Homily for Second Sunday of Ordinary time
As you will see on your missalette, the Church calls this the second Sunday of Ordinary time. After the high of the Christmas season we are back to normal life again. Having met God in the joy of the Midnight Mass and the Christmas, the challenge now is to meet him in our everyday, normal lives. Home, neighbourhood and workplace is our meeting place with God. A distant Christ would be a contradiction of the Incarnation. The God who came is a household God - domestic, local, available, approachable, familiar. We would be wrong to expect strange dramatic revelations. Christ sets himself in the ordinary, in the family. Bethlehem is a place 'where all men are at home'.
Today's first reading and gospel make the point again. Samuel is a young man who is an apprentice at the home of his master Eli. Samuel thinks it is the voice of his employer calling him. He mistakes the voice of God for the voice of his master Eli. It is Eli who recognises the voice of God and prepares Samuel for his meeting with him.
In our time we do not easily think of God revealing himself in the relation of employer and employee. We do not easily think of the divine in office or shop or at a work-bench. But the voice that called Samuel in the house where he worked, calls still today. It looks still for listening servants - for people who will respect and help one another, for people who will mediate God to one another as Eli did for Samuel.
To the workplace we must bring our everyday gifts. The wise kings brought gold, frankincense and myrrh. We bring our skills and dedication, loyalty and honesty, kindness and care. These are the gifts our God expects of us today. Through developing these skills, I become the person God wants me to be.
The other ordinary place of God's revelation is the home. Today's gospel is the revelation of the adult Messiah. 'If you want to know me come and live with me', is one of the commonest Irish pieces of folk wisdom. In today's gospel the very first disciples and Christ respect the validity of the phrase: 'Where do you live?' they ask. 'Come and see' he says. And they stayed with him all that day, the gospel tells us.
The ordinary and the familiar are both help and hindrance to our finding Christ, and recognising him. Because we are so accustomed to our own we miss Christ in them. Home is the last place you expect to find him. And he's not hidden there, only unrecognised. Because he's unrecognised there we sometimes fail to give thanks for him. But that doesn't mean he is neglected. The care and the constant work of the ordinary home is nothing less than the love and the constant kindness of Christ. Many homes that would lay no great claim to holiness are the tabernacles of the real presence of God that can be on earth - the loving care, day in day out, in sickness, in health, in age, in infancy, in adolescence, of one human being for another. It would be a pity if we missed this everyday, ordinary revelation of God just because it is so common. We should today recognize this and give thanks for it.