Tuesday, December 29, 2009

Christmas homily excerpts from Oscar Romero

by m

With Christ, God has injected himself into history. With the birth of Christ, God’s reign is now inaugurated in human time. On this night, as we Christians have done every year for twenty centuries, we recall that God’s reign is now in this world and that Christ has inaugurated the fullness of time. His birth attests that God is now marching with us in history, that we do not go alone, and that our aspiration for peace, for justice, for the reign of divine law, for something holy, is far from earth’s realities. We can hope for it, not because we humans are able to construct that realm of happiness which God’s holy words proclaim, but because the builder of a reign of justice, of love, and of peace is already in the midst of us. (December 25, 1977)

No one can celebrate a genuine Christmas without being truly poor. The self-sufficient, the proud, those who, because they have everything, look down on others, whose who have no need even of God—for them there will be no Christmas. Only the poor, the hungry, those who need someone to come on their behalf, will have that someone. That someone is God, Emmanuel, God-with-us. Without poverty of spirit there can be no abundance of God. (December 24, 1978)

We must not seek the child Jesus in the pretty figures of our Christmas cribs. We must seek him among the undernourished children who have gone to bed tonight without eating, among the poor newsboys who will sleep covered with newspapers in doorways. (December 24, 1979)

[From James Brockman, ed. The Church is All of You: Thoughts of Archbishop Oscar Romero (Minneapolis: Winston Press, 1984)]

source: http://catholicanarchy.org/?p=1353#more-1353

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