Transcript of Abbot Clement’s Christmas Eve Homily, December 25, 2004
The danger of being a monk is that we are too close to the celebration of the liturgy and its feast and unless we take out time to really just let the feast sink in, we will be satisfied with exterior things, which are necessary, nice to have the house cleaned up, thank you everyone. Nice to see the decorations, they perk us up, the music was beautiful, but that=s the expression of something from within. The question is where do we take out the time to really let the mystery start sinking in? This mystery especially since it is extremely rich in so many dimensions. So out of two things that monks have to do with feasts that is pause and really contemplate the mystery and personalize one aspect of it. Then secondly, to respond to that particular insight and particular truth so that actually what happens is that you grow more deeply in the mystery of God=s nearness to you. Let=s just take one point and let you carry it out in your own personal life.
All of us know what the mystery of the Transfiguration was about. Jesus appeared in glory before the apostles. What happened to the apostles? They fell flat on their faces in fear and trembling. For God to become a baby he had to perform a tremendous miracle. He had to exercise his powers to hold the glory of the divinity in. It would have been nice if he showed up as a baby, shining and bright everybody would have been flat on their face before him. Wouldn=t get anything done and everybody would be terrified.
So why did God hide his glory of his divinity in his humanity most of his life? Not totally but most of it. So that we could approach him. He wants to be touched. He wants us to be with him without fear. He wants us to have total confidence in him. So it=s enough just to start your thinking about this mystery from a different angle, just think about it. Chew on it. It=s enough to chew on for a good day or two. Then respond to it in two ways.
One, in praise. Take the psalm from the day Mass, after the first reading, it=s psalm 98. There the psalmist is saying, come on sea and all that=s in it, praise the Lord! The world and all that=s in it, praise the Lord, all you peoples! All you mountains and hills and trees, praise the Lord! That=s a response to beginning to see what a tremendous thing it is for God to draw near to us. So take out psalm 98 see how you can personalize it. Because the truth is we have experienced the salvation of the Lord. If you went to confession one time, on that particular day, at that particular time, God forgave you your sins and put you back in the state of total grace. You have experienced God=s salvation.
The second thing is to open up to the mystery that God just didn=t come. The gift of Christmas is the gift of Christ himself to us. He gave his self to us. We have to respond by giving ourselves to him. So I selected three acts of our being from Scripture that you can follow up if you want.
In 2 Corinthians 10:5; Paul tells us that we should give our mind to God. That is by tearing down all pretenses and all haughtiness that challenges the knowledge of God and make all our thoughts captive and obedient to Christ. To give your mind to the Lord means precisely that, your thoughts are thoughts that are subject to and flow from the presence of Christ and his light in us.
In Romans 12:1, Paul tells us that by the mercy of God we should offer up our body as a living sacrifice...then he goes on to say this is your spiritual worship. So to give ourselves and our body, in bodily being, is really to live a life in such a way that our very actions are an act of worship to God.
Finally, our heart. Romans 10:10, he says: AWith the heart we believe and we become upright.@ There=s a number of ways to translate this. So this is an action of our will to really follow the Lord and profit from his coming. The worst thing to do on the feast of Christmas is to follow the sadist line in the text for the feast that says there was no room for him in the inn. We must make room for the Lord in our hearts and that=s how we do it. We can be sure that of any day of the year Christmas is the time the Lord knocks the hardest on our door. The door of our heart. As we heard in the book of Revelation, chapter 3:20, famous verse, I stand at the door and knock, if anyone opens I will come and stay with him. If we do that then I think we will celebrate the whole of the Christmas mystery in a rather fitting and truly rich way.