Now can we be friends: Homily for Monday, December 25, 2023

We tossed the word miracle around a lot. When I was a junior in high school, the fact that the United States Olympic hockey team beat the Soviet Union hockey team was referred to by Al Michaels as a miracle. As a long time Red Sox fan, the fact that in 2004 they won the last eight games of the regular season to end an 86 year drought from winning the World Series, we thought of that as a miracle. When people go to the hospital and modern medical care helps them to become better, we sometimes refer to that as a miracle. Now, I'm certainly not comparing the health of a human being to the Red Sox winning the World Series, which as an aside doesn't look likely any time soon. But what I am saying is this, we've lost the sense of what a miracle is. See, a miracle is like the man in Montreal, I believe in the 40s, who had been asking for the intercession of Blessed Andre Besette, a brother, whose job, whose role, whose ministry and religious life was simply to answer the door, which seems to be a rather popular way to become a saint. We have a lot of saints who became saints because they answered the door. And they shared their faith and they prayed for people and they were kind and hospitable. This man was at the end of his life. He had seen the doctor on a particular day and the doctor told him, you've only got probably a few days left to live. The cancer that you have is spread throughout your entire body and there's nothing more we can do. This would be a good time to get things in order. And so as he left the doctor's office, he went and stopped at the oratory of St. Joseph, which is on Mount Royal, which is the mountain for which, it's hardly a mountain, but anyway, it's a hill for which the city of Montreal is named. Montréal is in fact Mount Royal in French. And he asked for the intercession of Brother Andre. He asked him to pray for him. The next morning he felt so amazingly well that he had to go see the doctor again because he just was that well. He hadn't felt this well in a long time and he went to the doctor and they ran all kinds of tests that day because he said, I just feel great. Great. They found not a trace of cancer. Not a trace. Modern medical care is good and maybe someday we will be able to treat cancer overnight, but that was not true in the 1940s and there was no way it could be true. It was this miracle in fact that was used to justify canonizing Brother Andre Bessette. Now, what's my point? There's no natural explanation for what happened to this man. The doctor was not being overly dramatic. What happened to this man was miraculous. And what Christmas is really about for us is to recognize the miraculous. See, I think in our Western world, in our Western time, I would say our post-enlightenment, post-modern world, we really want everything to have a rational and reasonable explanation. But that's not the way it is for people of faith. We need to leave room for the miraculous, the truly miraculous. And Christmas is about celebrating the truly miraculous, the belief that because Jesus has come into the world, miraculous things are possible. And we can be a part of that miraculous work of God. I would like to talk about the greatest miracle, which is the Son of God coming into our lives, and to share really why that matters. See, sometimes in our modern world, we don't always see the intersection between science and faith. Sometimes, in fact, when it comes to science, we think it can answer everything. . .