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Exploring the word

25 Dec 2016 - Solemnity of the Nativity of the Lord (Christmas), Cycle A

“Merry Christmas.” We greet each other this way at this time of year, casually or with warmth, and a host of meanings attend the phrase. We say with these words: Hope you have fun on the holidays! Enjoy this gift I’ve brought you. Please sit at our table and share our feasting. Have a safe journey and a lovely time with your family. In whatever context we utter the phrase, “Merry Christmas” is a wish and a blessing of real, tangible, incarnate life. We wrap love in bright paper and top it with a bow. We bake love in fragrant kitchens and serve it on longer-than-usual tables. We find love with the people who are most important to us. We have intimate conversations we never find time for in any other season of the year. Christmas celebrates our humanity, wonderful enough that God chose to share it. My friend Sister Pam Smith describes Christmas as the "scandal of anti-transcendence.” It’s scandalous because God does what none of us hope to do: plunges from omnipotence to powerlessness, from eternity to limitation, from omnipresence to crushing specificity. From celestial majesty to prickly manger straw? That’s a big comedown. There are cosmic consequences to this divine choice. The same God who “flung galaxies out and away . . . in pinwheels of matter and light” makes the uncanny decision to “drench Godself in starstuff and Earthdust. If we believe this, there can never be 'mere' matter” (Days of Light and Darkness). God wraps divine love in swaddling clothes and a baby’s hungry cry. God serves up love to be eaten and drunk at tables the world over. God decrees that divine love can be discovered in coming together with people we love and also with people we don’t love or even know. God is in the word, in the conversation, in the heart of the world and the heart of each one of us. So Merry Christmas indeed! God is in the world, in the flesh. God wants to be known as Emmanuel, God-with-us. Not some God-out-there, but God-right-here. Not a God who receives our prayers from faraway and may or may not reply—but a God who experiences our loneliness, sweats our fear, hopes for what we hope for, and works through us and with us to bring the future into being. Kingdom Coming won’t be dropped painfully on our heads out of nowhere. Kingdom comes as we prepare to receive it, heart by heart by heart. As the genealogy of Jesus reveals, God draws straight with the crooked lines of real lives. By means of our personal family trees, God is drawing us into the story of world rescue. Look around the holiday table. See where God chooses to act today. Related scripture links Stories of the Holy Family: Matt. 1:1-2:23; Luke 1:1-2:52 Other advice and models for family: Deut. 5:16; 30:19; Mark 9:36-37; John 19:26-27 Catechism links Jesus’ early life: CCC 525-534 Binding virtues: CCC 1827-1829 Family: CCC 2197-2233

Authors Alice Camille

merry christmas god-with-us emmanuel

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Exploring the word

25 Dec 2022 - Solemnity of the Nativity of the Lord (Christmas), Cycle A

“Merry Christmas.” We greet each other this way at this time of year, casually or with warmth, and a host of meanings attend the phrase. We say with these words: Hope you have fun on the holidays! Enjoy this gift I’ve brought you. Please sit at our table and share our feasting. Have a safe journey and a lovely time with your family. In whatever context we utter the phrase, “merry Christmas” is a wish and a blessing of real, tangible, incarnate life. We wrap love in bright paper and top it with a bow. We bake love in fragrant kitchens and serve it on longer-than-usual tables. We find love with the people who are most important to us. We have intimate conversations we never find time for in any other season of the year. Christmas celebrates our humanity, wonderful enough that God chose to share it. A friend in religious life describes Christmas as the "scandal of anti-transcendence.” It’s scandalous because God does what none of us hope to do: plunges from omnipotence to powerlessness, from eternity to limitation, from omnipresence to crushing specificity. From celestial majesty to prickly manger straw. That’s a big comedown. There are cosmic consequences to this divine choice. God wraps divine love in swaddling clothes and a baby’s hungry cry. God serves up love to be eaten and drunk at tables the world over. God decrees that divine love can be discovered in coming together with people we love and also with people we don’t love or even know. God is in the word, in the conversation, in the heart of the world and the heart of each one of us. So merry Christmas indeed! God is in the world, in the flesh. God wants to be known as Emmanuel, God-with-us. Not some God-out-there, but God-right-here. Not a God who receives our prayers from faraway and may or may not reply—but a God who experiences our loneliness, sweats our fear, hopes for what we hope for, and works through us and with us to bring the future into being. Kingdom Coming won’t be dropped painfully on our heads out of nowhere. Kingdom comes as we prepare to receive it, heart by heart by heart. As the genealogy of Jesus reveals, God draws straight with the crooked lines of real lives. By means of our personal family trees, God is drawing us into the story of world rescue. Look around the holiday table. See where God chooses to act today. Related scripture links Stories of the Holy Family: Matt. 1:1-2:23; Luke 1:1-2:52 Other advice and models for family: Deut. 5:16; 30:19; Mark 9:36-37; John 19:26-27 Catechism links Jesus’ early life: CCC 525-534 Binding virtues: CCC 1827-1829 Family: CCC 2197-2233

