Feast of the Holy Family of Jesus, Mary, and Joseph
28 December 2025
By now, you all know that I am a married priest and that Amanda and I have three children. And as my kids get older and begin (finally) to move out of the house
—especially at Christmas time—I find myself remembering their stories.
I remember our fifth wedding anniversary, Amanda and I sitting on the bathroom floor by the toilet as 2 year old Micah was getting sick over and over again,
thinking, this is real life, this is marriage. We said to each other across the commode, “Happy Anniversary”.
I remember one Christmas family gathering when Jillian, jumping on a trampoline twisted her ankle so badly that she couldn’t walk for days.
I remember one Christmas Eve rushing Mariam, at two years old, to the emergency room after she fell backward off the couch and split her head open.
I remember those Christmases when we were struggling financially,
wondering if we would have enough to pay the bills and still give our children presents, much less each other.
That’s life. That’s family life.
And it’s exactly into that kind of life—not a perfect one, not a polished one—that God chose to come.
Every year, on this Sunday after Christmas, the Church places before us the Holy Family—not as a sentimental postcard, not as a stained-glass ideal that feels out of reach, but as a living, breathing household. And that matters, because most of us live in less than perfect families; AND because most of our lives are not lived in moments of religious intensity or spiritual drama. Most of life happens at home.
Around kitchen tables. In carpools. In hallways and sickrooms. In conversations that go well, and in arguments that don’t.
And the Church dares to say today: that is exactly where holiness happens.
The Collect sets the tone beautifully. We ask God, who gave us “the shining example of the Holy Family,” to help us imitate them in the virtues of family life and the bonds of charity.
Notice what we do not ask for. We do not ask to imitate extraordinary miracles.
We do not ask for perfect circumstances. We ask for virtue. We ask for charity.
In other words, we ask for grace to live faithfully in the ordinary.
That is the heart of this feast: holiness is not forged first in the extraordinary,
but in the everyday.
The first reading from Sirach is striking in its simplicity. It speaks about honoring father and mother, caring for them in their weakness, remaining patient even when relationships are difficult. This is not abstract theology. This is lived wisdom. Sirach understands something deeply human and deeply spiritual: how we love those closest to us forms us at the deepest level. The way we treat parents, especially when they age, weaken, or frustrate us, is not separate from our relationship with God. It is one of the primary places where faith becomes real. It is living out Jesus’ mandate to love the least of these.
Sirach even dares to say that mercy shown within the family brings blessing and healing. Not because families are easy, but precisely because they are not.
Family life reveals who we really are. There is nowhere to hide. At home,
when it’s communicated well, we are loved not for our performance, but because we belong.
Saint Paul, in the Letter to the Colossians, pushes this even further. He does not describe family life in sentimental terms. He describes it in moral and spiritual terms:
compassion, kindness, humility, gentleness, patience. He speaks of bearing with one another. Forgiving one another. Letting love be the bond of perfection.
Those words only make sense if family life is sometimes hard. You don’t need patience when everything is easy. You don’t need forgiveness when no one has hurt you. Paul assumes that families are places of tension, misunderstanding, and growth, and he insists that these very struggles are the raw material of holiness.
Notice something important: Paul does not say, “Feel more loving.” He says, put on love. Love is a decision long before it is a feeling. It’s a practice. A habit formed over time. Family life is not sustained by feelings alone. It is sustained by virtue—virtue chosen again and again, often quietly, often unseen.
And then we come to the Gospel. If we were expecting a cozy scene of the Holy Family gathered peacefully around the manger, we are surprised. Instead, we hear of danger, fear, and displacement. Joseph is warned in a dream. The family flees into Egypt. They live as refugees. They return only when it is safe, settling not in a place of prominence, but in Nazareth, an obscure town with no reputation to speak of.
This is important. Jesus does not grow up in spectacle. He grows up in obscurity.
Thirty years of silence. Thirty years of ordinary family life. The Son of God learns to walk, to speak, to pray, to work all within a household. God could have saved the world any way He wanted. He chose to do it this way.
That should tell us something profound about how God works.
The Holy Family was not perfect in the way we often imagine perfection. They were faithful. Faithful to God. Faithful to one another. Faithful in uncertainty. Faithful when plans changed. Faithful when life was disrupted. That is the shining example the Collect points us toward… not flawlessness, but fidelity.
And that is good news for us.
Because when we talk about holiness, many people quietly assume it happens somewhere else—somewhere quieter, cleaner, more spiritual. Maybe in a monastery. Maybe on retreat. Maybe later, when life settles down. But today the Church looks us in the eye and says: holiness happens at home.
God sanctifies kitchens where meals are prepared with love. He sanctifies carpools where patience is tested. He sanctifies sickbeds where someone stays up through the night. He sanctifies arguments that end in reconciliation, and even arguments that don’t end well but are brought to Him in prayer. He sanctifies forgiveness offered again and again. He sanctifies parents who are exhausted and children who are learning, slowly, how to love.
The Holy Family shows us that God is not waiting for ideal circumstances. He enters real ones.
And this feast is not meant to make anyone feel guilty or inadequate. It is meant to give hope. It is meant for families that feel fractured, stressed, blended, grieving, overwhelmed. It is meant for grandparents raising grandchildren, for single parents doing their best, for households marked by illness or distance or loss. The Holy Family understands vulnerability. They understand fear. They understand uncertainty. And they show us that God is present precisely there.
At the same time, this feast gently challenges us. It asks us to take family life seriously as a place of discipleship. Not something we survive until we can get back to “real” spirituality, but something we offer intentionally to God.
What would it look like to see your home as holy ground? What would change if patience, forgiveness, and love were seen not as optional extras, but as spiritual practices? What if the daily routines of family life—meals, conversations, apologies, prayers—were understood as forming us for eternal life?
The Collect reminds us where all of this is headed:
“that, in the joy of your house, we may delight one day in
eternal rewards.”
Family life, lived in charity, prepares us for heaven. The habits we form now—the way we speak, forgive, serve, and love—are shaping our capacity for eternal joy.
The Holy Family did not escape ordinary life. They embraced it. And in doing so,
they show us that holiness is not distant or unattainable. It is close. It is practical.
It is daily.
So today, we ask not for perfect families, but for faithful ones. Not for extraordinary lives, but for grace to live the ordinary with love. And trusting the God who chose a family as the place to enter the world, we believe that holiness really does happen at home.