Homily - The Third Sunday of Advent - 16 December 2018

The Third Sunday of Advent (C)

Dear brothers and sisters,

When it comes to celebrations of great joy we generally put on the finest we have. Gentlemen polish their shoes and don suits. Ladies put on their nicest dress and jewelry. The one exception to this societal norm these days seems to be the celebration of Christmas when instead ugly Christmas sweaters have curiously grown in popularity over the past several years. What is it about an ugly sweater that makes so many people want to wear them in a joyful manner? Is there not in them a subtle mockery of the ugliness and disorder brought about by sin, an ugliness and disorder which the only begotten Son of God comes to destroy? In a playful way, the ugly Christmas sweater can remind us that “the one who has hope lives differently.”[1]

Some claim the hope of the Christian “is but ignorance” and founded only on possibilities, but the hope of Christians is founded on no mere possibility, but on a very great certainty.[2] What is this certainty in which we have such great confidence? It is simply this:

God is madly in love with you. The God who is love, created you in his love, and has a plan for your life. He invites you to share in his love and, even though you turned away from him, he constantly seeks you, out of love, to restore you to himself. He is so in love with you he sent his Son, Jesus Christ, to die for you so that you can be reunited with him. He wants to forgive you, and to heal you of whatever wounds and burdens you carry. He wants a personal relationship with you and wants you to follow him so you can be happy in this life and be with him forever in Heaven.[3]

The joyful hope of Christians is founded on the certainty of the Birth of Jesus Christ at Bethlehem and of his glorious return at the end of time; it is founded on the certainty that “the Lord is near” (Philippians 4:5). Does this hope live in you?

It is God himself who “is the foundation of hope: not any god, but the God who has a human face and who has loved us to the end, each one of us and humanity in its entirety.”[4] The one who has hope – and not simply optimism – is the one possessed by God, whose life is founded on union with Christ, who has baptized us “with the Holy Spirit and fire” (Luke 3:16). They live lives of generosity, of honesty, and of humility, all in imitation of Christ Jesus (cf. Luke 3:10-14).

Everyone who lives this season of Advent well cannot help but notice and be almost overwhelmed by the eager and increasing hopefulness of these days as we await the coming of the Lord. This expectant hope produces within the soul a deep pocket of joy seemingly ready to burst forth and overflow. It is for this reason that the readings today are so marked by the themes of joy, rejoicing, and gladness.

The prophet Zephaniah exclaims, “Shout for joy, O daughter Zion! Sing joyfully, O Israel” (Zephaniah 3:14)! Isaiah calls us to “cry out with joy and gladness” and Saint Paul tells us to “rejoice in the Lord always” (Isaiah 12:6; Philippians 4:4). Even the Collect, which collects our individual prayers and raises them collectively before the throne of God, prays that we might celebrate always “with solemn worship and glad thanksgiving.”[5]

What is the cause of this joy, what is the reason for our rejoicing, if not the certain knowledge that “the Lord, your God, is in your midst, a mighty savior; he will rejoice over you with gladness, and renew you in his love, he will sing joyfully because of you, as one sings at festivals” (Zephaniah 3:17). This, brothers and sisters, is the hope of Christians, founded on the certainty that Christ has come “to bring glad tidings to the poor,” the good news of victory over sin and death through his total giving of self that has won for us the forgiveness of sins (Isaiah 61:1). With the prophet Isaiah we can say, “My strength and my courage is the Lord, and he has been my savior” (Isaiah 12:2).

This same Lord who came among us so many centuries ago, who gives us courage and strength by his presence among us even now, will also come in his glory to judge the living and the dead. This realization gives the season of Advent a profound sense of joyful hope and at the same time it gives it a penitential character. It is, one might say, a spirit of joyful penance or of penitential joy, for while we know that he is coming we also know that not all of us are ready to receive him and to greet him befittingly when he comes.

This is precisely why the Lord gives us these holy days to prepare for his coming and to meet him in the Sacrament of Penance so that we might be reconciled with him and with our brothers and sisters. This requires, first of all, an awareness of the reality of our sins; to accept the good news of the Gospel, we must also accept the bad news of our sinful condition: each of us is sinful and has committed sin, whether great or small. We are all in need of God’s mercy.

