During Advent, the priests of the Diocese of Madison have been encouraged to preach on the kerygma.
In case you miss one of their homilies or wish to reflect on the topic further, we are reprinting similar content here.
We’ve all heard it before: Advent is a time of preparation.
For Christmas, yes, but in a deeper way, for receiving Jesus in his threefold coming: In history with the Incarnation, which we celebrate at Christmas; in mystery, when we receive Him in the sacraments; and in majesty, when He comes again at the Last Judgment.
Given how quickly Advent passes (especially this year!), it can be helpful to situate the Christmas story in the bigger arc of salvation history.
In the weeks leading up to Christmas, I’ll touch on the four main points of the kerygma, which is the basic proclamation of the Good News of Jesus Christ, using Bishop Donald J. Hying’s booklet — Boldly Proclaiming the Gospel — as the binding thread.
In this first article, I’ll talk about the grandeur of creation.
A return to wonder
Our best scientific approximation puts the universe at 94 billion light years across. Do you know how long a light year is?
One light year is about six trillion miles, so we live in a universe that’s something like 540 sextillion miles across!
What’s more, there are roughly 100 billion stars in our galaxy, with somewhere between 200 billion and two trillion galaxies in the universe. That’s around 200 billion trillion stars!
If we look at the creation story of Genesis, the creation of the stars is almost a throw-away line: “And God made the two great lights, the greater light to rule the day, and the lesser light to rule the night; he made the stars also” (Gen 1:16). We can hardly grasp the scale of a single star — our sun is relatively small, but it would still take 1.3 million Earths to fill the sun’s volume.
Not only did God make 200 billion trillion stars, He did so effortlessly. Psalm 33 says, “By the word of the LORD the heavens were made, and all their host [i.e., the stars] by the breath of his mouth.” He just breathed the stars into existence.
In light of all these things, we can’t help but be filled with a spirit of awe and wonder.
Even on a solely human level, we want to make sense of this marvelous universe. Surely, it can’t all be a meaningless accident.
From the Scriptures, we know that it isn’t. God freely and purposefully created everything. But why? The Lord is perfect in Himself and has no need of us.
God is love
The only answer is sheer love. God’s love, His very nature, overflows into the handiwork of creation.
God created everything from nothing, and He pronounced it good, crowning it with the creation of man and woman — you and me — in His image and likeness.
We did nothing to deserve our life or make it happen. Everything we have, existence itself, is a sheer gift from God.
As if our life and all the marvels of creation weren’t enough, God had more in mind for us.
If you have listened to any of The Catechism in a Year podcast from Ascension Press, early on you heard that “God, infinitely perfect and blessed in Himself, in a plan of sheer goodness freely created man to make Him share in His own blessed life” (CCC, §1). God made us in His image, with a will, heart, soul, mind, and body, so that we might have a relationship with Him now and, we pray, for all eternity.
From the very beginning, we were created out of love and created for love. We find ourselves in relationship with others, by giving and receiving love. That is our deepest identity.
Or, as Bishop Hying puts it, “We are children of God destined to live forever, here in this world for a very short time to fall in love with the Lord, discover the beauty of our existence in Christ, and to do the work that God has prepared for us from all eternity.” (Boldly Proclaiming the Gospel, p. 7).
Our identity comes from our belonging to God, and from there, our mission. We’ll get to that later.
For now, it suffices to say that the meaning of it all is love. It’s all a gift from God, and our life only makes sense in relationship with Him — when we receive His love and His will, and then share His love abroad.
If you’d like to get a copy of Bishop Hying’s booklet, reach out to Sarah in the Office of Evangelization and Catechesis at sarah.stout@madisondiocese.org or 608-821-3045.