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Now it happened that at this time Caesar Augustus issued a decree that a census should be made of the whole inhabited world. This census—the first—took place while Quirinius was governor of Syria, and everyone went to be registered, each to his own town. So Joseph set out from the town of Nazareth in Galilee for Judaea, to David’s town called Bethlehem, since he was of David’s House and line, in order to be registered together with Mary, his betrothed, who was with child. Now it happened that, while they were there, the time came for her to have her child, and she gave birth to a son, her first–born. She wrapped him in swaddling clothes and laid him in a manger because there was no room for them in the living–space. In the countryside close by there were shepherds out in the fields keeping guard over their sheep during the watches of the night. An angel of the Lord stood over them and the glory of the Lord shone round them. They were terrified, but the angel said, ‘Do not be afraid. Look, I bring you news of great joy, a joy to be shared by the whole people. Today in the town of David a Saviour has been born to you; he is Christ the Lord. And here is a sign for you: you will find a baby wrapped in swaddling clothes and lying in a manger.’ And all at once with the angel there was a great throng of the hosts of heaven, praising God with the words:

    Glory to God in the highest heaven,
    and on earth peace for those he favours.

    Now it happened that when the angels had gone from them into heaven, the shepherds said to one another, ‘Let us go to Bethlehem and see this event which the Lord has made known to us.’ So they hurried away and found Mary and Joseph, and the baby lying in the manger. When they saw the child they repeated what they had been told about him, and everyone who heard it was astonished at what the shepherds said to them. As for Mary, she treasured all these things and pondered them in her heart. And the shepherds went back glorifying and praising God for all they had heard and seen, just as they had been told.

John 1: 1-18

In the beginning was the Word:
the Word was with God
and the Word was God.
He was with God in the beginning.
Through him all things came into being,
not one thing came into being
   except through him.
What has come into being in him was life,
life that was the light of men;
and light shines in darkness,
and darkness could not overpower it.

A man came, sent by God.
His name was John.
He came as a witness,
to bear witness to the light,
so that everyone might believe
   through him.
He was not the light,
he was to bear witness to the light.

The Word was the real light
that gives light to everyone;
he was coming into the world.
He was in the world
that had come into being through him,
and the world did not recognise him.
He came to his own
and his own people did not accept him.

But to those who did accept him
he gave power to become children of God,
to those who believed in his name
who were born not from human stock
or human desire
or human will
but from God himself.
The Word became flesh,
he lived among us,
and we saw his glory,
the glory that he has from the Father
   as only Son of the Father,
full of grace and truth.

John witnesses to him. He proclaims:
‘This is the one of whom I said:
He who comes after me
has passed ahead of me
because he existed before me.’

Indeed, from his fullness
    we have, all of us, received—
one gift replacing another,
for the Law was given through Moses,
grace and truth have come
   through Jesus Christ.
No one has ever seen God;
it is the only Son,
   who is close to the Father’s heart,
who has made him known.

Christmas
December 25, 2005

We just heard the story of Jesus’ birth. We’ve heard it over and over, yet our hearts rejoice to hear it again. Our God came to us, not in majesty and glory, blinding us with his brilliance and deafening us with the sound of his voice. Our God came to us in humility and poverty and simplicity. He showed us, by sharing in our life, that there is goodness in the world he created, goodness in the life he gave us, goodness in all of us and that we are worth saving, even worth dying for. Words alone cannot express the wonders we celebrate today. And so we express our words in song. No celebration throughout the year has so many songs dedicated to it. It is a time for singing. But to celebrate today’s feast, even singing is inadequate. We put up statues picturing Jesus’ birth. They help us understand more fully God’s humble coming to us. We thank St. Francis for that. He tried to think of a special way to celebrate God’s love, a way that even the youngest child could understand. So, one day he asked one of his friends to prepare a cave with a manger filled with straw and animals in the cave. There were no statues there, not even a statue of baby Jesus. It was just a stable with live animals, an ox, a donkey and sheep, similar to the stable of Bethlehem where Jesus was born. He placed an altar over the manger, so people would make the connection in their minds that just as Jesus came to us as a human, he comes to us today as our food and our drink. St. Francis was a deacon. When Mass was celebrated at midnight that year, he read the gospel and preached of God’s love and Jesus’ birth. Some people even saw the baby Jesus lying in the crib and they saw Francis pick up the baby and hold it. Francis, who also gave us the stations of the cross, has helped to bring Christmas alive for all of us through the Christmas crib.

