Deacons frequently get a chance to preach on the feast of the Holy Family, and I think that is for a couple of reasons. First, it happens on a relatively quiet Sunday in between some major holidays, so if a pastor is like the manager of a baseball team, it seems like a good day to run your fourth or fifth starting pitcher out to the mound and the team won’t take too much of a hit. More seriously, since most deacons are married, it’s thought that we might know something about families, or even holy families. What people should realize, is that while that’s logical, really until there are…
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In our day, and maybe, they say, since the good old days of Victorian England, the Christmas season has been all about being home. You know the imagery: with the fire ablaze in the living room, children gathered around, and everybody home for the holidays, right where they should be. But it’s striking sometimes to look at how different that image of family is from the stories we’ve heard over the past five weeks of Advent and Christmas about Jesus’s family, his parents, his cousin John the Baptist, all the people in Luke’s wonderful narrative of Christ’s birth and childhood. One of those differences that we can pay some attention…
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This feast of the Holy Family that we celebrate today is here, they tell us, so that we can consider how our lives as families can be inspired by the Holy Family. As we all know, this is an intimidating prospect. I was struck on Christmas Eve, when we were singing that old favorite, “Away in a Manger,” by the line in one verse referring to the baby Jesus that says “no crying he makes.” Now this is a pretty high standard for babies, at least in this parish, perhaps as much of a miracle as anything else that happens in the Christmas story, and sometimes we’re tempted to apply…