Nativity of the Lord (Christmas) 2022

Published: December 24, 2022

Bishop Anthony B. Taylor preached the following homily at the Cathedral of St. Andrew in Little Rock on Saturday, Dec. 24, 2022.

Bishop Taylor

One of the facts of life is the broken human condition, which we all share. When a reporter asked Pope Francis to describe himself, he said: "I am a sinner." I am too, obviously, and I keep committing the same sins over and over, despite having confessed them many times.

This was one of the issues I had to work through in deciding whether I could respond to God's call to the priesthood. But once I was ordained, I discovered something very important: While committing sins is never a good thing, the humility that came from knowing myself to be a sinner made me a better priest than I would have been otherwise.

A more compassionate priest because I understood the broken human condition. We aren't disembodied spirits. We are incarnate beings with a body as well as a soul, and so are subject to temptations coming from the flesh, from the world and from the devil — from inside ourselves and from outside ourselves. We deceive ourselves and we let ourselves be deceived. That's how it is for all of us.

On Christmas we celebrate the incarnation, the day when God ceases to be a disembodied spirit. Jesus has a body as well as a soul, and so will be subject to the same temptations that we face. And while he never actually sinned, he did embrace the broken human condition which we all share. This may be why he was so compassionate and demanding. It was from him that I learned that the biggest victim of sin, the one who suffers the greatest harm, is often the sinner himself.

This is also why he reached out even preferentially to those whose lives and hearts were most broken and most needed a personal experience of God's healing love and mercy, out of which they could then reset the direction of their lives. When God took on human flesh and became subject to human weakness on Christmas, you'd think the logical result would be a diminishment of God — but in fact, it was precisely through his incarnation in Jesus that the light began to shine in our very dark world.

Thirty-three years later, the powers of darkness — who even today dominate so much of our broken world — will do their worst, but when Jesus (God incarnate and our innocent victim) is nailed to that cross, he takes our sins and brokenness with him, thereby setting us free from the power of sin and death. Yes, we still sin and yes we still die, but it is God's mercy and forgiveness that now has the last word. And then he sends us out to bring that same love and mercy to others.

How about you? Joseph was a righteous man who knew that committing sins was never a good thing, so he decided to divorce Mary when he discovered that she was pregnant and he wasn't the father. He was a kind man and so despite her apparent adultery, he planned to do so quietly. But he was also a humble man who knew how to listen with his heart and so was able to accept the truth of the angel's version of the most improbable unwed pregnancy story in all of history.

Humble people are open to truths bigger than themselves, and the biggest truth revealed on Christmas is that God loves you so thoroughly that he wants to be the center of your life — no matter what you've ever done or the habits of sin that still have a hold on you.

Those things mean nothing to a God who loves you so much that he will humble himself to take on all the limitations of our vulnerable, human condition as a helpless baby born in a barn and soon to be a refugee in Egypt.

And our sins mean even less to a God whose very reason for becoming incarnate this day is to have a body to offer on the cross as the ultimate sign and irrefutable guarantee that God's love for you and his mercy for you are simply without limits!

His arms reach up to you from the manger for the most loving embrace that you will experience. He invites you to open your arms to receive him and cradle next to your heart the completely vulnerable baby born for you today.