Homily, December 3, 2023
From The Pastor
Advent is a season of hope, built on faith, with a lively anticipation of joy and renewed strength. Hope is the theological virtue that lives in communion with faith and love. Hope is built on faith, and faith is supported and animated by love. Each of these virtues is dependent on and expressive of each other. The virtue of love gets most of the front-page attention in the Christian life but love can only flow from faith in God as the source and origin of love.
Hope supports faith and love in the trials and challenges of life that can incline a person to discouragement. None of these virtues, singularly or as a group, grow in an uninterrupted increase. The challenges, losses, hurts, and tragedies of life are the very things that purify and deepen the virtues of faith, hope, and love.
If one chooses to notice, we are living in a time that is showing us a snapshot of the history of civilization. Well before the challenges Israel faced as a conquered nation, the development of human civilization had already been characterized by war, oppression, conquering nations, and a critical disregard for the dignity of human life, society, or creation. This very much is the frame of this post-modern time.
As we enter the Advent season in such a frame, how might our faith secure us against fear, doubt, discouragement, or inclination to give up on the promises of God? Such a time is the critical reason not only for the season, but for the reality it celebrates. The hope of the season is built on the acceptance, trust, and secure faith that God entered the world as Savior and Christ precisely because of the very challenges that lie before us today.
Will we cling to faith in the Incarnation of God entering our world with the promise to save, heal, and reconcile the human family? Or are we inclined to join the fifteen million or so Americans who have chosen to leave the Christian faith? I do not pretend to know the breadth or depth of reasons why people leave their faith. I will however offer, in the spirit of Advent, that in a time of economic and political uncertainty, fear, and broad social change many are unseated in a faith that no longer seems to work. If the world can have this kind of chaos, confusion, deception, social violence, and a lack of moral integrity, where is God? Many have lost hope in the reality of Divine Love and the capacity of God to control the world.
God did not become Incarnate in the person of Jesus to control the world. God came to the world to save the world from the very disorder that has befallen us. Jesus, as the Christ, came to reveal that even during time of such chaos, faith, hope, and love would nonetheless secure the day. Jesus himself is a critical example of what Advent means. Jesus lived in an oppressive time of social change and upheaval. Most were poor, most were oppressed, and most had lost a grip on the fidelity and promises of God. More personally, even as Jesus faced his personal death that would reveal our redemption, he clung with hope in the promise and experience of his Father’s love. At the point of his Crucifixion, Jesus embraced the Father’s fidelity responding, “Not my will, but your will be done.” That is faith, hope, and love on full display.
Mary is another critical example of Advent faith. Her life is radically turned upside down with a pregnancy by the Holy Spirit, bearing a child to be known as the Son of God. Mary abandoned herself to God’s promise with perfect trust against the chaos of her time. Poor, uneducated, pregnant, and unmarried, Mary went forth with Joseph on a radical journey of suffering, rejection, exile, and ultimately to the death of her child. Mary clung to hope in the darkest of dark times. Mary refused to surrender her faith in the promise and the power of God she saw and experienced in her own Son.
It is a good time for Advent. It is a good time to be reminded of who we are as Christians, what we believe in, and why. Ours will not be the last age. But our days will come to an end. This is the tone of our readings in these weeks. Be ready, stay awake for you do not know the day or the hour of the Lord’s coming. We too often hear this message as a threat or something to be afraid of. What if we received the message as one of hope and promise that God remains ever-present and active in this wounded world. That is what I hear.
Stay awake. Cling to your faith in a living, mature, and confident way. God is still in charge. God has not left the building. Ours is to cling to faith, to live with love, and to be agents of hope through the virtues of compassion, acceptance, mercy, tolerance, and forgiveness.
This is a time of trial. Will you stay with your faith or not? Will you cling to Christ, living gospel values to the best of your ability? If that is your plan, be at peace. You are secure in the Kingdom of God. If you are wavering, run to someone secure and be restored to faith, with living hope in the constancy of Divine redemption in the Lord Jesus. Christ is King of Creation and Lord of the Cross, and you belong to him.
Father John Esper
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