The very first time that I preached on this gospel, I got myself into really big trouble. I was a deacon, working in Sacred Heart Church in Suffern, New York. We were the very first class of seminarians sent out to work in parishes. We were ordained deacons, and that meant we had the right to preach the gospel, to baptize at solemn ceremonies, and to witness weddings. And, on that particular Sunday, because I was involved with the teen group in the parish, wanting the young people in the church to understand something about the boy, Jesus, I referred to Him in my homily as the rebellious teenage Jesus. And, as soon as I got off the altar, the priest who was celebrating Mass let me have it both barrels. His problem was that, according to all of our scriptures, Jesus was a human being like us, in every way except that He could not sin. And I had just said, from the altar, that Jesus committed a sin because he was a rebellious teenager.

My goodness, there are more people at this Mass than we’ve had in an entire weekend since Covid began. Merry Christmas to all of you.

Now, a question for you. Show of hands. How many of you have ever held a baby? Almost everybody. So I jotted down a few of the things you might have said, or at least thought, when you held that baby. “You came from me?” “I will always love and protect you.” “I made you?” “This was not in my plans.” “This changes everything.” “Will my parents still love me?” “He’s so tiny.” “She’s so little.” “I can’t wait until you’re old enough for me to play with you.” “Oof, kid, you need a diaper change.” “You are so beautiful.” “What will you grow up to be?” I’m sure almost everybody here has said or thought one or more of those things.

One storytelling technique is to tell one story in terms of another story. One of the most recent examples is Stephen Sondheim and Leonard Bernstein’s “West Side Story”, which is in revival now with a whole new version of it. It’s a based on Shakespeare’s “Romeo and Juliet,” but it tells a different story. It tells the story of ethnic and racial tensions in an urban setting, with crime and other things hanging over the whole plot. And so, if that’s the storytelling technique, it shouldn’t surprise us that it’s a technique used in the telling of the gospel story. St. Luke tells the story, this morning, in terms of a very, very small, but very important story in the second book of Samuel, in the Old Testament.

Today is called Gaudete Sunday, the Sunday of joy. It’s why we switch from wearing purple vestments to wearing rose colored vestments. But joy is an elusive thing. Most of the time now when I hear the word “joy” I think of is “Jeremiah was a bullfrog. He was a good friend of mine.” In that song, joy is equated with pleasure. The singer sings about the pleasure of getting drunk and the pleasure of sexual intimacy. But joy and pleasure are not always the same. Pleasure gives us joy, but joy doesn’t necessarily give us pleasure. 

When I was growing up, one of the most famous poems that people would recite on special occasions was “Casey at the Bat.” And it ends with the line “... somewhere men are happy, and somewhere people shout, but there is no joy in Mudville - mighty Casey has struck out.” If that doesn’t seem like an issue for people, just look at the success of television show “Friday Night Lights,” in which an entire little village, or town, in Texas is consumed with what happens on the football field among high school boys on a Friday night. Sometimes you get all caught up in things that are ephemeral. And joy is one of those things that seems to be ephemeral.

St. Luke goes to great lengths to place the work of John the Baptizer within the setting of world history. It’s important to notice who it is who he lists in his story - Tiberius Caesar, the Roman emperor; Pontius Pilate, his henchman in Jerusalem; tetrarch of Galilee, Herod, and Herod’s sons; his brother, Philip, and his brother, Lysanias, tetrarchs of the region of Ituraea, Trachonitis, Galilee, and Abilene; during the high preiesthood of Annas and Caiaphas. If you look back from chapter 3, which was that, to chapter 2, this is how the same St. Luke situates the birth of Jesus. “In those days a decree went out from Caesar Augustus that whole world should be enrolled. This was the first enrollment, when Quirinius was the governor of Syria.” He does this same thing for the birth of Jesus and for the birth of John the Baptizer. He sets their birth within the larger framework of the people, places, and events of their time. That’s not the way we write history. But it’s the way the ancients would have shown the importance of the person they were writing about, by placing that person in their galaxy with all the other famous people of that era. But, if you pay close attention to the names, Luke is also telling us another story.