Advent & Christmas

The word “epiphany” is a big word that means revelation.

“But [it’s] not any revelation,” Father Caesar Rubiano, pastor of Our Lady of the Angels Parish, Trenton, said Jan. 5 during the Mass he celebrated in St. Joachim Church. Epiphany, he said, is the revelation of God who comes to this world through the Incarnation and in human form. God was born of the flesh, he said, and “this revelation gave us the new beginning, the new life, the new joy.”

In my Christmas Message to the Diocese this year, I wrote, “The whole world becomes different at Christmas.”  Those are my words, yes, but they are not my idea. 

The prophet Isaiah – 800 years before the birth of Christ – expressed the idea this way, as we heard in our First Reading tonight, “The people who walked in darkness have seen a great light.”  Light makes the dark world “different.”  It enables people to see.  And what do we see at Christmas?  “A child is born for us,” Isaiah explains, “A son is given us.  Upon his shoulders dominion rests.” 

This is what we see; this is whom we see at Christmas.  A Child.  A Son. 

Epiphany Parish, Brick, is keeping busy this Advent and Christmas season! Frist there was a “Night in Bethlehem” and live Nativity. Then there was the Magi Christmas Lunch as well as the annual junior youth gingerbread house-making contest.