Too often today it is said, “I’m a good person. I haven’t stolen anything, killed anyone, or committed adultery (which, today, is often untrue). I don’t have any real sins,” so many people say. Rubbish! We have all sinned, we have all failed to love God and to love neighbor fully, and so we are in need of the Lord’s mercy, which he wishes to bestow upon us in the confessional. Let us, then, hasten there that the words of Isaiah might be fulfilled in us: “With joy you will draw water at the fountain of salvation” (Isaiah 12:3).

Many will say that their sins are always the same and wonder about the point of going to confession, whether it does any good at all. The Pope Emeritus Benedict XVI once put it this way to a group of children:

It is true: Our sins are always the same, but we clean our homes, our rooms, at least once a week, even if the dirt is always the same; in order to live in cleanliness, in order to start again. Otherwise, the dirt might not be seen but it builds up. Something similar can be said about the soul, for me myself; If I never go to confession, my soul is neglected and in the end I am pleased with myself and no longer understand that I must always work hard to improve, that I must make progress. And this cleansing of the soul which Jesus gives us in the sacrament of confession helps us to make our consciences more alert, more open, and hence, it also helps us to mature spiritually and as human persons.[6]

By going to confession on a regular basis, even if confessing the same sins again and again, the Lord changes what is ugly in us into beauty and brings order out of chaos; we are strengthened with the Lord’s grace, and this is always a cause of joy and gladness and a bolster of hope. While there is still time, let us live differently; let us seek his mercy so that we might rejoice always in the Lord, confident that he is near, and so celebrate the festival of his Birth in nine days “with love and thanksgiving.”[7] Amen!

---

[1] Pope Benedict XVI, Spe salvi, 2.

[2] J. R. R. Tolkien, The Return of the King: Being the Third Part of the Lord of the Rings (Boston, Massachusetts: Houghton Mifflin Company, 1994), 835.

[3] Edward Sri, Who Am I to Judge? Responding to Relativism with Logic and Love (San Francisco: Ignatius Press, 2016), 87.

[4] Pope Benedict XVI, Spe salvi, 31.

[5] Collect, Third Sunday of Advent, Roman Missal.

[6] Pope Benedict XVI, Address to First Communicants, 15 October 2009.

[7] Collect of the Day.

Homily - 9 December 2018 - The Second Sunday of Advent

The Second Sunday of Advent (C)

Dear brothers and sisters,

This past week, the United States of America observed the obsequies for her forty-first President. Before laying him to rest in College Station, Texas, funeral ceremonies were celebrated for George Herbert Walker Bush in Washington, D.C. in the so-called National Cathedral, part of the Anglican Communion first begun by King Henry VIII of England.

Watching the ceremonies out of a patriotic virtue and with a desire to prayer for the repose of his soul, a number of people sent questions to me via Facebook asking something along these lines: “I’m watching the funeral for George Bush and they have recited the Apostles Creed both days, including ‘Holy Catholic Church’. What’s the relationship between the Episcopal and Catholic Church?” Given the number of these questions I received, I thought I might address it this morning, supposing some of you had the same question.

The first mention of the Apostles’ Creed comes to us from a letter of Saint Ambrose of Milan, the great preacher who taught and baptized Saint Augustine of Hippo. In his letter, Saint Ambrose said, “Let them give credit to the Creed of the Apostles, which the Roman Church has always kept and preserved undefiled.”[1] He wrote this letter around the year 390, indicating that the Apostles’ Creed was already then well known. Already by the third century, this “rule of faith” was considered to be part of apostolic tradition and those seeking the grace of Baptism were required to accept it, as remains the same today. The Apostles’ Creed is, at were, a summary of the Christian faith, that which must be believed in order to receive Baptism and thus become a Christian.

When we speak of the “holy catholic Church,” we use a term first used – so far as we know - by Saint Ignatius of Antioch. The word “Catholic” comes from two Greek words: Kata, meaning “according to,” and holos, meaning “the whole.” Catholic then means “according to the whole,” or, put more simply, “universal.” Around the year A.D. 110, Saint Ignatius said,

Let no man do anything connected with the Church without the bishop. Let that be deemed a proper Eucharist, which is administered either by the bishop, or by one to whom he has entrusted it. Wherever the bishop shall appear, there let the multitude of the people also be; even as wherever Jesus Christ is, there is the Catholic Church.[2]

Jesus Christ is present in the Catholic Church both because it is he who established the Church and because it is in the Catholic Church that the Sacrament of his Body and Blood is found.

