Deacon Michael’s Homily for 2nd Sunday of Advent - December 3-4, 2022

2nd Sunday of Advent December 3-4 2022

The Sunday reading upon which this homily is based can be found HERE

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Well, the season is in full swing it seems.

Outdoor lights brighten up the evening.

Window candles make homes look inviting and warm in the cold and darkness.

Trees are up and decorated and in the windows.

The kids are getting all wound up. 

Advent calendar windows are flipping open each morning.

People are anticipating and preparing for the Big Day!

So we come into church and hear from a kind of wild man character

…about broods of vipers

…about trees being axed at the root,even now,

…about threshing floors being cleared,

…about wheat gathered into barns,

…but chaff being burned in an unquenchable fire!

And Merry Christmas to you too!

I don’t know about you but I like the sound of that first reading A LOT better

…the wolf, leopard and the lion getting along with the lamb, the goat and the calf

…rather than eating them

…about justice for the land’s afflicted

…where there is no harm or ruin on God’s holy mountain

…and everyone “gets” God.

It’s almost like you could get whiplash from reading these two readings so close together.

So what’s going on?

Well...appropo Advent, it's all about anticipation as well

…but also what we hope for and where we actually are, and where we need to go.

While we make our way through this far from perfect world we

...yearn for the Kingdom of God

…the final reconciliation and re-making of all things

…so beautifully evoked by Isaiah’s poetic analogies.

It’s a kingdom that this wild man John is anticipating too and preparing for

…telling us is “at hand”

…and that something, someone new is entering the scene to usher it in

…the one greater than John himself.

That’s the good news.

The bad news is that preparing for this Kingdom, ushering it in, and helping it to grow more and more

…calls us to change

Even in this holiday season, Scripture also tells us that this Kingdom is not one of food and drink,

…but of “righteousness, and peace and joy in the Holy Spirit”

 …the spirit that dwells in us even now

…so a kingdom that is among us even now

…a kingdom that is looking for more space, more real estate, in this world,

…even as we all move toward the next.

This is a reality that we hope to give life to, to bring into the world ourselves

…and evoke every time we say ”thy kingdom come, on earth as it is in heaven”

…as we ourselves are called to be instruments of this coming, this arrival, this Advent.

Doing so we need to remember that what we celebrate on December 25th is more than the arrival of a child, as beautiful and tender and miraculous that image of mother and child may be.

…but the start of a much larger event, the embodied intervention of the the divine in the human realm

…an intervention that includes the totality of Christ’s presence and destiny lived out among us

…what he did, what he taught, what he subjected himself to and what he triumphed over

…the entirety of his live, death, resurrection and ascension

…but starting in the hillside town in Bethlehem of Judea we recall.

In our 2019 parish pilgrimage to the Holy Land we followed in the footsteps of Jesus, the pathway of his life among us, from Bethlehem, to Galilee to the Jordan to Jerusalem. 

On our last day we had an early morning Mass at the Church of the Holy Sepulchre, the location of the Lord’s death and resurrection.

There were were called to see all we had experienced over the past several days as one grand gesture of God, of the Divine, the sweep of God’s arm, drawing us, even herding us all closer to Himself

…as so towards the kingdom as it advances through time.

It reminds us that for Christians this event, this sweep of God’s arm, in the incarnation of the Son is THE most important event in human history

…and nothing has been the same since.

This is why the civilization that took to the belief and faith in all of this started to count time itself, the passage of the years, from the year of His birth

…the year that heralded, inaugurated the coming of a new kingdom, a new reality.

Maybe this Advent, this Christmas,

…we can recall the beautiful vision of Isaiah

…and the words of John calling us to change to make it happen

…and reflect on where we are in relation to all of this

…and ask ourselves just how our lives now are helping to make this Kingdom come on earth as it is in heaven.