Room for us

Fr Richard Healey preaches about the significance of Christmas and the birth of Jesus, focusing on the humble circumstances of Jesus’ birth. He emphasises that Jesus, despite his poverty, was open to all, even sinners and outsiders. The speaker uses a humorous cartoon to symbolise the challenges Jesus faced. He underscores the message that one does not need to be perfect or have everything figured out to be accepted by God. The speaker concludes by stating that Jesus’ birth in poverty shows that there is room for him in everyone’s lives and experiences.

RH (00:00:00) – [Sung] In the beginning was the word.
And the word was with God.
And the word was God.
And the word became flesh.
And the word became flesh.
And dwelt among us. [/Sung]

That’s the opening line of the prologue to the Gospel of John. It’ll be the reading tomorrow morning, and John is trying to express in that the mystery of what happens on this day, the day when we gather around a crib, the day when we remember. The poverty of that opening scene. The poverty of the Christ child. The family who were organised enough when prepared. Whatever it was that gathered them in Bethlehem on that day, and the best that they had to offer was the manger, the feeding trough for the animals. And yet Jesus didn’t seem to be worried by that. And we see it across the whole scope of his life, that Jesus is not afraid of people who are outsiders, not afraid of people who were excluded, people who didn’t fit in, people who hadn’t done the right thing.

RH (00:02:01) – People who weren’t in the in-crowd, in the Jewish temple and the community. People who had made mistakes. People who were sinners. I saw a cartoon this week that, uh, it’s a little bit impolite, but, uh, you know that Jesus was born surrounded by bullshit. Because he knew that the rest of his life that that was what he was going to experience as well. And I love that. And I love the fact that this is truth about that, that we don’t have to be perfect. We don’t have to get it all right in order to be acceptable to God that the Lord chose to be food for us, to be wrapped, prepared, helpless. He could have come as an adult. Of course, he could have done any other kind of miracle that he wanted to do, but he chose to go through everything that we experience. He chose to be part of our lives and part of all of the ordinary things that are part of, of our situation and our experiences.

RH (00:03:22) – He didn’t want any of that to be alien or separated from his experience. The author of the letter to the Hebrews says that Jesus experienced every single thing that we experienced, with the only one exception that he didn’t choose to deny God. He didn’t fail in his love for God, so he didn’t sin. But everything else: hunger, frustration, sleeplessness. He experienced grief. He experienced what it was to lose a friend. He went through every kind of experience, every kind of emotion, so that when we go through the same. We know that we’re not alien from God. That none of those things separate us or make us less than what we’ve been called to be. And if he chose to be born among us in such poverty, that even when we know from ourselves and from our own experiences, that within ourselves there is this BS, there is this this incompatibility, there is this stuff that is not yet finished, that what we’re always is work in progress, that if he’s able to be born there, if he’s able to be born in poverty, if he’s able to be born surrounded by droppings, then perhaps there’s room in my life.

RH (00:05:01) – Room in my experience, room in everything that I’ve been through. To also make room for him. To also open myself to the possibility of God loving me in that place. But it’s not when I get my stuff together. It’s not when I’ve worked through all of my issues and I’ve paid all my therapist bills. It’s not when I’ve done all of the work that is necessary in order to be worthy of his love. We’ll hear in the letter of Paul to Titus. It’s the reading of the dawn mass tomorrow. It’s just this, this great line. That Paul is struggling with that himself, but he gets the point of that. That it was while we were still sinners, while we were still helpless, while we were still alienated and separated from God. That he chose to save us not because of anything that we had done, not because we had earned it, not because we had become the most beautiful, the most successful, the most famous, the richest. None of those things matter. It’s just whether we have the capacity for love, whether we have through our sufferings, through our struggles, through our questioning, through our doubts, through all of those things, we’ve somehow made ourselves capable of love, capable of God.

RH (00:06:39) – That’s the criteria. That’s the place where we’re able to discover the presence of God. So today, as we gather around the manger, as we make room for the Lord, surrounded by our own BS, let’s allow the Lord to meet us there, to love us there, to heal us there, and above all, to save us and to call us back into life in that place.

And may the God who chooses to dwell among us, the God who is available to love us, to heal us, to save us. Be with you, to bless you, to enrich you and keep you safe this day. The father, the son, and the Holy Spirit. Amen. Let’s go in peace to celebrate in the love of our God.