Now, if a group of Christians does not have the Eucharist, if they have – like the members of the Anglican Communion - taken authority upon themselves and not received it from the Bishop, they are not part of the Catholic Church, despite what they say. Saint Augustine put it this way:

The consent of peoples and nations keeps me in the Church; so does her authority, inaugurated by miracles, nourished by hope, enlarged by love, established by age. The succession of priests keeps me, beginning from the very seat of the apostle Peter, to whom the Lord, after his Resurrection, gave it in charge to feed his sheep, down to the present episcopate. And so, lastly, does the name itself of Catholic, which, not without reason, amid so many heresies, the Church has thus retained; so that; though all heretics wish to be called Catholics, yet when a stranger asks where the Catholic Church meets, no heretic will venture to point to his own chapel or house.[3]

How, then, does one, in this age of so much confusion, determine where the holy catholic Church is to be found? The answer is found in the Nicene-Constantinopolitan Creed in which we profess “one, holy, catholic, and apostolic Church.” Where each of these four marks are found together, there is the Catholic Church.

First, the Church is one because Christ did not establish a series of Churches, but one, gathered around Saint Peter and his successors, with whom the members of the Catholic Church maintain a spiritual communion.

Second, the Church is holy because she was established by Christ and because she is his Mystical Body. While the Church herself is holy, her members are sinners called to holiness, every one of us. This is why J.R.R. Tolkien spoke of the Church as “the temple of the Holy Spirit dying but living, corrupt but holy, self-reforming and rearising.”[4]

To help her members become saints, the Church has been entrusted with everything necessary for salvation; within the Church, nothing is lacking. What are these means to salvation? The Scriptures; prayer; the Sacraments, especially the valid Eucharist; the apostolic succession; union with the Bishop of Rome, the Pope, who shepherds the Church in the name of Christ. Some of these are present outside of the Catholic Church, but they are not all found together outside of her.

Third, the Church is universal, present throughout the world and not confined to any particular people or geographic location.

Fourth, the Church is apostolic because Christ Jesus founded it on the Apostle Peter with the rest of the Twelve. This foundation upon the Apostles is essential to the nature of the Church for it is through the apostolic succession that the mandate of missionary activity is handed on through the ages in every place. It is the through the apostolic succession that the faith of the Church is handed on through the apostolic tradition in the Church.

This Church constituted and organized in the world as a society, subsists in the Catholic Church, which is governed by the successor of Peter and by the Bishops in communion with him, although many elements of sanctification and of truth are found outside of its visible structure. These elements, as gifts belonging to the Church of Christ, are forces impelling toward catholic unity.[5]

Consequently, the Catholic Church – and no other - is the Church of Christ.

Here, it should be remembered that,

according to Catholic doctrine, [the Protestant] Communities do not enjoy apostolic succession in the sacrament of [Holy] Orders, and are, therefore, deprived of a constitutive element of the Church. These ecclesial Communities which, specifically because of the absence of the sacramental priesthood, have not preserved the genuine and integral substance of the Eucharistic Mystery cannot, according to Catholic doctrine, be called “Churches” in the proper sense.[6]

Because they do not possess the four marks of the Church, we refer to them not as Churches but as “ecclesial communities,” as Church-like communities, you might say.

Even so, it is possible to come to salvation within a Protestant denomination, if one has not rejected the truth of the Catholic Church:

It follows that these separated churches and Communities, though we believe they suffer from defects, are deprived neither of significance nor importance in the mystery of salvation. In fact the Spirit of Christ has not refrained from using them as instruments of salvation, whose value derives from that fullness of grace and of truth which has been entrusted to the Catholic Church.[7]

Whatever graces are received within the ecclesial communities flows from the pierced side of Christ through the Catholic Church; they contain some, but not all, of the means of salvation.

Now, you might be asking, what does this have to do with Advent? With Saint John the Baptist, the Catholic Church continually cries out, “Prepare the way of the Lord” (Luke 3:4). By doing so, she calls all people to “see the salvation of God” (Luke 1:6). Because she is “confident … that the one who began a good work in [us] will continue to complete it until the day of Christ Jesus,” Mother Church calls us to “go forth weeping” with the tears of sincere repentance into the confessional, so that, with our sins forgiven, we “shall come back rejoicing,” “blameless for the day of Christ” (Philippians 1:6; Psalm 126:6; Philippians 1:10). Let us not ignore her call in these Advent days, let us not give in to the secularizing tendencies of these days, but let us prepare our hearts to be received by the Lord and to look upon the radiant glory of his Face, when at last he comes. Amen.

