Brothers and sisters
May the Lord give you peace!
How beautiful it is to be here… to prepare together to celebrate the Lord’s Christmas. And it is beautiful because we celebrate it as brothers and sisters. We are here from different nations, cultures… we are here with our dreams, our desires… we come from different homelands… When I say “your homeland”, you immediately think of your land. But I ask you to close your eyes… and to think of your homeland. Think of the landscapes, the celebrations, the songs, the foods, the traditions, the Perfume… But now open your eyes. But be careful: When we say homeland, we also say provenance, where you come from. And so homeland is not only the land. Because where you come from? (From where you are). You come from a family, from friends, from all the people who have put a strong content of your life, inside you (Educators, family, friends). So homeland is not only an external land, homeland is also internal. So we bring our homeland where we go… we bring our family, our friends… and unfortunately also our wounds, our pains…
But brothers and sisters, we are Christians… and I would like to say something that must be very well understood. If we are truly Christians we understand that our true homeland is the kingdom of heaven… we understand that the church is our Mother, that the Church is also our family. If we understand this, we understand that we are truly all brothers. Pope Francis reminded us with the encyclical “fratelli tutti”… Yes, the world becomes our homeland… our country!
But be careful, only when we have Jesus wecon understand this. Without Jesus its remains only a theory, only beautiful words. The Gospel we have heard tells us the example of the Virgin Mary, she after the Incarnation of the Word (with Jesus), Mary teaches us: we are happy when first of all we have God in our life… and we understand what it means to be Christians when we begin to “serve”. To walk to serve, and we have the example of the Virgin Mary. Like our Sister Rossy, like Sister Ramona, and all the members of our pastoral care for refugees.
With the Virgin Mary we learn to sing the “Magnificat”: all generations will call me blessed. Yes, all generations, all peoples… attention: “All”…
All means: integration… yes, as Christians we are afraid of others. Even if they are of different religions, but we must work, educate for integration.
In our parishes and communities in Cyprus we have the beauty of the choirs, who sing together: Africans, Filipinos, Cypriots, Indians, Sri Lankans, and other Europeans. Latin Americans …. Because we have Christians, Catholics who have come from many nations, and we want integration to begin in our community
Brothers: as a bishop I would like to say: that we love you. We are limited in our resources, possibilities. The Church is not a political power and we do not want to be, but I would like to tell you: the Church is your mother, the Church is your family, and we love you.
And so we can go towards a new world that the Lord is preparing for us. And this is our true common homeland: the Kingdom of God that we Christians are called to welcome. “Maranath” come Lord Jesus!