Christmas Eve 2008

Homily for Christmas Eve Vigil Mass 2008 As we processed it to church for this Mass, it was a joy to see so many dear and familiar faces, all smiling at the approach of this holy night, but chief among them I am pleased to see my old friend Solange, here in row A- she is nearly 89, and housebound, this is the first Christmas she has managed to get to Mass for many years but I dragged her here tonight. Soyez la bienvenue! Solange enchants me with her fund of stories about her childhood on a farm in the Vosges, in Lorraine, in Eastern France. I particularly enjoy her reminiscences about those village Christmases eighty or so years ago, when as midnight approached you could see from all the neighbouring farms each family set out for Mass, and come trudging along the paths at the edges of the fields, each with their own lantern swinging in the night, all those lights bobbing along, each one a family group muffled up against the cold, making their way to the village church while the bells pealed out in the frosty air. And there, in that ancient church as the Mass began, the choir- and Solange was in the village choir as a little girl- would belt out that charming old French Christmas hymn, “Minuit Chrétiens!” which we know in translation as “O Holy night”. It has a lot of theology in it, like all the old hymns do, and the second verse has a particularly striking line, I think: speaking of the birth of the Redeemer it asks “Qui lui dira notre reconnaissance?” Who will tell him our gratitude? How are we going to show our gratitude, how are we going to express to Our Lord how grateful we are that he came into our world, into our flesh, and dwelt among us? My Aunt, who brought me up, was big on manners- saying the right thing at the right time. But words, as I often found out, were never enough to satisfy her. If I had done something wrong, and said sorry, perhaps a bit too easily or a bit half-heartedly, she would say sceptically “Well, you don’t look sorry!” And so I learnt to act sorry! But that wasn’t enough either- to show I was sorry and meant it, I had to do something, to do something nice to the person I’d upset, to try to put right whatever it was I’d done wrong. And so it was with being grateful- just saying thank you was a start (I used to think as a boy that if I didn’t say thank you the ceiling would fall in, my Aunt’s eyes so often were raised to it!). Being grateful, like being sorry, had to mean more than just words, it had to involve action. And so it is with us tonight, when we consider how we are going to answer that question in the old hymn- how are we going to thank God for his precious gift, the gift of his only Son, the baby in the manger who has entered our world and taken on our humanity? Words are a start but we will want to do more than just words. An advert on TV has given me an answer- I wonder if you have seen it. It’s for the famous chemist’s that we have a branch of in the shopping centre here, and it takes place in an office where all the staff-mostly women- are taking part in a “Secret Santa”, and are secretly wrapping up the presents they have bought for the name they have drawn- a shaver for the man with the unruly beard, tweezers for the girl whose eyebrows meet in the middle, and so on. And there is one young woman who has a crush on the man whose name she has drawn, and she is busy wrapping herself up in a whole roll of Christmas paper and when the time comes for them all to go down to the tree and put their presents round it, there she is, try to hop her way down the stairs all done up as a present herself! She is the present, she is going to give herself, to some lucky man! Can that be us tonight? Can we make of our lives a present? If we stop and think about ourselves, and how we conduct our lives, and how we behave to those around us, are we a gift? Are we really much of a gift? Can we try to be a gift, a gift and a blessing, to our loved ones, to our neighbours and friends, to our work colleagues? We can ask Our Lord to help us become such a gift, so that we are better gifts, real presents to those among whom we live. At every Mass the priest takes the unconsecrated bread on the paten and says one of a variety of prayers: sometimes in Canon II he says “Let your Spirit come upon these gifts to make them holy”- those words you know apply to us too- “that they may become for us the body and blood of Our Lord Jesus Christ”. You see, we too must change with the changes that are wrought on the altar, we need to be made holy, we too need to be changed into the Body of Christ, to become more and more like Christ so that we can be his body in the world. In Canon III the priest says “May he make us an everlasting gift to you”. Our Lord is a gift to us, and we in our turn want to be a gift to him- this is the exchange of gifts that the old missal called “a wonderful commerce”, that God shares our humanity and we share his divinity, which is in the prayer that the deacon makes as he mixes the chalice to hand to the priest. Tonight we use the ancient Roman Canon, in which you will hear Fr Sean say “Bless and approve our offering, make it acceptable to you, an offering in spirit and in truth”. When we hear those words, let us place in our imagination ourselves and our lives on that paten next to the bread, so that it is of ourselves we are speaking- bless me, approve of me, make me acceptable to you, make my life an offering in spirit and in truth. Then our lives will be changed- if we allow ourselves to co-operate with the graces that come to us at this holy Mass tonight- and we will be able to be the gift to our family that we want to be, the blessing to those with whom we live and work. And so we answer that old carol’s question – who will tell him our gratitude? – we will! Dear Lord Jesus, let you spirit come upon us this Christmas night to make us holy, to make us acceptable to you, to make us an everlasting gift to you, as we bring to the manger the gift that is our very selves, an offering in spirit and in truth. Amen.