---

[1] Saint Ambrose of Milan, Letter 42.5, to Pope Siricius, ca. 390.

[2] Saint Ignatius of Antioch, Letter to Smyrnaeans, 8.

[3] Saint Augustine of Hippo, Against the Letter of Mani Called “The Foundation,” 4.5. In Jimmy Akin, The Father’s Know Best: Your Essential Guide to the Teachings of the Early Church (San Diego: Catholic Answers, 2010), 180.

[4] J.R.R. Tolkien, Letter 250, To Michael Tolkien, 1 November 1963. In Humphrey Carpenter, ed., The Letters of J.R.R. Tolkien (Boston: Houghton Mifflin Company, 2000), 339.

[5] Lumen gentium, 8.

[6] “Responses to Some Questions Regarding Certain Aspects of the Doctrine on the Church,” Response to Question Five.

[7] Unitatis redintegratio, 3.4.

Homily - 8 December 2018 - The Solemnity of the Immaculate Conception

The Solemnity of the Immaculate Conception

Dear brothers and sisters,

What is it that so distinguishes the Blessed Virgin Mary from us? The obvious answer is that none of us has physically given birth to the Son of God, but there is something greater yet that distinguishes her from us. The fundamental difference between the Mother of God and us is found in obedience. We, like our first parents, very often disobey the Lord God and look upon him as a rival; we do not like our creaturely status and are thus prone to harbor an antagonism against the Creator and to strive against his will (cf. Genesis 3:6). Mary, on the other hand, delights in her status as a creature and recognizes the love of the Creator for her – and for all of us – and simply says to him, “May it be done” (Luke 1:38).

Reflecting on the reality of our lives, the celebrated author and Christian apologist C.S. Lewis once said that obedience

appears to me more and more the whole business of life, the only road to love and peace – the cross and the crown in one … What indeed can we imagine Heaven to be but unimpeded obedience. I think this is one of the causes of our love of inanimate nature, that in it we see things which unswervingly carry out the will of their Creator, and are therefore wholly beautiful: and though their kind of obedience is infinitely lower than ours, yet the degree is so much more perfect that a Christian can see the reason that the Romantics had in feeling a certain holiness in the wood and water.[1]

The Romantics, of course, such as Henry David Thoreau and Walt Whitman, took this too far, but that is a conversation perhaps for another day. The forest is beautiful because the trees and streams do what they were created to do, and in so doing they glorify God. The sunset is beautiful because the sun and the clouds and the sky do what they were created to do. The natural world is beautiful because it is obedient.

The great J.R.R. Tolkien once said it is upon the Blessed Virgin Mary that “all my own small perception of beauty both in majesty and simplicity is founded.”[2] The great beauty of Mary which has captivated so many artists and poets through the centuries is found in her beauty; she is eminently beautiful because she willingly and lovingly obeyed the will of God in all things. This is why Saint Irenaeus of Lyons said, “The knot of Eve’s disobedience was loosed by the obedience of Mary.”[3]

We know that through the disobedience of Adam and Eve, our first parents, sin and death entered into Creation and the original righteousness with which the Creator created was lost. Saint Paul tells us that “as by one man’s disobedience many were many sinners, so by one man’s obedience many will be made righteous” (Romans 5:19).

If Jesus is the new Adam, then salvation is not just about saving sinners from the fires of hell. It is about undoing the effects of the Fall of Adam and Eve… What does any of this have to do with Mary? The answer is simple: If Jesus is the new Adam, then who is the new Eve? According to the book of Genesis, Adam is not the only human being created by God and placed in the Garden of Eden. Moreover, Adam does not bring sin and death into the world alone. As Adam’s partner, Eve plays an essential role in bringing about the fall of humankind.[4]

So, too, does Mary play an essential role in bringing about the redemption of humankind, and of all of Creation. This is why Saint Augustine says that “through woman, poison was poured upon man, in order to deceive him, but salvation was poured out upon man from a woman, that he might be reborn in grace.”[5] So great is the honor of the new Eve, of the Blessed Virgin Mary, that she “Mary benefited first of all and uniquely from Christ’s victory over sin: she was persevered from all stain of original sin and by a special grace committed no sin of any kind during her whole earthly life.”[6]

