Christmas Homily: St. Joseph's Map
Dear Friends,
A blessed holiday season to all of you! Below are preliminary drafts of my the Fourth Sunday of Advent and Christmas homilies. Any suggestions you care to offer would be greatly appreciated. E-mail your comments to jms48@fuse.net.
Also, I'd greatly appreciate you going to Amazon.com and checking out my latest book from 23rd Publications, Stable Faith: Portraits of Grace from the Heartland.
Thanks for the assistance you've rendered to my preaching this past year.
Fr. Jim Schmitmeyer
Christmas Homily – St. Joseph's Map
A lot of people travel a lot of miles on Christmas
to be with their families and their loved ones.
Hopefully, no one in your family
had to travel to Ohio to year
by way of the Denver airport.
On this feast of Christmas,
I’d like to talk a bit about traveling,
but mainly, I’d like to focus on maps.
Maps help us get through life.
Sometimes we don’t study them close enough.
Sometimes we ignore them all together.
Let’s take the Christmas story as an example.
Did Joseph ask directions
on the way to Bethlehem?
Was there a AAA roadmap
in the pack of the donkey?
Would Mapquest have helped Joseph and Mary
reach the outskirts of the City of David
in time to acquire better accommodations?
When he hear the word “map,”
we generally think in terms of
getting from one place to another.
But there are other kinds of maps.
A new book hit the stores this holiday season
call the Historical Atlas of the United States.
It’s not a best-seller
but if you happen to come across this book
you discover that the maps people employ
are as much about destiny as they are about destination.
Coasts and mountains,
rivers and lakes,
peaks and plains
are described by the explorers who encountered them for the first time
and, as these explorers drew their maps,
they had no idea what lay beyond
those mountains, those lakes, those plains of endless grass.
If you’re an explorer, having a map in your hand,
keeps you pushing ahead until the map is complete.
For others, maps are geological tools
whose contours of the land tantalize the investor
with suggestions of deposits
glutted with oil and diamonds and gold.
In this Historical Atlas of the United States,
maps chart the pattern of settlement
and reveal the geographical reasons
why battles were lost and others one.
A Soviet map of the eastern seaboard
was drawn to help nuclear missiles
hit the intended spots.
A map based on a satellite photo
shows a ravaged New Orleans
after Hurricane Katrina.
So, you see, maps record more than roads and rest stops.
They’re contain hints of history, hope and hysteria
for peoples, cities and nations.
With that in mind,
how would you draw the map of your life?
Would your map be based on the mountains you’ve climbed,
or the battles you’ve won,
or the wealth you’ve sought
or the storms you’ve endured?
Would the document include notations
from the treasure map your son once scribbled
on the back of notebook?
Would it include the Tom-tom voice in the mini-van
guiding your family on the way to Gatlinburg
for a summer vacation?
Most importantly,
would your map resemble in any
the map of St. Joseph?
Not the one he stuffed into the donkey pack
before hoisting Mary up into the saddle,
rather the map he drew based on directions given by God.
The landscape on the face of this map
isn’t coastlines or mountains
or minerals or wealth
or battles or blizzards.
It’s a map based on the voice that steadies you
in the darkness of the night
in the ER room with your kid,
the hospital room with your husband
and your mother’s room at Hillebrand.
There is a voice that turns us toward the proper direction;
urges us to take the right road and the righteous road
when questions arise or confusion sets in:
Do I marry this person?
Do I take this job?
Do I pursue this degree?
Some call this an inner voice
but, in its true form, it is an outer voice,
a voice that comes from outside us.
For Joseph it was the voice of an angel he heard in his dreams,
it was voice of Mary
and the shrill cry of an infant
and the soft knocking of a hammer in a carpenter shop.
Through these vistas that echoed with love
God charted a road for Joseph to travel.
And God does the same for each one us here tonight.
So, look close to the map God has placed in your hand.
Study well the roads, the highways, the bridges.
Take the ones that Joseph walked…
the paths that lead from Bethlehem.
Homily for the Fourth Sunday of Advent
You won’t see him pictured on any Christmas cards.
You won’t find him standing among the shepherds at a nativity scene.
I’m talking about Zechariah,
a priest in Jerusalem
and the father of John the Baptist.
His wife, Elizabeth, appears in today’s gospel,
but Zechariah’s nowhere to be found.
(Which, by the way, might be a blessing in disguise
since, in all likelihood, old man Zechariah could be nursing a grudge
from that incident in the Temple three months ago
when he doubted the good word of God
and an angel struck him dumb as a result.)
Since Zechariah is absent from today’s gospel passage,
there’s no need to spend a lot time talking about him.
I thought I’d give him a brief mention
for the same reason that the Bible gives him a brief mention:
Zechariah, you see, appears at the beginning of the Christmas story
for one reason and one reason only:
to highlight the contrast between
despair and hope;
his sorry example bring to light
the difference between a life lived in doubt
and a life lived with faith;
his dragging his feet
when it comes to responding to God’s plan
illustrates the sharp distinction between
trust in God and wariness of God.
