Dear Brothers and Sisters in Christ,
With fear and joy mixed together, we approach again the birth of our
Lord Jesus Christ at the great feast of Christmas. We fear because we
know we are not the saints God is calling us to be. We have joy
because we have already experienced God’s infinite, sweet mercy. Fear
and joy are mixed because creation is all of one piece, and all “very
good.”
As I look back over two years of serving you in Christ as
your Bishop, I am amazed at the Providence of God which brings good
even out of our failures and sins. And this is good and even
necessary, because we are all weak vessels of clay, I no less than the
least of you. But with St. Paul I will say that I love Jesus Christ
enough to leave everything and follow Him. I know you, the People of
God in this Church of Sioux City where I am privileged to live and
serve, you love Him no less than I. As we wait together in the gentle
night when He is born for us, we kneel and pray, praising God with our
whole beings, and trust in His infinite mercy.
Our Holy Father this year has given us a beautiful encyclical on hope: “Spe Salvi: In Hope we are saved.”
Christmas is indeed the season of hope. We anticipate the Messiah, we
“grasp beforehand” the reality of Christ’s new presence among us. We
are waiting, but we are already with Him in our hearts. We are
fearful, but we have already been freed from this in our souls. We are
joyful in the trust that what we experience now by anticipation, does
indeed promise its sweet fulfillment, eternal beatitude.
The birth
of the Lord into history was the most radical event the world has ever
seen. As our Holy Father reminds us, there really was no hope before
Christ. The pagan world did not hope; it endured. The whim and
manipulation of the many gods of mythology was terrifying. The highest
philosophy of the Roman world was Stoicism, which made a virtue out of
remaining unmoved by either pain or pleasure. Unfeeling endurance in
the face of incomprehensible fate was the greatest achievement of a
world without even the anticipation of true liberation. It was truly a
world without any reason for hope.
But if we are to claim the hope
which our experience of Christ has taught us, we must live in the whole
Tradition which makes that hope possible. Beginning with Abraham and
the Patriarchs, the line of God’s Word preparing for the great day of
the Messiah runs through the history of Israel. The judges and kings
and prophets repeat the hopeful refrain, in fear and joy and
trembling. How long, O Lord, until you spare your wounded people? How
great, O Lord, your works! Lord, teach me your ways, that I may walk
in your paths. We have heard these words of the prophets all through
the Advent season.
This preparation for Christ still has much to
teach us today, even though we are the Body of Christ left in the world
for the sake of the lost, and live His life in Baptism. We pray daily
with the Psalmist, we read the Old Testament each Sunday, we listen to
the Word of God making straight the crookedness of our hearts. The Law
of God is not done away with by Christ, but made perfect and whole. As
long as our joy in Christ is mixed still with fear because of our sins,
we still need to hear what prepares the world for His coming: Repent!
He is coming soon!
The Truth does not change. What God willed for
Abraham, for David, for Mary, He still wills for us: to love Him
absolutely, because He is all love, all truth, all beauty, all
goodness; because in loving Him we find the full measure of our
existence; because in loving Him we are freed from all that traps us in
the habits of sin. Tradition is old, but ever new, grasping beforehand
the full truth that one day, we shall be totally immersed in the divine
life. Even now, in the midst of our earthy humanity, we share in the
grace of our loving God. The beauty of our Tradition is its fullness,
its richness fleshed out with the love of countless saints, its
capacity to transform the mundane into the sacred.
As our world
today drifts away from the knowledge and love of Christ, we risk
replacing the hope He gives us with only fear and endurance. We must
not forget what we are waiting for, because we already possess it:
Jesus Christ, the Messiah, God Incarnate, Love Incarnate. As we grow
in love and holiness, faithful to the great Tradition descending from
Abraham and Sarah, our fear slowly changes into awe and wisdom; our joy
flowers as praise and justice; our trust overwhelms hated and despair.
“Then the lion will lie down with the ox and the lamb. Swords will be
beaten into plowshares, and spears into pruning hooks.”
Our faith,
which tempers our fear with joy and faces despair with trust, is not
subject to the whims of the world. Justice and mercy are concepts
foreign to the world. Our faith is our greatest treasure, the source
of all our hope and compassion. We don’t choose God; God chooses us.
We don’t make our faith; our faith makes us.
The Church offers us
the feast of Christmas, to remember not only the Incarnation, but also
the utterly dependent infancy of the Child Jesus. We need to imitate
Him in this. Just as He was utterly helpless against the fear and
hatred of Herod, so too are we against the storms of the world today.
Joseph obeyed the dream and took his family to Egypt to escape the
tyrant. The Church, with its Tradition and all its baggage, is our
refuge. Jesus grew into adulthood under the loving care of Mary and
Joseph. The Church feeds us milk until we are strong enough for solid
food, and guides us into mature sanctity. Jesus never rebelled against
His mother; nor should we against our Holy Mother Church.
I urge all
of you, as I pray for all of you, to know and love the Savior more
deeply this Christmas season. Christ is our head, the Head of the
Church; He knows us better than we know ourselves, and He never offers
us anything harmful or contrary to our nature as children of God.
Christmas reveals to us the truth of our fear and our joy, our trust
and our hope. Let us turn to God with every generation of the
faithful, and plead for His coming in glory. He is all sweetness and
beauty. He is the way and the truth and the light. He is the good
shepherd, the just king, the Holy One of Israel. May the grace of our
Lord Jesus Christ fill you with every blessing under the heavens, and
may the coming of the Lord find you ready to greet Him with boundless
joy! May Mary the Mother of God, and Saint Joseph the Just, patrons of
our Diocese, intercede for us! And may Christ use us to fill the needs
of even the least among us, to the glory of His name. Merry Christmas,
and all God’s blessings on our new year of grace 2008.
Your brother in Christ,
Most Reverend R. Walker Nickless
Bishop of Sioux City