Here it is good to ask what we mean by the original sin, what it is that we are subject to, but Mary is not. If we are honest, we know that

…a contradiction exists in our being. On the one hand every person knows that he must do good and intimately wants to do it. Yet at the same time he also feels the other impulse to do the contrary, to follow the path of selfishness and violence, to do only what pleases him, while also knowing that in this way he is acting against the good, against God and against his neighbor. In his Letter to the Romans St Paul expressed this contradiction in our being in this way: "I can will what is right, but I cannot do it. For I do not do the good I want, but I do the evil I do not want" (7:18-19). This inner contradiction of our being is not a theory. Each one of us experiences it every day. And above all we always see around us the prevalence of this second will. It is enough to think of the daily news of injustice, violence, falsehood and lust. We see it every day. It is a fact.[7]

By the singular grace of her Immaculate Conception, Mary was free from all stain of this original sin, but we, of course, are not.

We celebrate this great Solemnity of the Immaculate Conception in the midst of Advent as we are preparing for the Second Coming of Christ Jesus for two reasons. The first is rather obvious: nine months from today, on September 8^th, we will celebrate the Nativity of the Blessed Virgin Mary. The second reason is a bit more profound: Mary provides for us a shining example of obedience to the will of God.

Tomorrow, we will hear Saint John the Baptist cry out, “Prepare the way of the Lord” (Luke 3:4; cf. Isaiah 40:3)! Mary teaches us to prepare the way of the Lord; we do so by complete and loving obedience to his command, by loving God and neighbor above all else, even more than myself. Let us, then, ask her to intercede for us and to shine a light upon the darkness of our hearts, so that, by confessing our sinful disobedience of God, “we may be delivered from all our faults.”[8] Then, with the Immaculate Conception, we will be able to “sing joyfully to the Lord” when at last he comes (Psalm 98:3). Amen.

---

[1] C.S. Lewis, Letter to Alan Griffiths. In Philip Zaleski and Carol Zaleski, The Fellowship: The Literary Lives of the Inklings: J.R.R. Tolkien, C.S. Lewis, Owen Barfield, Charles Williams (New York: Farrar, Straus, and Giroux, 2016), 250.

[2] J.R.R. Tolkien, Letter to Robert Murray, S.J., 2 December 1953. In Humphrey Carpenter, ed., The Letters of J.R.R. Tolkien (Boston: Houghton Mifflin Company, 2000), 172.

[3] Saint Irenaeus of Lyons, Against Heresies, 3.22.4. In Brant Pitre, Jesus and the Jewish Roots of Mary: Unveiling the Mother of the Messiah (New York: Image, 2018), 34.

[4] Brant Pitre, Jesus and the Jewish Roots of Mary: Unveiling the Mother of the Messiah (New York: Image, 2018), 15-16.

[5] Saint Augustine of Hippo, Sermon 51.3. In Brant Pitre, Jesus and the Jewish Roots of Mary, 35.

[6] Catechism of the Catholic Church, 411.

[7] Pope Benedict XVI, General Audience Address, 3 December 2008.

[8] Roman Missal, Prayer over the Offerings for the Solemnity of the Immaculate Conception.

Islamic State Ongoing Updates - December 2018

Previous Updates: November 2018 | October 2018 | September 2018 | August 2018 | July 2018 | October 2017 | September 2017 | August 2017 |  July 2017 | June 2017 |  May 2017 | April 2017 | March 2017 | February 2017 | January 2017 | December 2016 | November 2016 | September 2016 | August 2016 | July 2016 | June 2016 | May 2016 | April 2016 | March 2016 | February 2016| January 2016 | December 2015 | November 2015 | October 2015 | September 2015 | August 2015 | July 2015| June 2015 | May 2015 | April 2015 | March 2015 | February 2015 | January 2015 | December 2014 | November 2014 | October 2014 | April - November 2014 |

19 December 2018

• UPDATE (12-21-18): Trump says ISIS defeated in Syria as US prepares exit
• UPDATE (12-21-18): Abdulrahman El Bahnasawy Sentenced To 40 Years In Prison For Plotting To Carry Out Terrorist Attacks in New York City For ISIS In Summer Of 2016

17 December 2018

• UPDATE (12-21-18): Iraq's Post-ISIS Campaign of Revenge

14 December 2018

• UPDATE (12-21-18): Class to make you count your blessings: Schoolchildren in Raqqa finally have their first lessons in four years after ISIS's reign of terror

