|
One
verse in today’s gospel struck me and serves as the focus for my
reflections. That verse is:
But when these signs begin to happen,
Stand erect and raise your heads
Because your redemption is at hand. (Luke 24:28)
What
precisely are
“these
signs”—not the sun, moon, stars, and the like—but what they
symbolize that, when they begin to happen in our lives we should
stand up and raise our heads because our redemption is at hand?
To answer that
question, I reflected upon
the opposite, namely, those times when the signs made my shoulders
slump and I looked down at the ground, thinking that the end was
near and I was either going to be “dead” or wanted to die.
This reflection reminded me of when I was a kid and how it was,
that whenever
I’d do something wrong and get found out (the important part, of
course, was
“getting found out,” because otherwise it wouldn’t have mattered), my natural impulse wasn’t
to stand up straight and to hold my head high.
Think
about all of this in terms of your lives and experience. You
suddenly
“got found out” and, as a result:
·
everything turned upside down;
·
the steady predictability of daily life gave way to upset,
anger, and tumult;
·
a
fondest hope was nothing more than
self-willed delusion; and,
·
the darkness of sin was exposed to the
light of day…
...it’s
when these things happened—when
the sun, moon, stars, and the like came “crashing down”—that our natural impulse
was:
·
to bury our heads in shame;
·
to shrink and to turn away;
·
to attempt to hide behind very inventive but deceitful excuses; or,
·
pushed to the brink, to deny the truth that we are imperfect, that
we have sinned, and that we stand in need of forgiveness.
The
theme of this season of Advent which we embark upon today can be summed up in the beautiful Jewish prayer, “Maranatha,” which
means, “Come Lord.”
When we
utter this prayer, however, we aren’t simply asking the Lord to
“come” into our lives as if our prayer is an invitation to the Lord
to visit us one afternoon for what the English call “high tea”
replete with scones and crumpets. No, when we utter
this prayer, we are doing much more than asking, we are begging—if not
demanding—the Lord to break into our lives by destroying all of
those barriers we have erected to keep the Lord out of our lives. These
barriers include:
·
the self-pity and shame by which we delude ourselves into believing
that God wants nothing to do with us;
·
the deceitful excuses by which we pretend we are so righteous when,
in reality, we know that we are sinful; and,
·
the pride that keeps us from asking for forgiveness for all of the
wrongs we know we have committed, whether purposefully or not.
When we
utter Maranatha, that is what we are demanding. We want the Lord to come into our
lives, to turn everything upside down, to make the predictable
unpredictable, to illuminate our false pretensions and hopes, and to
expose our sins. We are demanding the Lord to do this so we
once again can atone, that is, to be “at one” with God.
Our prayer—our
demand—Maranatha gives us hope. Not some whimsical and
fanciful “let’s pretend that I’m okay and everything will be okay”
kind of hope, but the theological virtue of hope—the type of hope engendered as we seeing ourselves for who we
truly are—that will motivate us to turn away from sin and to become more completely the
person God has created us to become.
Preachers oftentimes describe Advent as a “season of grace” and a
“time of preparation.” And, indeed it is! Advent is a time of
grace and preparation—a period of four weeks—when we demand the Lord come
into our lives so that, as the Lord breathes into and moves within our hearts, we will
once again stand up straight and raise our heads high because we
will recognize that our redemption is near.
How near? The answer is quite simple: as near as recognizing the
truth about ourselves and the pathway we’ve chosen to walk.
Advent,
then, is the season of grace and time of preparation by being
honest with ourselves. We become honest by asking two questions. The first is: “Why do I sin?” The second is: “How is it that I
have become comfortable—though not really—living in shame and fearing the truth?”
Responding to these two
questions, the twelfth-century Cistercian monk, reformer, and Doctor
of the Church, St. Bernard of Clairvaux, identified three reasons
that are as good today for explaining why we sin as these reasons
were good eight centuries ago in explaining why people in those days
sinned.
First:
We sin because we delude ourselves into believing that what we
know is good, we pretend is bad and what we know is bad, we pretend is
good.
Any one
of us who has been charmed by and then obsessed with the allure of evil knows precisely
what it is like to delude ourselves into believing that we cannot live without the object of
desire. It’s like kids say around this time of year: “I’ll die
if I don’t get X, Y, and Z for Christmas!” And so, we sin by deluding ourselves into believing
that very bad things like lies,
drugs, gossip, excessive alcohol, pornography, theft, adultery, fornication
and the like make sense. Then, we ultimately justify to
ourselves that these very bad things
aren’t bad at all. Worse yet, it’s not very long at all before
we’re living—just like Lewis Carroll’s Alice in Wonderland—in a back-to-front Looking-Glass kingdom where
everything is turned
upside-down and where a baby can turn into a pig, time can be
abandoned at a tea-party, and a chaotic game of chess can make a
7-year-old girl a Queen. Everything is upside down but we
convince ourselves that everything is right side up! That’s
how we became comfortable living in shame and fearing the truth.
Second:
We sin because, although we are well-intentioned, we
falter time and again.