If you compare God’s Word to a burst of light,
Zechariah’s nothing more than a sunspot.
If he’s the dark sunspot,
where’s the sun?
It’s shining down on his porch
and that’s where today’s gospel opens,
on the doorstep of Zechariah’s house
where his wife, Elizabeth, is overcome with joy
and Mary sings a song praise of the Lord.
What a contrast!
An old man who can’t talk
and beautiful young woman who can’t stop sining.
Compare Zechariah’s old covenant ritual and incense in the stately Temple…
compare that to the exuberance of pregnant women,
laughing on a front porch on a summer day!
Mary, on tip-toe, reaching up to embrace Elizabeth!
The young Mary, on the tip-toe edge of God’s shiny new plan…
a plan to fix up this broken old world;
a plan to coax the fearful into the light of day,to lure the Zechariah in each one of us
out of the cellar and basements of confusion and fear
into the sunlight streaming down on that porch
where Elizabeth and Mary are celebrating
something never happened before
and would never happen again:
God, taking on the flesh of a human being.
in the womb of Mary,
a young girl from a backwater town.
What a day that was!
No wonder Elizabeth was dancing.
Her callused feet suddenly as nimble as a ballerina’s,
her arthritic toes
boot-scootin’ across the wooden planks of that wrap-around porch.
Let old man Zechariah
mutter and stumble his way to salvation…
(let’s you and me fall in line behind Mary and Elizabeth!)
How?
It’s easy!
Sing along with the kids in the car
on the way home from church,
Let your eyes tear up
as the people you love
open the gifts
you’ve given with love…
your love…
the love that God has placed in your heart
and wants you to feel deep inside your heart.
Leave the darkness behind…
And, come Christmas morning,
take a step outside.
Go out onto you porch and offer a prayer of praise to God
The God who comes to the world in human skin
The God who makes old women dance
and young women sing.
No matter the weather,
go out on the porch
feel the sun,
feel the rain,
feel the frost,
open your heart in welcome to him
who opened his arms on the cross for you.
Open you mouth and say the word that Mary said.
Yes.
Say yes!
“Yes, Lord.
Be it done unto me according to your Word.”
Let me sing with Mary.
Make my spirit dance.
This Christmas, Lord,
make my soul to tremble.
A blessed holiday season to all of you! Below are preliminary drafts of my the Fourth Sunday of Advent and Christmas homilies. Any suggestions you care to offer would be greatly appreciated. E-mail your comments to jms48@fuse.net.
Also, I'd greatly appreciate you going to Amazon.com and checking out my latest book from 23rd Publications, Stable Faith: Portraits of Grace from the Heartland.
Thanks for the assistance you've rendered to my preaching this past year.
Fr. Jim Schmitmeyer
Christmas Homily – St. Joseph's Map
A lot of people travel a lot of miles on Christmas
to be with their families and their loved ones.
Hopefully, no one in your family
had to travel to Ohio to year
by way of the Denver airport.
On this feast of Christmas,
I’d like to talk a bit about traveling,
but mainly, I’d like to focus on maps.
Maps help us get through life.
Sometimes we don’t study them close enough.
Sometimes we ignore them all together.
Let’s take the Christmas story as an example.
Did Joseph ask directions
on the way to Bethlehem?
Was there a AAA roadmap
in the pack of the donkey?
Would Mapquest have helped Joseph and Mary
reach the outskirts of the City of David
in time to acquire better accommodations?
When he hear the word “map,”
we generally think in terms of
getting from one place to another.
But there are other kinds of maps.
A new book hit the stores this holiday season
call the Historical Atlas of the United States.
It’s not a best-seller
but if you happen to come across this book
you discover that the maps people employ
are as much about destiny as they are about destination.
Coasts and mountains,
rivers and lakes,
peaks and plains
are described by the explorers who encountered them for the first time
and, as these explorers drew their maps,
they had no idea what lay beyond
those mountains, those lakes, those plains of endless grass.
If you’re an explorer, having a map in your hand,
keeps you pushing ahead until the map is complete.
For others, maps are geological tools
whose contours of the land tantalize the investor
with suggestions of deposits
glutted with oil and diamonds and gold.
In this Historical Atlas of the United States,
maps chart the pattern of settlement
and reveal the geographical reasons
why battles were lost and others one.
A Soviet map of the eastern seaboard
was drawn to help nuclear missiles
hit the intended spots.
A map based on a satellite photo
shows a ravaged New Orleans
after Hurricane Katrina.
So, you see, maps record more than roads and rest stops.
They’re contain hints of history, hope and hysteria
for peoples, cities and nations.
With that in mind,
how would you draw the map of your life?