13 December 2018

• UPDATE (12-21-18): Lund profession freed student from Islamic State war zone

12 December 2018

• UPDATE (12-21-18): U.S. Downplays Reports of Surge in ISIS Activity

7 December 2018

• UPDATE (12-21-18): Prince Charles praises Sister who helped Christians escape ISIS

3 December 2018

• UPDATE (12-04-18): Boy, 11, vows to cut off his enemies' heads in chilling ISIS video before he and his brother, 17, are shot dead by police after ramming a car into cops in Chechnya
• UPDATE (12-04-18): Analysis: IS steps us use of Telegram 'groups' feature

4 December 2018

• Former soldier sentenced to 25 years for trying to help Islamic State
• U.S. Soldier Sentenced to 25 Year in Prison for Attempting to Provide Material Support to ISIS

Homily - The First Sunday of Advent - 2 December 2018

The First Sunday of Advent (C)

Dear brothers and sisters,

With the celebration of Vespers yesterday evening, we entered into my favorite season of the year, one too often overlooked. It is not my favorite time of the year because of the cold and snow (some of my favorite memories of this season come from a land of sun and sand). Nor is it my favorite time of year because of the hectic frenzy, jealousy, and anxiety we allow ourselves to be worked up into. Rather, this season is my favorite time of year because it stands diametrically opposed to the busyness that the secularism thrusts upon us this time each year. This is my favorite time of year because “there’s an imaginative fertility and a reaching ambition” in the season of Advent “which offers something much richer than just a cheery countdown to Christmas.”[1]

This season of Advent has become quite overshadowed and even eclipsed altogether by so many premature celebrations of Christmas. One of the causes of this problem is that “everybody wants … Christmas without Advent just like we want dessert without eating our vegetables.”[2] This happens because we do not have a proper understanding of what the Season of Advent is all about. Just as we lose something of great importance by not eating our vegetables, so, too, do we lose something of great importance by diminishing Advent or by skipping it altogether.

Even as Advent began in the quiet of the evening, all around us supposed celebrations of Christmas have already begun. I say supposed because, if you pay attention, they are not at all celebrations of the Birth of Christ, but rather celebrations of commercialism, materialism, or winter, or some combination of the three. Have you tried looking for Christmas cards this year? Unless you go to a specifically religious store, good luck finding cards that speak of the Bethlehem event. Most cards might mention the name “Christmas,” but there is nothing else concerning Christmas about them. In all of this, we should not forget what saint Augustine preached in one of his Christmas sermons: “What we don’t want to do,” he said, “is surround this celebration of Our Lord’s birth of a Virgin with all sorts of silliness.” Today, even as we claim to celebrate Christmas right now, we have largely abandoned it.

We desperately need to rediscover the quite beauty of Advent if our hearts are not to “become drowsy from carousing and drunkenness and the anxieties of daily life” (Luke 21:34). Because so many of our Christmas celebrations – such as they are these days – have crept earlier and earlier such the actual Christmas season is largely ignored, we have forgotten what Advent is about.

The Universal Norms on the Liturgical Year and the General Roman Calendar tell us that "Advent has a twofold character, for it is a time of preparation for the Solemnities of Christmas, in which the First Coming of the Son of God to humanity is remembered, and likewise a time when, by remembrance of this, minds and hearts are led to look forward to Christ's Second Coming at the end of time. For these two reasons, Advent is a period of devout and expectant delight."[3]

Advent, then, looks forward by first looking backward. What do I mean?

Mother Church has assigned for us throughout the season of Advent Scriptural readings that

urge us to ready ourselves for the coming of an event which has already happened, thousands of years ago; and they direct us to look not just towards the immediate future, as we count down four weeks forwards into our own lives, but towards the eventual future, the Apocalypse, the end of all time.[4]

We see this in the dual direction in the readings we heard just a few moments ago.