I always look for a story to help us see in a new way what Christmas is all about. This is a story by a writer named Barbara Baumgardner. Barbara’s husband died and her first Christmas without him was not joyful. It was very painful for her. During the following year her pain in losing her husband began to heal and the second Christmas after he died, she began to get excited that Christmas was coming and she decided to celebrate it with her two daughters. They both lived out of town but she invited them to her home for a big Christmas dinner. She had decorated everything in sight, baked lots of goodies and had Christmas music playing on the CD. Her house looked, smelled and sounded like Christmas. Three days before Christmas her first daughter called and had frozen water pipes at home and couldn’t come. She had to take care of the mess the frozen pipes caused. Within twenty minutes Barbara’s second daughter, who lived on a farm, called and said in her area the wind chill factor was 45 below zero and they had farm animals which she had to care for, so she couldn’t come. Barbara would have gone to visit her daughter in a minute, but Barbara was stuck at home. She had already invited a few neighbors to join her family on Christmas. Her brother-in-law, who was recently widowed, along with his 84 year old mother was coming, and a young single man from church, and the widow next door who had just gotten out of the hospital, and she had promised to bring a plate of food to the old man across the street. She didn’t invite him because he was always so filthy and smelled like stale cigars. She was going to let everyone join her family dinner on Christmas and now there was no family. She suddenly felt very much alone and was feeling very sorry for herself. She complained to God that he was not fair. Her family wasn’t coming and she was stuck having to entertain all those other people. She kept asking God why he let her invite all those other people when he knew her family wouldn’t be able to be with her on Christmas. In the silence of her misery she began to hear God answer her complaints. God said, “I know it’s Christmas, Barbara; it’s my birthday. What did you get me?” “What, God, what do you mean?” she asked. “Whose birthday is it?” he insisted. “What did you get me?” Well, Barbara started thinking “What can I get you, Lord? Maybe I can be nicer to my neighbor, maybe instead of just taking food to that smelly old man across the street, I can invite him and his dog to come and have dinner with us. It would blow his mind! Maybe I can invite someone from the homeless shelter and the checker at the grocery store who will probably be alone on Christmas.” Before long she said her party was full, but not as full as her heart. She said she did not remember having so much fun on Christmas as the day she gave her Christmas to Jesus as a birthday gift.

Many people today want to take Christ out of Christmas and just celebrate for some other reason. That’s their loss. The heart of our celebration is God’s love shown to us in Jesus Christ. We are grateful to the gospel writers for telling us about that blessed event. We are grateful to St. Francis for helping to make it more concrete for us through the crib. We are grateful for the composers of music who have helped us put our joy into song. We are grateful to all of you who have come to make this a special celebration today. Amen.

Isaiah 25: 6-10a

On this mountain, for all peoples,
Yahweh Sabaoth is preparing
a banquet of rich food,
    a banquet of fine wines,
of succulent food, of well–strained wines.
On this mountain, he has destroyed
the veil which used to veil all peoples,
the pall enveloping all nations;
he has destroyed death for ever.
Lord Yahweh has wiped away the tears
    from every cheek;
he has taken his people’s shame away
    everywhere on earth,
for Yahweh has spoken.

And on that day, it will be said,
‘Look, this is our God,
in him we put our hope
    that he should save us,
this is Yahweh, we put our hope in him.
Let us exult and rejoice
    since he has saved us.’
For Yahweh’s hand will rest
    on this mountain,



Matthew 22: 1-14

Jesus began to speak to them in parables once again, ‘The kingdom of Heaven may be compared to a king who gave a feast for his son’s wedding. He sent his servants to call those who had been invited, but they would not come. Next he sent some more servants with the words, "Tell those who have been invited: Look, my banquet is all prepared, my oxen and fattened cattle have been slaughtered, everything is ready. Come to the wedding." But they were not interested: one went off to his farm, another to his business, and the rest seized his servants, maltreated them and killed them. The king was furious. He despatched his troops, destroyed those murderers and burnt their town. Then he said to his servants, "The wedding is ready; but as those who were invited proved to be unworthy, go to the main crossroads and invite everyone you can find to come to the wedding." So these servants went out onto the roads and collected together everyone they could find, bad and good alike; and the wedding hall was filled with guests. When the king came in to look at the guests he noticed one man who was not wearing a wedding garment, and said to him, "How did you get in here, my friend, without a wedding garment?" And the man was silent. Then the king said to the attendants, "Bind him hand and foot and throw him into the darkness outside, where there will be weeping and grinding of teeth." For many are invited but not all are chosen.’



