Homily – Christmas Eve – 2025

I remember quite vividly the foyer of our house in Wausau, a place now 50 years in the past. And I could tell you with some detail where the tree would be and what we would do on Christmas Eve. First supper, and then the fastest post meal cleanup of the year followed by the opening of presents. On days like today those kinds of memories come flooding back, a combination of joy and melancholy flavored with the realization of the too quickly passing years.

There are some disadvantages about growing older. You realize there’s more behind than ahead and the unrecoverable parts of your past can come roaring back, things you wish you could’ve or should’ve been or done or said. High school classmates are increasingly found in the obituaries and the face in the mirror starts looking like those old people you knew when you were a kid.

And the body starts acting up in ways that are simultaneously novel, disappointing, and sometimes just plain funny. I remember doing things back then that would probably give me a heart attack now and every so often I discover the existence of new parts and places in this mortal coil only when they start to act up and I have to laugh because its better than crying.

There are some significant advantages, though, that should also be mentioned.

You learn stuff along the way. The combination of growing intelligence and hard experience over the years really does provide a wisdom and time, if properly applied, can grind the hard edges from your life and personality. Age really can make a difference both in wine and in people if you let it do its work and there’s reason older folks often forsake the intensity of earlier days for a kind of patience and resolve with the world that only time seems able to create. Things new and frightening to youth seem different from the perspective of passing years and the experiences of making it through so many moments when the world tried its best to make you angry, frustrated, or frightened.

And, even as I still struggle, how I wish I had the faith I have now when I was just a kid!

The best part of being older is that, if you take an honest look at it, you can as a person of Christian faith see and recall all the various times of your life when our Lord has truly been Imanuel, God with us. Beyond any regrets from the past, you can also see how God has sustained, nurtured, protected, and cared for you. It’s not that you didn’t have nicks or dings or struggles or sins but rather that God in His mercy never let you out of His sight and helped you along even when you weren’t necessarily interested in Him.

And from my position as a person of 65 Christmases and counting I want to remind you of a great truth that comes to us every year this season rolls around.

God saw the world and God everyone in it, including us, including me, from before time with a love that defies description and a grace beyond imagination. Every flaw in us and me and in the world was eternally open to Him. No secrets were hidden. Every darkness was exposed to light before God said “Let there be light…” at the dawn of existence. All the troubles of the present world were known to the One who sees all eternity in a single glance.

And when the time was right God chose not to exact punishment or inflict condemnation for all of it but rather to come to our rescue. All of our regrets and wishes and mistakes and struggles were given the option of solace. Every wrong inflicted on us us and everywhere we trespassed on others was not for His revenge but rather for forgiveness if we so chose to give and receive it. All of our untold secrets and bitter tears in the night, the places where we are most painful to the touch, can be soothed.

For unto us a child is born, unto us a son is given: and the government shall be upon his shoulder: and his name shall be called Wonderful, Counselor, The mighty God, The everlasting Father, The Prince of Peace. Of the increase of his government and peace there shall be no end, upon the throne of David, and upon his kingdom, to order it, and to establish it with judgment and with justice from henceforth even forever. The zeal of the Lord of hosts will perform this.
And because of this we are not alone. We do not have to be given over to fear or regret or the pain of the world even if it reaches out to touch us or calls us to remembrance of those things that were but have been washed away in the sea of His grace. God came to us so long ago but, in truth, He has in one way or another never left. And while we’re not immune from the night of this world those who can see will realize there is a Light that shines as well, a Light the night can never overpower, a Light that lives in everyone who receives it.

Looking back I can see moments when the swirl of life and my own sinfulness and stupidity caught me up in the pain of everything around me. Sometimes I guess I just had to learn the hard way. Still, there are also many more places where, in times of reflection, I’ve seen that the God who came into the world on this holy night was also with me as well, preserving, helping, healing, and granting me grace even when I was convinced I was unworthy of it or actively ran away from it. If I can remember Christmas Eve’s decades ago I can even more recall from this place in my life those moments when the Child of Bethlehem came not just to the rescue of the world but mine as well. Every Priest has scars.

