it's false, what am I doing coming to church? What do I wanna do with it? I ought to be working to destroy that idea.
That's the reason I admire a good honest to God atheist. I can deal with an atheist. I can fight with him. Because if if this whole if this whole panorama of God and becoming man and Christ, if that's all just a pipe dream, who wants any parts of it? Look how it has men misled men and women down the years.
Look how it has caused so many misspent, empty, futile, frustrated lives. You mean to tell me that's good? I should be destroying it. And a good honest to God atheist wants to destroy it. Let's not talk about this phony pluralism.
If there's such a thing as error, I don't want any parts of it. On the other hand, if it should happen to be the truth, what then? What then, my friends? If you quietly say to yourself, oh, no. I this is real stuff.
I believe that there's a God. I believe that God became man. I believe that Jesus Christ, the son of Mary, was and is God. Now what do you do about it? Nothing?
Or does it change your life? Because it's gonna do one or the other. And as Christ our lord himself said, because you are neither hot nor cold, I will begin, not I will, I will begin to vomit you out of my mouth. You see, so many in the world are compromising. And if there's one thing you cannot do with god is to negotiate.
God is God, and he became our savior in Jesus Christ. That's either true or false. And if you accept it as true and try to live it, your life will be absolutely transformed. You will be seeing the forest. In the name of the father, of the son, and of holy spirit.
Amen.