The first reading directed out attention to the past event of the Birth of Christ, to that great day the Lord fulfilled the promise he made to the house of Israel and Judah (cf. Jeremiah 33:14). Humanity had fallen out of friendship with God through the Original Sin, but the Lord himself promised to reconcile mankind to himself (cf. Psalm 25:15). This he accomplished through the Death and Resurrection of Jesus Christ so that we might no longer live estranged from him. This is the Good News of the Gospel, that through his Paschal Mystery the Lord Jesus, the Second Person of the Most Holy Trinity, took on human flesh in the womb of the Blessed Virgin Mary and was born among us; that he healed the sick, cast our demons, forgave sins, and raised the dead; that he suffered on the Cross for us and by his Death and Resurrection has destroyed death and defeated the Enemy; that he established his Church so that his ministry of healing and forgiveness might continue even among us today here in Ashland. But if we do not recognize the evil of sin and of the separation it causes from God, this is news is not so good to us and certainly nothing to celebrate. This is, I dare to say, where we are as a society; we have forgotten sin and so have forgotten our need for redemption and salvation.

How often do we wander away from him? How often, even today, do we place ourselves outside of his friendship through our sin? How often do we reject his grace and live as if he does not exist? The contemplation of this tragic reality of our fallen human condition led Saint Augustine to say to God,

Turned out of paradise by you and wandering to a far-off country, I cannot return by my own strength unless you come to meet me in my wandering, for my return has been waiting on your mercy throughout the whole stretch of earthly time.[5]

Is this not true of each of us, as well? We need the Lord to come to us, to meet us in our wandering, to grant us his mercy, and show the us way to the Father’s house. He first came to meet us when he was born at Bethlehem; he comes to meet us each day in the Holy Eucharist and in the Scriptures; and he will come once more to meet us as our Judge. This is the focus of Advent: it looks backward in order to look forward.

In the Gospel, Jesus directed our attention to the future event of the Last Day, to that day when every eye “will see the Son of Man coming in a cloud with power and great glory” (Luke 21:27). On that day of judgment, everyone who allowed the Lord to meet them in their wandering and who accepted the grace of his mercy will be welcomed into the joys of heaven. But on that day of judgment, everyone who refused the Lord’s invitation to receive his merciful love and continued in their sinful wandering will have their rejection of the Lord honored eternally. When that day comes, which will it be for you and me? This is the great question of Advent. This sacred time is given us by the Church to call us to a deeper reflection on the sincerity of our discipleship of the Lord Jesus.

If we allow it to penetrate our hearts with its quiet peace, if we allow the Lord to teach us his way by opening our hearts to him in silence, this Season of Advent will strengthen our faith, hope, and love with a steadily growing and joyful eagerness to meet the Lord when he comes. If we reject the hectic frenzy, jealousy, and anxiety of these secularized days to instead welcome the patience of Advent into our hearts, this great season will prepare us to “stand erect and raise [our] heads” in the humble confidence that out “redemption is close at hand” (Luke 21:28). Then, inspired by a sincere trust in the Lord and waiting upon his kindness, everything else will fall into place because we will have discovered and embraced what is most important.

Above all, Advent is a time of watching and waiting, and, as a society, waiting is not something we like to do, but it is something we must do. Now is the time to wait on the Lord’s mercy. Saint Augustine is right to remind us that

[God] will teach his ways not to those who want to run on ahead, as if they could rule themselves better than he can, but to those who do not strut about with their heads in the air or dig in their heels, when his easy yoke and light burden are set upon them.[6]

Let us, then, not allow the celebration of Christmas to eclipse Advent; let us not resist or struggle against its grace, but simply and quietly settle into it. Let us allow the wisdom of the Church and of her Lord to take root in our hearts by prayerfully reading the Scriptures assigned to the Mass each day of Advent. If we honor Advent in this way, these days will indeed acquire the imaginative fertility of God that will transform them into something more than just a cheery countdown to Christmas. Let us, then, beg the Lord to give us docile hearts in these days of Advent so that, having used them well, we will “run forth to meet [the] Christ with righteous deeds at his coming” and be found “worthy to possess the heavenly kingdom.”[7] Amen.

---

[1] Eleanor Parker, “‘If in a day of Doom one deathless stands,’” A Clerk of Oxford, 1 December 2018. 2018.

[2] Dwight Longenecker, “The Christmas Curmudgeon,” 1 December 2018.

[3] Universal Norms on the Liturgical Year and the General Roman Calendar, 39

[4] Eleanor Parker, “‘Swa leaf on treowum,’” A Clerk of Oxford, 28 November 2016.

[5] Saint Augustine of Hippo, Expositions on the Psalms, 25.5.

[6] Ibid., 25.9.

[7] Collect of the First Sunday of Advent, Roman Missal.