Yet, this is the gift I would like to leave with you today, especially those who’ve not traveled through time as far as I have. God is with us, always has been, and from those days long ago in Judea nothing has changed. The world can fling mighty arrows our way and even we ourselves can be caught up in self-harm but mercy and healing and grace have touched this sometimes sad and broken world and its ours for the taking, the greatest gift of all, eternal, unbreakable, in history but beyond its impact, ours now and also stored away where, as our Lord says, moth and rust have no power and no thief can steal it. Never forget this because the world is rough sometimes but not so rough that its escaped the grasp of the King who came to us as a baby and will one day return as the Lord of history.

A child, the Son of God, has been born. Receive Him. Believe Him. Love Him. Rest in Him. Let His forgiveness cleanse the past. Let His mercy flow from you to the world. And let love drive away every anxious moment, soothe every fear, forgive every wrong, and lead you safely Home.

Back in the last century when I was a child it would be about this time of year that something would arrive in our mail delivered to us by an exhausted letter carrier. It was a catalog, actual several of them, just in time for Christmas.

Now to you who are not from that century a catalog is really just a thing made out of paper, a book if you will, where, instead of scrolling, you turned the pages and there were pictures and prices of things you could buy. If you wanted something you’d send a check to an address after filling out a form or, perhaps, you’d travel downtown to the actual store and pick it up for yourself. It was a very analog and organic approach to sales and way ahead of its time because it could also be recycled. How cool was that!

And the Christmas catalogs back then were skillfully created to ensure that children would nag their parents day and night for whatever caught their eye in anticipation of the big day. You see the boring stuff like draperies and shoes and housewares were printed in a kind of monotone, not unlike early Windows operating systems, but the potential Christmas presents were printed, at least in my era of the last century, in bright, glossy color that jumped out at our eager little eyes.

Even back then, in the days of only three TV networks, we were already being educated in how to be good members of the consumer society, acquirers of stuff, desirous of whatever was next. And people my age are the ones who raised most of you listening to me right now with what we’d been groomed with ourselves. In our defense we, too, were children of our time and mostly unconscious of the cultural waters in which we swam.

That being said, the catalog people didn’t, however, tell us about the very large downside, the reality that our treasures would break or soon lose our interest or that there would be a later version of our gifts to deliberately render our current ones obsolete. As we grew older they also didn’t tell us that the stuff we thought we wanted to own would start to own us, that bigger, better, faster, and more would require maintenance, upkeep, and a constant chase to stay ahead in the game. They left us blissfully unaware that more stuff means more work and we were definitely never told that everything we thought was ours would one day be someone else’s via the thrift store or eternally slip from our grasp when, one day, our kids would throw it away after our funeral.

They also didn’t tell us that to keep, acquire, and maintain we’d find ourselves making personal compromises. At first they’d be little things but as time wore on the quest for more and the maintenance that would follow would strongly tempt us to cut corners with our family, our politics, our lives, our morals, our faith, and, indeed, our souls.

Threatened with the loss of the things of this world, the pressure to sacrifice our moral core values and the things of eternity can grow, like the rich man in our Gospel, in its allure and what were, at first, little nips around the edges over time can easily turn into large gashes across our souls. Like fish caught up in the moment our vision can easily be blinded to the hook within the easy meal. The fear of losing what we spent so much time and effort to gain and the compromises we found ourselves making to allay that fear are why the Scripture warns us that the love of money is the root of evil but the more we acquire the greater the temptation to ignore the alarm.

Still, there is no evil, per se, in having things. There is, however, great evil afoot if we find ourselves paying for them with our souls. Our Lord knows we have physical and practical needs but if getting them causes us to fall away from being rich in the things of God then we need to ask some hard questions of ourselves. If the compromises we make to keep the temporal start robbing us of the eternal then perhaps this time of fasting is also our wake up call.

Our Orthodox history is full of people who gladly exchanged the whole world, all the things they’d acquired so they could keep their soul. Out stories don’t necessarily have to be exactly like theirs, although they might, but surely the watchfulness they had, the larger vision, the eternal perspective should be ours as well.

On His arrival among us our Lord changed everything and those who accept His story as theirs will see the whole world in a different way. To the faithful Christian what matters no longer comes through catalogs and marketing and the wisdom of this world but rather of that which is, while already present among us, also to come. The eyes that see eternity also see the present in a different way and filter even the good things of this world through God’s lens. And those who choose to keep their soul, especially in a world where the temptation to sell it cheap is pervasive, will find the riches of heaven, the life to come even in the present and become children not just of the times but eternity.

