Rejoicing in the season of hope

Dec. 20, 2007

Dear Brothers and Sisters in Christ,

With fear and joy mixed together, we approach again the birth of our Lord Jesus Christ at the great feast of Christmas. We fear because we know we are not the saints God is calling us to be. We have joy because we have already experienced God's infinite, sweet mercy. Fear and joy are mixed because creation is all of one piece, and all "very good."

As I look back over two years of serving you in Christ as your Bishop, I am amazed at the Providence of God which brings good even out of our failures and sins. And this is good and even necessary, because we are all weak vessels of clay, I no less than the least of you. But with St. Paul I will say that I love Jesus Christ enough to leave everything and follow Him. I know you, the People of God in this Church of Sioux City where I am privileged to live and serve, you love Him no less than I. As we wait together in the gentle night when He is born for us, we kneel and pray, praising God with our whole beings, and trust in His infinite mercy.

Our Holy Father this year has given us a beautiful encyclical on hope: "Spe Salvi: In Hope we are saved." Christmas is indeed the season of hope. We anticipate the Messiah, we "grasp beforehand" the reality of Christ's new presence among us. We are waiting, but we are already with Him in our hearts. We are fearful, but we have already been freed from this in our souls. We are joyful in the trust that what we experience now by anticipation, does indeed promise its sweet fulfillment, eternal beatitude.

The birth of the Lord into history was the most radical event the world has ever seen. As our Holy Father reminds us, there really was no hope before Christ. The pagan world did not hope; it endured. The whim and manipulation of the many gods of mythology was terrifying. The highest philosophy of the Roman world was Stoicism, which made a virtue out of remaining unmoved by either pain or pleasure. Unfeeling endurance in the face of incomprehensible fate was the greatest achievement of a world without even the anticipation of true liberation. It was truly a world without any reason for hope.

But if we are to claim the hope which our experience of Christ has taught us, we must live in the whole Tradition which makes that hope possible. Beginning with Abraham and the Patriarchs, the line of God's Word preparing for the great day of the Messiah runs through the history of Israel. The judges and kings and prophets repeat the hopeful refrain, in fear and joy and trembling. How long, O Lord, until you spare your wounded people? How great, O Lord, your works! Lord, teach me your ways, that I may walk in your paths. We have heard these words of the prophets all through the Advent season.

This preparation for Christ still has much to teach us today, even though we are the Body of Christ left in the world for the sake of the lost, and live His life in Baptism. We pray daily with the Psalmist, we read the Old Testament each Sunday, we listen to the Word of God making straight the crookedness of our hearts. The Law of God is not done away with by Christ, but made perfect and whole. As long as our joy in Christ is mixed still with fear because of our sins, we still need to hear what prepares the world for His coming: Repent! He is coming soon!

The Truth does not change. What God willed for Abraham, for David, for Mary, He still wills for us: to love Him absolutely, because He is all love, all truth, all beauty, all goodness; because in loving Him we find the full measure of our existence; because in loving Him we are freed from all that traps us in the habits of sin. Tradition is old, but ever new, grasping beforehand the full truth that one day, we shall be totally immersed in the divine life. Even now, in the midst of our earthy humanity, we share in the grace of our loving God. The beauty of our Tradition is its fullness, its richness fleshed out with the love of countless saints, its capacity to transform the mundane into the sacred.

As our world today drifts away from the knowledge and love of Christ, we risk replacing the hope He gives us with only fear and endurance. We must not forget what we are waiting for, because we already possess it: Jesus Christ, the Messiah, God Incarnate, Love Incarnate. As we grow in love and holiness, faithful to the great Tradition descending from Abraham and Sarah, our fear slowly changes into awe and wisdom; our joy flowers as praise and justice; our trust overwhelms hatred and despair. "Then the lion will lie down with the ox and the lamb. Swords will be beaten into plowshares, and spears into pruning hooks."

Our faith, which tempers our fear with joy and faces despair with trust, is not subject to the whims of the world. Justice and mercy are concepts foreign to the world. Our faith is our greatest treasure, the source of all our hope and compassion. We don't choose God; God chooses us. We don't make our faith; our faith makes us.

The Church offers us the feast of Christmas, to remember not only the Incarnation, but also the utterly dependent infancy of the Child Jesus. We need to imitate Him in this. Just as He was utterly helpless against the fear and hatred of Herod, so too are we against the storms of the world today. Joseph obeyed the dream and took his family to Egypt to escape the tyrant. The Church, with its Tradition and all its baggage, is our refuge. Jesus grew into adulthood under the loving care of Mary and Joseph. The Church feeds us milk until we are strong enough for solid food, and guides us into mature sanctity. Jesus never rebelled against His mother; nor should we against our Holy Mother Church.

I urge all of you, as I pray for all of you, to know and love the Savior more deeply this Christmas season. Christ is our head, the Head of the Church; He knows us better than we know ourselves, and He never offers us anything harmful or contrary to our nature as children of God. Christmas reveals to us the truth of our fear and our joy, our trust and our hope. Let us turn to God with every generation of the faithful, and plead for His coming in glory. He is all sweetness and beauty. He is the way and the truth and the light. He is the good shepherd, the just king, the Holy One of Israel. May the grace of our Lord Jesus Christ fill you with every blessing under the heavens, and may the coming of the Lord find you ready to greet Him with boundless joy! May Mary the Mother of God, and Saint Joseph the Just, patrons of our Diocese, intercede for us! And may Christ use us to fill the needs of even the least among us, to the glory of His name. Merry Christmas, and all God's blessings on our new year of grace 2008.

Your brother in Christ,

Most Reverend R. Walker Nickless

Bishop of Sioux City