28th Sunday Ordinary Time
October 9, 2005

INTRODUCTION: (Isaiah 25, 6-10a; Matthew 22, 1-14) If we were raised in the old school we’re used to associating God’s will with something we don’t like. We just grit our teeth and say: “It’s God's will. We just have to accept it!” Well God doesn’t always make life easy for us, but today’s first reading gives us a fuller picture of what it is we’re praying for when we say “thy will be done.” God's will is for our complete and eternal happiness.

In our second reading St. Paul is making reference to a donation he had just received from the Philippians to help support him and his ministry. He is writing to thank them and in his comments he describes some of the ups and downs of being an apostle.

HOMILY: In today’s gospel, Jesus compares heaven to the wedding celebration of a prince. It would have been the social event of a lifetime. In that culture, when someone celebrated any wedding, the celebration went on for a few days, not just a few hours like ours do. But for a prince, it would have been lavish beyond belief.

In the story the king sent out servants to inform all of the guests, who had been previously invited, that everything was ready. It’s the servants I want to talk about today. I am one of those servants. Today is vocation awareness Sunday. All parishes have been asked to promote vocations and one of the ways I thought I could promote them is to say something personal about my own vocation.

I never had an angel or a vision to tell me to be a priest. It’s just an idea that grew in me from the time I made my first Communion at St. Patrick’s. But as I grew, I discovered girls and I decided being a priest was something I didn’t want to do. But the idea of being a priest wouldn’t go away. I reasoned if this really was something God wanted me to do, I better give it a fair try. I knew deep down I would find my greatest happiness only if I did what God wanted me to do. So I went to the seminary intending to stay only one year and to see how it went. I managed to survive for five years that way, always full of doubts about whether that’s what God wanted me to do with my life. After five years of that, one evening while I was praying in chapel, all of a sudden, all my questions and doubts disappeared. It was a real gift to me that that happened because in the early years when I was a priest, a lot of priests I admired and respected were quitting, but that experience in the chapel in the seminary helped me know that God wanted me to be where I was.

In the gospel the servants were treated badly. I’ve never been treated badly, physically, but I’ve taken some verbal beatings and when I invite people to respond more to God’s invitation, I been ignored many a time. But the good far outweighs the challenges. The happiest part of being a priest is to know that somehow some people’s lives are better because I have influenced them for the better. I can truthfully say I have enjoyed almost all of the things I do as a priest (except trying to raise money). The only drawback is that sometimes all of these enjoyable things I do, counseling, praying with people, teaching, visiting the sick, saying Mass, etc. get to be too many enjoyable things and then it can become burdensome. We can have too much of a good thing. But that’s part of anybody’s life, I’m sure, so I can’t complain. As a priest, the opportunities to pray and to grow in knowing and loving God are numerous and most rewarding. One thing that touches me most deeply is confession. It is very humbling and inspiring to me when I hear someone’s confession, especially someone who has been away from Church for a while or who is inwardly troubled and I can bring them peace. It is a privilege and a joy like no other.

Everywhere I’ve been, my ministry has been different, rewarding and challenging. Northside is a lot different than Loveland is for example. But I want to say that my last fourteen years here (and they’re not over yet) have been exceptionally rewarding. I love being here, I love the people here. I just wish we had a few more people coming to Mass. In being a priest one gives up family, but I have inherited a larger family and wonderful friends as a priest.

We do not have a lot of young people here unfortunately, so I’m probably not going to get any one to join the seminary or religious life from what I say today. But, a lot of you are grandparents. If your grandchild mentions giving themselves to God in the religious life, support them. It’s a good life, as good as any life can be. I recommend it.