Surveying the terrain of our choices, we delude ourselves
into believing that we’re no further along the pathway of holiness
than the point from where we first started our journey. The truth,
however, is that we’re no farther along than from the point where we
departed the pathway of holiness...which isn’t the point where we
started! But, we
rationalize, “my spirit is willing but my flesh is weak” or “I’ve
tried and failed so many times.” And so, we wrongly conclude, “holiness is beyond my power”
or “I must be doomed.” All along, however, we know we are doing
very bad things but,
because we possess little or no hope, we wrongly conclude we are powerless
to do otherwise. Tragically, we terminate our journey toward
holiness. This is nothing other than to sin against the Holy
Spirit—what Jesus taught was the only “unforgivable sin”—namely, to deny the hope
won for us in the death and resurrection of Jesus Christ! And
so, once again,
we
became comfortable living in shame and fearing the truth.
Third:
We sin because we make reality conform with the way we see
things, thereby making ourselves god and ruler of our own petty
universe.
Believe
it or not, there are people in our world—perhaps you may know a
person like this or, maybe even, live with one of them—people who
are so wounded,
so hurt, and so tortured, with defenses so great, that it is
impossible to get through to the real person imprisoned
inside. They reject immediately and sometimes violently any gesture
which communicates God’s love, so much so that it is virtually impossible
to approach them as human beings. We need to look not at
others, however, but at ourselves because sin makes us that person!
As sinful people, we’re the one’s who reject immediately and
sometime violently any gesture which communicates God’s love, so
much so that God finds it virtually impossible to approach us as
the person God created us because we reject everyone and everything God
sends our way. Yep,
that’s
how we became comfortable living in shame and fearing the truth.
The
season of Advent gives us the grace and time to demand Maranatha—come
Lord, break into my life. Turn everything upside down. Upset the
predictability of my days. Give me insight into my self-delusions.
Break down the walls I’ve erected to imprison myself. Most of
all, expose my sin to me. When we demand this of God from the depths of our
hearts, the advent cry Maranatha reveals our hope that the
Lord will work this miracle in our hearts and, by so doing, will
restore the order of God’s grace in our lives.
It is
difficult, however, because we must admit that we are powerless to turn
things around and need God to do the turning
around for us. Yes, it will take time to prepare for this momentous
change and we need this time to prepare if we are
to see ourselves on Christmas Day as we truly are...God’s beloved sons and daughters!
Through
this season of grace and time of preparation, then, we live in hope
that the Lord will heal us so that we can atone, stand straight up,
and raise our heads high as Christ is born anew—as the Son of God rises to new
life—in the manger of our hearts. Jesus assures us in today’s
gospel: “When these signs begin to happen, stand erect and raise
your heads, because your redemption is at hand. And, surely,
it is at hand!
A very brief commercial
break...
As
Catholics, we prepare for Christ's coming by celebrating the season
of Advent. During the coming four weeks, we prepare the way
for Christ to come into our own lives each and every day not just on
Christmas day. For Catholic families, let me suggest five
practical ways to prepare for Christ's coming:
1. Place
an advent wreath in the center of your dinner table. Each
evening before sitting down for dinner, have one member offer a
prayer of thanksgiving to God for His presence in the life of your
family and light the appropriate candle(s).
2. Use
an Advent calendar.
Hang an
advent calendar on the refrigerator door beginning on December 1st.
Each morning, before everyone scatters for the day, have one member
of the family open one door and read the scripture verse or describe
the biblical scene behind the door. This is a great way for
family members to keep focused on the coming of Christ for the rest
of the day.
3. Make
a Jesse tree. The Jesse tree is the traditional way that
Catholics recall Jesus' heritage, coming from the line of King
David, the son of Jesse. Have members of the family make a
symbol for each day of Advent that marks an important moment in
Israel's history (e.g., Noah's ark, Jacob's ladder, Moses' stone
tablets, David's harp). Then, each evening before everyone
goes to bed, gather the family around the Jesse tree, have the
family member explain the symbol, and hang it on the tree.
4.
Celebrate the Feast of St. Nicholas on December 6th. One
way to "put Christ back into Christmas" is to reclaim the
faith-filled life of heroic virtue revealed in the great Christian
saint, St. Nicholas of Myra. Besides sharing simple gifts with
family members, like placing candy in shoes that have been left
outside of the bedroom door, share some time with people who are
alone, in the hospital, convalescing, etc.
5.
Celebrate God's mercy. Advent is a particularly fitting
time for every member of the family to welcome the light of God's
forgiveness into the dark places of family life. Gather the
family together and go to church to celebrate the Sacrament of
Penance together. Then, go out for pizza to celebrate God's
mercy and a new beginning free from sin.
By
participating in these five practical activities to prepare for Christmas
day, Catholic families will not only have contemplated their need
for God and God's self-revelation through salvation history.
In addition, they will have experienced God present and active in
their family's life. Then, on Christmas day, when family
members greet one another by saying, "Merry Christmas," they all will
truly be prepared to celebrate the Mass wherein Christ will
strengthen and nourish them with his body and blood to bring Christ
to the world.
|
HOMILY