Authors Alice Camille

merry christmas god-with-us

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Featured Exploring the Word

20 Jul 2025 - Sixteenth Sunday in Ordinary Time, Cycle C

The quest for ultimate answers continues. Just visit the spirituality section of a bookstore, the self-help quadrant of Amazon, or the political blog of your choice. Fundamentalism, always the primary dispenser of definitive answers, is on the rise worldwide: in Christianity as well as Islam, in Buddhism and Judaism, too, and even—gasp!—in Roman Catholicism. Many of us want to know the secret to living a good life, that's all. We want to know how to be happy and avoid suffering. If there's a formula that's eluding us, we'd be glad to hear it. Paul has such a formula, which many have heard and most dismiss: "It is Christ in you." Got it? That's it. Now just live it. But ay, there's the problem. Christ-in-you sounds great on paper. But how does that work at the supper table or in the work place—or in the unemployment line, as the case may be? Bringing Christ or being Christ everywhere we go isn't easy, considering how hugely incompatible many places are with what we imagine Christ-life to be. So let's back up. Christ-in-you resembles another phrase we've heard before: God-with-us. And salvation history assures us God's been with us from the beginning. Consider Abraham under the terebinth of Mamre. Someday I'm going to open a retreat center called Terebinth: It will be a happy sheltering place where God shows up when you least expect it. The most vital lesson Abraham learns is that we don't have to go looking for God in exotic spiritual locations. God is content to show up at our place, wherever that is. You got a shack in the desert? God will be there around dinnertime. Be prepared to offer a spread, because we know how God feels about supper. In a seemingly unrelated story, Jesus shows up in Bethany—also conveniently around mealtime. Like Father, like Son. And Martha pretty much does what Abraham did when she realizes the Holy Presence is here for dinner. She pulls out the stops, goes totally Martha Stewart in the kitchen. And Jesus doesn't criticize her for that. Chances are he can smell some pretty nice aromas coming from out back, and if the gospels are clear on anything, it's that Jesus likes to eat. Martha makes her mistake when she criticizes her sister for not putting on an apron. Martha's a fan of even-steven. She sees Mary's decision to plant herself at the feet of Jesus as an inferior choice. Assuming the posture of a disciple can never be a lesser choice to the service (diakonia) Martha finds most natural. How we arrive into the Holy Presence may find a different expression in each of us. As long as we all make it to the table, the Mystery of the Ages will be waiting for us. Related scripture links Hospitality code: Exod. 23:9; Lev. 19:33-34; Deut. 10:17-19; Isa. 58:7; Job 31:31-32 Luke, Jesus, and meal time: Luke 5:27-32, 33-35, 6:1-5, 7:33-34, 36-50, 9:10-17, 11:37-52, 12:37-48, 14:1-6, 7-14, 15-24, 15:23-24, 16:19-30, 17:7-10, 22:7-20, 24:29-32, 41-43 David and the temple: 2 Sam. 7:1-7 Another Martha story: John 11:1-12 Catechism links Hospitality: CCC 2571 Incarnation: CCC 464-470 Indwelling Spirit: CCC 797-798 Adapted from a previously published Exploring the word.

Authors Alice Camille

Christ-in-you god-with-us quest for ultimate answers

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