Jeremiah 33:14-16 + Psalm 25: 4-5, 8-9, 10, 14 + 1 Thessalonians 3:12-4:2 + Luke 21:25-28, 34-36
Click here to listen to today's homily
Delivered at Holy Spirit Catholic Church in Mustang, Oklahoma
During this Advent season we find ourselves in an in-between
time. Between the coming of the infant Savior born in Bethlehem and the Son of
Man returning in glory to judge all creation. Between those lullabies away in a
manger and the storm of the day of the returning Lord.
Advent therefore causes us to look back, to look back and to
see how God fulfills God’s promises — how God is always faithful to what God
says God will do. Promising to the prophet and through the prophet Jeremiah
that He would raise up a “Just Shoot” for Israel and so He does in the Lord Our
Justice, the Savior of the World. Looking forward into the future, knowing that
the God who is faithful will remain so in the days and years ahead. And so,
looking forward with hope, hope-filled hearts, knowing that history itself is
not meaningless. Our lives are not meaningless, that rather, we are all heading
somewhere toward and ultimate goal, toward this end point who is Jesus, the
Christ, the King of Glory and King of the Universe.
So, filled with trust, overflowing with hope, how can we not
be an Advent people who live in joy, expectant joy, knowing that the Lord who
has come and who will come, continues to come? In fact, we are an Advent people
always because the Lord continues to come to us.
The question is: Do we welcome Him as He comes? What
prevents us from opening the door of our hearts and our lives to receiving Him
today?
The Jesus in Luke describes twin threats to receiving Him as
He comes. Carousing and drunkenness? I look at this crowd and say you probably
wouldn’t be here this morning if you were under that threat. Maybe too many
Christmas parties in the days ahead, but not that threat. But the second
threat: The anxieties of daily life. Anxieties that are birthed in the womb of fear,
anxieties that cause us to focus solely on today, to protecting what is ours,
to hunkering down in our bunkers. In fact, it seems at times that our world
runs on the fuel of fear. And that we tend to, therefore, run around and run
around in circles trying to anxiously hold on to what we have and always
fearful that it will be taken from us.
This kind of fear flows from a lie. It is no accident we
call the Evil One “The Father of Lies” and the lie that he wants us to believe:
This is all there is. This is all there is. What we can see and touch – that’s
all there is. And so, when we lose our possessions or some of the stuff we
have, fear paralyses our hearts. When we lose our health in thinking “This is
all there is”, fear closes out the joy that should be the mark of our
days.
We can in fact become like trees weighed down with ice. You
know, trees as trees are meant to be, they reach to the Heavens. They stretch
to the Infinite. Rooted in the earth, they are made to reach to God. The same
for us, but when we are bowed down by the frozen nature of our fears, it is
hard to stand erect and to reach toward the One who has made us not for fear
but to live rooted in joy and to recognize the truth that Jesus comes to
proclaim: This is not all there is. There is something much, much more than
what we can see and touch.
And so it is every year on the first Sunday of Advent, the
Church focuses us on the end time, on the eternal call of God to dwell with Him
in glory for all eternity. To recognize, yes, what we do on this earth counts
and we will all stand before the Son of Man to be judged on how we have lived,
but this is not all there is! That even if we lose it all, even if we lose
these frail, fragile lives of ours, whatever we place in God’s hands, that we
will possess forever. It is never lost to us. And thus, we can be people of joy
even when fear weighs us down, even when we are tempted to embrace fear instead
of the trust that God has made us to live from, instead of the very fountain of
hope that we are called to drink from.
The challenge therefore for us also is to help others who
are bowed down by fear, who are stooped over because of the daily anxieties
that weigh them down, to help them to stand erect, to raise up their heads and
to see the One coming to them to set them free by the warmth of God’s love and
light, the One who comes to them in and through us, the living Body of Christ.
We do this in a very special way as Jeremiah reminds us of that title he gives
to the Savior by working for justice. He calls the Savior “The Lord of Justice”
— that where we see something that has gone awry, we make it right; where
something is wrong, we make it right. Where human dignity is bowed down by
injustice, we break those bonds and lift people up so that they may see, and
only see, the God-given dignity of every human person.
Minoru Yasui understood this truth. Minoru lived during a
time of great fear, after the bombing of Pearl Harbor in the early 1940’s in
our country. Minoru was a Japanese-American, who lived in the northwest, a
bright young man, a lawyer by trade who believed in the founding principles of
this country – liberty and equality and justice for all. And so, when a law was
passed, a curfew was demanded of all Japanese-Americans — “be in your homes by a
certain time” — He said, “This is not right, this is not just. And so, he broke
the law. He broke the curfew. He even went to the local police station and
said, “Here I am breaking the law, put me away.” Because he wanted to bring to
the courts, to the court’s attention, the injustice of such a fear-filled law.
And so, as he was put in solitary confinement, Mr. Yasui held on to the hope
that his case would prevail. As he spent months upon months all alone in his
little cell, he was fueled by this hope that somehow the principles of this
country would be lived out by its people. And even when his case failed before
the Supreme Court, and he was sent away with other Japanese-Americans to those
internment camps on the West Coast, he never gave up his hope that as Americans
we would live by what we say we believe — liberty and justice for all.
For his tireless work, for his hope that sustained him to
work for the dignity of those who were so discriminated against, this past week
he was given the Presidential Medal of Freedom, the highest recognition any
civilian can receive in our land. And he reminds us, as do all people who lift
up others who are bowed down, that indeed, working for justice in whatever way
we do so, working to make right what has gone wrong, requires this kind of
hopefulness, this kind of courage, knowing that that kind of work is the work
really of the Lord, Our Justice. The Lord who comes and who continues to come in
order to bring God’s justice to the world, in order that all people, especially
those who are bowed down by injustice, may be lifted up, may stand erect, raise
their heads and know that they, too, have a God-given dignity that no one and
no thing can take away.
So, as we move forward on our Advent journey, which really
is the journey of our lives, as we pray to the Lord to reveal to us more
clearly the fears which dominate our hearts, as we prepare for His coming to us
in surprising and mysterious ways during these sacred days, we do so in a
spirit of love that fuels our work for justice. Because as Saint Paul said to
the community at Thessalonica, and he says to us today, the way forward:
Increase and abound in love, day by day, increase and abound in love. And it is
basically what our Pope challenges us to do as well. By reaching out to see and
touch those that the world has forgotten, and to lift them up, to lift them up
by the warmth of the Coming One’s love that surges through us to them, that
strengthens them to stand erect in their God-given dignity, to lift their
burdens so that they no longer are weighed down. That they might know, as we
do, this incredible joy that comes from knowing the Lord who keeps coming to
us, as we welcome Him, and as we touch Him broken in the bodies of those around
us, with love. We hasten the day of his return, we quicken His coming in glory.