Whatever else happens in this world, my dear Orthodox friends, never sell your soul cheap. Never, ever, ever.

Homily November 16, 2025

“Do not confuse man -this image of God – with the evil which is in him, because evil is only his accidental misfortune, a sickness, a devil’s dream; but man’s essence – the image of God – is always there”

St. John of Kronstadt

How scandalous Jesus must have appeared in HIs life among us. His followers were largely uneducated. His dinner companions often were tax collectors, prostitutes, and the great unwashed. Wherever He traveled the sick and demonized followed. He touched the untouchables and spoke with great grace to those who had only heard harsh words from their Rabbi 

Our Lord was holy, pure, sinless and, as one of the Trinity, inspired the very laws which many of the people He spent time with had broken. He had every right to judge and yet refrained. He had the ability to point out every flaw hidden deep within the hearts of those who listened to His words but most often chose mercy. The only prayer He had even for those who laughed at His torture on the cross was for their forgiveness. 

Now it wasn’t a matter of low standards or compromise. Indeed our Lord said that the Law must be fulfilled. It also wasn’t about what we call “love” in our times, a bland acceptance of everything, even the dangerous and cruel, rooted in wanting to just get along. There was something more. 

Our Lord Jesus saw that we humans were broken, entrapped, and made mortally ill by our sins. He knew that our decisions often made us playthings of the demonic. He knew our capacity to reason ourselves out of  our situation was compromised. We all had become confused. We were sheep without a shepherd. We had become, as St. John of Kronstadt says, “A devil’s dream.”

And, out of love beyond our imagination and mercy beyond comprehension He came to us in all our various kinds of disfigurement so that we would again be made well, holy, and true. The healthy, or at least those under the delusion of assuming their perfection, never understood this then or now. So the Great Physician came to those who would understand, the sinners of His time, indeed of all time, and chose to be their friend, their companion, and most of all their Savior. And, in doing this He left an example for us all.

One of the great paradoxes of Orthodoxy is that we run hard to get away from the sins which, as the Apostle Paul says “So easily beset us…” Our standards are high and challenging and the goal is to increasingly be nothing less than as like our Lord as possible. Yet that same standard also demands that we see those around us struggling with sin not as lepers to be avoided but as co-strugglers with us caught up in a darkness that we ourselves could easily succumb to if we let our guard down and people who need not a judge but a physician, indeed the Great Physician of our souls.

The temptation is strong, especially in these times, to want to hide ourselves away. A godly life can be very difficult to maintain in a world where things that can do great damage to our souls are not only accepted but celebrated. Yet we dare not if for no other reason than our Lord’s command to “Go ye into all the world…” 

St. John of Kronstadt, quoted at the beginning of this homily, was a man of great personal piety and yet that didn’t prevent him from caring for the hardest cases not with judgement or distance but with compassion and an understanding that each person, no matter what sin encumbered them, bore the image of God and that godly love compelled him to embrace that image even if they had no understanding of it themselves. 

We who’ve been given grace must do the same, never shunning any person regardless of their sins but rather resolving to become channels of God’s grace. To us no sinner is repulsive beyond salvation and any and all who need to repent, like ourselves, are welcome to find among us the salvation we all so desperately need. Those who judge and condemn will accuse themselves by their own standards. Those who graciously hold the high calling of God as a banner and in true Christian love desire to share what God has generously given will both save themselves and become a bridge so those battered by the world can cross to find rest and home with the One whose yoke, unlike this world’s, is easy and whose burden is light.

As Orthodox we work hard to put distance between us and everything sinful and broken within but we don’t put distance between ourselves and the people we encounter everyday who are themselves caught up in the accidental misfortunes and the devil’s dreams. To them we offer mercy, words of life and healing, and with great patience and love share the cup of living water that we’ve been given.

In some ways this is as scandalous today as it was when Jesus walked among us. We live in a world where we’re quick to judge others, forgetting the beam in our own eye while hunting for the specks in others. Yet if the world is to be saved, if we are to be saved, we must both strive for Christ’s holiness and sit, like Him, with the sinners to the end that we and they and all of us may be saved.