Would your map be based on the mountains you’ve climbed,
or the battles you’ve won,
or the wealth you’ve sought
or the storms you’ve endured?
Would the document include notations
from the treasure map your son once scribbled
on the back of notebook?
Would it include the Tom-tom voice in the mini-van
guiding your family on the way to Gatlinburg
for a summer vacation?
Most importantly,
would your map resemble in any
the map of St. Joseph?
Not the one he stuffed into the donkey pack
before hoisting Mary up into the saddle,
rather the map he drew based on directions given by God.
The landscape on the face of this map
isn’t coastlines or mountains
or minerals or wealth
or battles or blizzards.
It’s a map based on the voice that steadies you
in the darkness of the night
in the ER room with your kid,
the hospital room with your husband
and your mother’s room at Hillebrand.
There is a voice that turns us toward the proper direction;
urges us to take the right road and the righteous road
when questions arise or confusion sets in:
Do I marry this person?
Do I take this job?
Do I pursue this degree?
Some call this an inner voice
but, in its true form, it is an outer voice,
a voice that comes from outside us.
For Joseph it was the voice of an angel he heard in his dreams,
it was voice of Mary
and the shrill cry of an infant
and the soft knocking of a hammer in a carpenter shop.
Through these vistas that echoed with love
God charted a road for Joseph to travel.
And God does the same for each one us here tonight.
So, look close to the map God has placed in your hand.
Study well the roads, the highways, the bridges.
Take the ones that Joseph walked…
the paths that lead from Bethlehem.
Homily for the Fourth Sunday of Advent
You won’t see him pictured on any Christmas cards.
You won’t find him standing among the shepherds at a nativity scene.
I’m talking about Zechariah,
a priest in Jerusalem
and the father of John the Baptist.
His wife, Elizabeth, appears in today’s gospel,
but Zechariah’s nowhere to be found.
(Which, by the way, might be a blessing in disguise
since, in all likelihood, old man Zechariah could be nursing a grudge
from that incident in the Temple three months ago
when he doubted the good word of God
and an angel struck him dumb as a result.)
Since Zechariah is absent from today’s gospel passage,
there’s no need to spend a lot time talking about him.
I thought I’d give him a brief mention
for the same reason that the Bible gives him a brief mention:
Zechariah, you see, appears at the beginning of the Christmas story
for one reason and one reason only:
to highlight the contrast between
despair and hope;
his sorry example bring to light
the difference between a life lived in doubt
and a life lived with faith;
his dragging his feet
when it comes to responding to God’s plan
illustrates the sharp distinction between
trust in God and wariness of God.
If you compare God’s Word to a burst of light,
Zechariah’s nothing more than a sunspot.
If he’s the dark sunspot,
where’s the sun?
It’s shining down on his porch
and that’s where today’s gospel opens,
on the doorstep of Zechariah’s house
where his wife, Elizabeth, is overcome with joy
and Mary sings a song praise of the Lord.
What a contrast!
An old man who can’t talk
and beautiful young woman who can’t stop sining.
Compare Zechariah’s old covenant ritual and incense in the stately Temple…
compare that to the exuberance of pregnant women,
laughing on a front porch on a summer day!
Mary, on tip-toe, reaching up to embrace Elizabeth!
The young Mary, on the tip-toe edge of God’s shiny new plan…
a plan to fix up this broken old world;
a plan to coax the fearful into the light of day,to lure the Zechariah in each one of us
out of the cellar and basements of confusion and fear
into the sunlight streaming down on that porch
where Elizabeth and Mary are celebrating
something never happened before
and would never happen again:
God, taking on the flesh of a human being.
in the womb of Mary,
a young girl from a backwater town.
What a day that was!
No wonder Elizabeth was dancing.
Her callused feet suddenly as nimble as a ballerina’s,
her arthritic toes
boot-scootin’ across the wooden planks of that wrap-around porch.
Let old man Zechariah
mutter and stumble his way to salvation…
(let’s you and me fall in line behind Mary and Elizabeth!)
How?
It’s easy!
Sing along with the kids in the car
on the way home from church,
Let your eyes tear up
as the people you love
open the gifts
you’ve given with love…
your love…
the love that God has placed in your heart
and wants you to feel deep inside your heart.
Leave the darkness behind…
And, come Christmas morning,
take a step outside.
Go out onto you porch and offer a prayer of praise to God
The God who comes to the world in human skin
The God who makes old women dance
and young women sing.
No matter the weather,
go out on the porch
feel the sun,
feel the rain,
feel the frost,
open your heart in welcome to him
who opened his arms on the cross for you.
Open you mouth and say the word that Mary said.
Yes.
Say yes!
“Yes, Lord.
Be it done unto me according to your Word.”
Let me sing with Mary.
Make my spirit dance.
This Christmas, Lord,
make my soul to tremble.
posted by BlueCollarPreacher at 1:36 PM
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