Christmas Day Homily...Salvation part 2

(Last night I spoke of salvation, and our Salvation is that God has embraced our humanity.  That embrace changes us;  it allows the strong parts of ourselves to be used to love others; the weak parts allows us to grow and transformed so that we can be loved and love others.)

This all requires humility.

Humility is to accept my place, and our place, in the Universe.

This may come as a shock to some, I know it gets me all the time; I am not the Master of the Universe, and nobody is.  I am but a servant, creature; all of us are but servants and creatures.

I have been made.  You have been made.  We have been made by God.

Yet we are made for something wonderful and spectacular.  God made us to be part of a great harmony,  a harmony within this universe and beyond it.  

My humanity, my uniqueness, our humanity and uniqueness, all of it serves the great purpose;  God’s great plan.

It is like a choir;  a single voice is beautiful, it has its melody, but voices together, blending, that makes harmony.  Stories weave together and evoke something greater than one person, one self.

My melody and the melody of others make the song.  The singers do not make the song, they sing their parts given to them.  

Chaos would erupt in a concert or opera if a singer stopped singing his or her part, and simply did their own thing.

Imagine in Turandot during an aria, the singer simply stops singing the score, and decides to sing Thunderstruck by AC/DC.

There maybe moments where one can solo, and one voice is heard, but it adds to the song.  It is part of the grand scheme.

We are created to be in harmony, with God, with others and with all of creation.  Salvation is the freedom to be in this harmony.  This is the good news of Jesus Christ, this is what we celebrate at Christmas: we are part of the divine plan.

Jesus sang wonderfully the Song of God, restoring the harmony to people, healing them; because the Son of God embraced humanity.

Jesus sang the song of love to the poor, the sinner, the sick; those who had been told, in one form or another, that they had not song, not part to sing.

Jesus said, “Yes you do.”

The angels sang at Jesus’ birth, and ancient song of God’s harmony and glory.

God sang the universe into being; creating a universe of harmony.  God sang us into being.  

To hear this song, to sing this song, means we need to listen, and listen well.  

We need to listen to our song and more importantly to the song of others; we must attune ourselves to each other.

It means we understand that all of our songs change.  The one I sang at 21 is way different now at 51.

Suffering occurs because we don’t listen, we don’t allow others to change.  Maybe the harmed us years, decades ago; so we hold onto that hurt that anger:  we sing of resentment, passive aggressiveness.  All is does is create discord in our lives and those around us.

God has given us a better tune, a song so that we can sing together.

So we must attune ourselves to God most importantly of all.  

It means we understand in our hearts, we all have our parts, but we are not the conductor.  This is humility.

This is why music is intrinsic to our celebration of Eucharist:  we sing because it is part of all of creation!

We find our melody, and we merge our melody with others; here during liturgy, not matter the quality of our voices.  We embrace our parts.

We humbly sing how we sing.

We sing together of God’s great love for all.

We sing of the need to forgive others.

We sing of Christ’s healing poured out onto us.

And we go forth to sing!