First Sunday of Advent. Cycle A November 27, 2022

 First Sunday of Advent.     Cycle A    November 27, 2022

 The word "advent" means a coming, an arrival.  We are expecting and looking for something to happen, or more accurately, for someone to arrive.   It is the liturgical equivalent of being parked at the cell phone lot at ABIA, waiting for your friend or family member to land.  It is a time of patient expectation. 

          On one level we are looking forward to the celebration of Christmas.   Since before Halloween, stores and commercial enterprises have put out their Christmas decorations.  We won’t do that here in church till December 24.   For weeks Christmas music has been playing on the radio.  We won’t sing carols and Christmas hymns till the 24^th of December.  We take this period of Advent as a time of preparation and expectation, but for something very different and far richer than a commercial Christmas.  

          Advent is the first part of the word “adventure”.  I hope this Advent will be for you an adven-ture of waiting and preparing for the coming of the Christ, both at Christmas, and more importantly at the end of time.

          The end of time.   When is that?   St. Paul in our second reading plainly states: “Brothers and sisters: You know the time;”   However, in the Gospel today Jesus seems to contradict St. Paul, when Jesus declares “For you do not know on which day your Lord will come.” 

          Well, we do know the time in the sense that we have been warned.   St Paul warns us “it is hour now for you to awake from sleep.”  Getting up in the morning is NOT my favorite thing to do.  Maybe you jump up out of bed all excited to take on another day, but now being in my 70’s, I do not.  Anyway, it is now the hour for us to awake from sleep, the spiritual sleep of being dulled by routine and the comfort of the familiar. 

          It is that time in the morning just before the sun rises, when the sky is no longer black, but a dark blueish purple, hinting at the dawn to come.  We wear vestments that are blueish purple to distinguish this season from Lent, and also to allude or hint that we are far into the night, the sky is already slightly changing, the Son will soon arrive, and the new day, the day of the Lord, is coming.  “It is the hour now for you to awake from sleep.”  St Paul states “the night is advanced, the day is at hand.”    It is a new dawn.

          Being spiritually and ethically awake then, you will NOT be taken by surprise on the day your Lord will come.  The five people shot and killed at the Club Q last Saturday in Colorado, nor the four people murdered in Hennessey OK last Sunday, nor the hundreds killed in the earthquake and sunami that struck the Cianjur region in West Java, in Indonesia on Monday, nor the seven people murdered at the Walmart in Chesapeake VA, on Tuesday, nor the two people shot and killed in Houston on Thursday, did not expect to die that day. 

          As Jesus tells us in our Gospel today: “For you do not know on which day your Lord will come.”   We just don’t know.  So we need to stay spiritually awake, ready to welcome the Lord when He comes to us, at the end of our life, or at the end of time. 

          For we do know, by faith, that the Day of the Lord is coming.  A day of liberation and restoration. A day with no more war: “They shall beat their swords into plows, and their spears into pruning hooks.  On nation shall not raise the sword against another, nor shall they train for war again.”   A day of healing, a day of reconciliation, a day of wholeness and completion.  A day of Peace and Fullness. 

¡Come Lord Jesus!

Homily 32 Sunday of Ordinary Time C November 6, 2022

 Homily    32 Sunday of Ordinary Time C    November 6, 2022

Last week we had the Annual Catholic Services Appeal and I dutifully preached on it.  Thank you for all who have responded.  However, I wish it had been this week, because I have found the readings that the Church gives us this week to be extraordinarily difficult to preach on.  Oh well.

In the Gospel the Sadducees try their luck in trapping Jesus.  They present Jesus with a very odd question.   Seven brothers in succession all marry this one women.  None of them have any children, and one after another the brothers die.  Finally the women dies.  (Probably of exhaustion).  And the Sadducees want to know whose wife she will be in the Resurrection?  The Sadducees were the anti-resurrection party.  They did not believe in resurrection.  That is why they were “sad-you-see”.    ….

The Sadducees try to put God in a box.  But of course, you cannot do that.  God exceeds our logic and all our attempts to comprehend God.  As St. Augustine of Hippo said, “whatever you think God is, that is NOT God.”  God does not fit into any of our rules or plans.  No thought can even grasp God.  God is beyond all of our categories. 

That does not mean we cannot say things about God that are true.  In our second reading St. Paul tell us “But the Lord is faithful….”  And indeed God is faithful.  We can rely on God’s Word, Jesus Christ. 

St. John tells us “God is love.”  And that is also true.  But that still leaves a lot of room for exploration. 

All of us must grapple with the mysterious but real nature of God.  How do we know that there really is a God?   And more importantly, how do I know God’s Will for me?  Is God a figment of my imagination, or an actual reality that grounds and sustains all of reality?

          This is a question each of us must answer for ourselves.  We cannot rely on anyone else to answer this for us.  It is a deeply personal answer. And it is not a once-for-ever answer.  It is not the case that once you resolve satisfactorily for yourself the issue whether God exists or not that you are done and finished.   As we age and develop we hopefully outgrow the answers that satisfied us earlier, and so must continue to expand and deepen our understanding of God. 

And the thing is, there is no end to this process.  There is no point, nor can there ever be a point, at which we come to a full and complete understanding of God.  Such an understanding doesn’t exist.

One of my favorite theologians, Karl Rahner, said that the incomprehensibility of God is the blessedness of man.  I liked that so much that I put it on my ordination holy card.  The incomprehensibility of God is the blessedness of man.

The fact that we will never be able to fully understand God is our blessedness.  Because once we fully comprehended God, there would be nothing more to live for, nothing more to explore, nothing more to learn.  There would be nothing more. 

But we will never do that.  For all eternity we will go deeper and deeper into the unfathomable mystery of God, forever learning, forever exploring, forever grasping new insights and deeper understanding of the transcendent nature of The True, The Good, The Beautiful:  of the fullest and most mind-blowing reality of God, and ever deeper and deeper into love.  That is our destiny as members of the Body of Christ.  And it is wonderful indeed!  

As we sang in our Psalm Response today: “Lord, when your glory appears, my joy will be full.”  

AMEN.