Waiting in hope

Fr Richard Healey delivers a sermon on the feast day of the Holy Family. He explores the origins and importance of the feast, delving into the concept of family and drawing parallels with the faith and patience exemplified in the biblical readings from Genesis and the Gospel of Luke. The sermon serves as a reflection on the virtues of the Holy Family and their relevance to contemporary family life.

(00:00:00) – Sometimes there are things in our lives that we just kind of take for granted and presume have just always been the same. But as in so many things in our world. There is so much that is in flux, so much that is in constant change. And even this feast day, you know, you think, yeah, the Holy Family that that must be like one of these ancient feast days that is just always been celebrated by the church. But no, that’s not the case. There were certain places that had celebrated it, but it was only offered by Pope Leo the 13th back at the end of the 19th century, as a feast that was optional, that different churches could celebrate. And it was only in 1921, with Pope Benedict the 15th, that it was finally instituted as a feast day that was celebrated by the whole church. Three weeks after the Feast of epiphany. Because there used to be a season of epiphany in the Old Calendar. Then it moved to the Sunday after epiphany, and it kind of then wandered around the liturgical year until it was finally fixed by Pope Paul the Sixth in the year 1969, when the the liturgical calendar was kind of reorganised and given to us much the way that we have it now.

(00:01:27) – So it’s kind of an interesting thing that this feast kind of becomes an example of family for us. You know, that there isn’t just this set definition of what a family is at that time, at the end of the 19th century, family certainly wouldn’t have just been the nuclear family that we kind of know it now. It would have included a much broader sense of who was included as part of that family. And so grandparents and uncles and aunts and cousins were probably all considered to be part of the family or indeed anybody that happened to be living in your house. And households were certainly much more diverse than they are today. You know, the ideal and the dream of owning your own house, you know, as a dream like as that often is, particularly for young people today. At that time, it was still the case that it wasn’t something that was so fixed and certain. And now with all of the changes to our understanding around sexual orientation and gender identity and all of those different kind of realities of impacting upon the way that we experience and celebrate family as well.

(00:02:41) – So that sense of flux, that sense of movement, that ability just to try and make sense of where do we find God in the midst of, of all of this? How do we encounter him? How are we to be loved by God as part of our families, and some of us come from really deeply loving families, places of safety, places of protection, places where human life is able to flourish and find itself in all its fulfilment. But many others experience all kinds of dysfunction, all kinds of violence, all kinds of hatred, all kinds of just attitudes of life that are not about love and not about mercy, not about forgiveness, not about that full human flourishing. And so it can indeed be a real challenge to find our source, to find our identity as to how we live within our family. Because family is meant to be this building block of our society, meant to be this place where we experience God. And the church, especially more recently, has certainly taught that the family is the primary place where you’re able to encounter the sacred.

(00:04:00) – The domestic church is the place where you first are meant to be brought into union with the Lord. So the family isn’t alien to that experience. You know, it’s not primarily in a church that you’re meant to experience God, but around the dining room table and wherever you gather to celebrate life together, that’s where we’re meant to find our life and our goodness. And I think the three examples that are given to us, you know, first and second readings today, we’re reflecting on this holy couple of Abram as he’s first introduced in Genesis 15. And then we bounce through a few chapters later into Genesis 21, where he’s been renamed now to be the father of a multitude. And Abraham and then his wife Sarah. Sarah, who is there also, you know, kind of in this, this context of just waiting. But they’re forced to wait. Abraham was invited in the beginning of Genesis 12 to go, to leave your family, to leave your household, to leave your land, to a place where I will show you any kind of sits about and does that.

(00:05:18) – He takes a while. He takes his time to go first to Iran, and then eventually to make his way to the promised Land. But Abraham, is this this sign, an example of us, of of someone who, despite all of the obstacles along the way, he continues to trust. He continues to put his faith somehow in the Lord, despite all kinds of bumps along the way. And what we read today, I think is, is really significant because he’s invited to go outside and to look up at the sky, and we kind of just presume at this point that it’s so dark that he’s looking up at the night sky. But in fact, a few verses later, we read that at this time the sun was setting. So this is not at night time that he’s invited to go outside and to look up into the sky and to count the stars, if you can. It’s in the middle of the day, it’s in bright sunlight. And so in the middle of the day, in bright sunlight.

(00:06:26) – How many stars can you see? Just the one. The soul, the sun, the. Our own star itself. It’s the only sun that we can see now are the other stars up there. They don’t go away during the middle of the day. It’s just that the sun is so bright that we’re not able to see them. And you know, the the dark, the clouds that we’ve had over the last few days have certainly not made stargazing any easier, although it has been nice to have come down here away from, you know, the McArthur lights where you don’t see a damn thing when you look up into the night sky, and to at least see some stars when we’re down here. But it’s sometimes that we can be so obscured, like not by the darkness, not by what is overwhelming us. But just the sun can be so bright that it can overwhelm us and prevent us from seeing beyond that. Sometimes we are invited to trust. Sometimes when we look we can’t see anything. There’s nothing that is obvious to our eyes to encounter.

(00:07:32) – And yet in that moment, in that place, we’re still invited to trust. We’re still invited to consider our relationship with God. And that’s what hope is, is all about. It is not just based on circumstance, but based on our relationship with the living God, with a God who’s loving us and calling us into life. And we get something similar in our gospel today. These two figures of Simeon and then Anna, to people who have just been faithfully going about their lives, not doing anything extraordinary, there’s nothing that kind of marks them as different or separate. There’s nothing that we would have even remembered their names or known their names, except that they happened to be there, that just happened to be going about their ordinary events, ordinary lives. And that included spending time in the temple, spending time in prayer. And these two people had both been waiting, both been longing, both hoping that the Messiah would come. And sometimes that waiting can be excruciating, you know, not knowing, not seeing any hints, not seeing any signs that God is actually going to come through on his side of the promise.

(00:08:51) – Sometimes it can be so frustrating just being asked to wait just a little bit longer. Just just wait. Just continue to stay. Just continue to stay in that moment. Sometimes we can feel so frustrated and so annoyed that the Lord is just inviting us just a little bit longer. Just keep on waiting. But both Simeon and Anna point to for us, the reality that God will come through; God will provide that answer. That no matter how dysfunctional our family might feel, no matter how far we might feel from our God, or how much our sin might overwhelm us, God is always faithful. He’s always there, sometimes hidden by the brightness of the sun. Sometimes his love can feel so overwhelming. But wherever we are, whatever we’re doing, the Lord is inviting us into that same experience of holiness, that same encounter with the living God, to let his love be so great and so strong that he’s inviting us, despite how long we have to wait into trust and continue to wait upon the Lord, and to allow God to call us into that place of encountering his love, to be a place to be the people that he’s invited us to be, to be the family, the Holy Family where he can dwell, where he can rejoice, to celebrate life with us, where he can indeed make us to be that domestic church where God is able to be encountered and loved.

(00:10:21) – Let’s indeed pray that our family, our community, might become a little bit more a place where God can draw, a place where he delights to find his life and his freedom among us. A place where, despite the waiting, we continue to faithfully remain open to his love, to his purpose, and to his plan for our lives.