Journey's Weekly Homilies
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Isaiah 6:1-2,10-11
Third Sunday of Advent
I Thess. 5:16-24
12/10/02 Homily:
Nancy
John 1:6-8,19-28
ADVENT…four weeks in which you are asked to let your longings be known.
ADVENT…a time when the future is not something to fear. The future is already…but not yet.
ADVENT…when the candles burn, and light fights the darkness, both inside and outside ourselves.
ADVENT…the placing of the mantel of the Spirit on the winters of our lives.
ADVENT…when we begin to understand that our God chose to become human…
…that our God walks,
even this day, among us, unrecognized, silent until we speak.
How did our
church come up with the idea of Advent?
Chances are you
haven’t been thinking a lot, lately, about Filaster of Brescia.
And you might remember him best, not by his real name, but
by his nick name: Filaster
was known as the HAMMER of HERETICS!
(In Latin that’s “malleus haereticorum”!)
He was the Bishop of Brescia, in northern Italy, in the
late 300’s. He was
a contemporary of St. Augustine.
AND he wrote the book on heresies of the time, listing 28
Jewish and 128 Christian heresies.
Needless to say, the book never became a major motion
picture, but it did give historians of Christian worship some
crucial clues about how the liturgical year was taking shape in
northern Italy around 400 C.E..
In his book, Filaster tells us that his people celebrated,
annually, four principal fasts.
“The mysteries of Christianity,” he wrote, “are made
known to us…in four fasts that the church celebrates each
year…” The first
one he named was the one leading to Christmas!
(He named the pre-Easter fast, the Ascension fast, and the
fast before Pentecost, but the FIRST one was the season before
Christmas.) And so,
the history of Advent, which began (we might say) with John
baptizing people in the Jordan, took the next step 400 years
later!
AND SO…on this
Third Sunday of our Advent Season, let us rejoice in the history
of those first hundreds of years in which the church was forming
and evolving from country to country, city to city, and people to
people. [It was the
power of the Advent season that made me take the next steps toward
asking for baptism in my life.
It was this season that awakened the power of the faith
questions in me. It
led me to freedom. It
taught me to begin to try to find God walking among people. It taught me to light a candle when darkness seemed to be
surrounding me.]
After our friend
Filaster’s time, 40 years or so later, a man named Leo became
the Pope (440-461C.E.). We know about Pope Leo because he
published his sermons! There’s
a whole series of them dated as having been preached in the weeks
leading up to Christmas. In
these homilies he NEVER mentions the birthday of Jesus, instead
they focus on fasting, and he teaches that during this time people
are to embody their love of God in love for neighbor!
He taught that GOD’S REIGN begins when we live our lives
in total generosity. NOTICE…the advent (or arrival) Leo was anticipating was NOT
Christ’s birthday, but the end of the world as we know it!
He was preparing for the reign of God.
During this
Advent time, he taught, we await a new age (even then they were
saying such things!). We await a new human society where the
deepest human hungers are satisfied – where “giving” trumps
“getting,” where peace surpasses violence, where God’s
kingdom is coming. In
this time we begin to realize that God’s presence is
taking flesh as food for the hungry, water for the thirsty,
shelter for the homeless, comfort for the imprisoned, clothing for
the naked. Leo’s
“Advent” sermons were not about the coming of Christmas, but
about the joy that results when God’s people walk in ways of
justice, show each other every kind of goodness.
When this season we call “Advent” began to be named, it was from Rome. The “end of harvest” celebrated in the secular world needed a Christian name, too! It was not a time of preparation for Christmas, but a celebratory season, focusing on the “end times.” Christians were being urged to fast and give alms…signs of a new and blessed order of things that might finally come true when Christ returns and all God’s people live together in peace.
The whole idea of
Advent, then, was rooted in cultural customs…it was being formed
in response to secular life, not spiritual life.
We talk all the time about the commercialization of
Christmas, and how we really don’t observe Advent because we put
up lights and trees and swill down our eggnog at Christmas parties
instead of staying home and praying around our Advent wreaths.
And yet we are the inheritors of a history of this very
Season being one that began BECAUSE of the secular reality, the
harvest and the celebration of agricultural bounty was it’s
beginning.
SO…Advent’s
roots are fundamentally based on the rhythms of nature, and out of
that natural truth we invited the Holy Spirit into our thinking
and the season was filled with grace.
That’s a little history…but for us today: Is it feast or fast? Is it party or penance? Is it Alleluia or lament? What are we waiting for during Advent?
There was a monk of the Benedictine Abbey in the Bahama’s. He took himself to Cat Island to a rough bare shelter where monks could go to retreat and pray…a wilderness, as Jim would say…
and there he stayed. He stayed so long that his brothers knew he did not have enough food, so they took their boat and went to check on him. There he sat, in a trance, looking out through the trees at the constantly moving Caribbean Sea. They said, “Come home with us, Brother.” He said, “No. I will pray until I have finally understood how to accept the love and mercy of our God.”
What are we
waiting for? How can
the reign of God begin? How
can our longing for this reign bring light in the darkness?
The answer comes from the book.
From the scripture comes the clear focus that Advent is
about the future – a future that begins taking possession of us
even before it fully arrives.
Isaiah tells us, “The Spirit of the Lord God is upon me,
because the Lord has anointed me to bring good tidings to the
afflicted…” We
are anointed, too…. to bring good tidings to the afflicted,
to bind up the brokenhearted, to proclaim liberty to captives, to
release those who are bound.
We hear the song of Isaiah as both warning and promise, as
he says: “…as a garden causes what is sown in it to spring up.”
Paul tells the people of Thessalonica (and us!) , “God who calls you is faithful, and will do it.”
The future begins
now, what is arriving in our own Advent is that future.
BUT…this future is not merely work of human hands.
What is done in our worship here, is God’s work more than
our own. That is why,
in the eucharistic celebration we gather to pray, the present (the
“here and now”) loses it’s privileged role as our center of
gravity. The present
moment in the other parts of our lives determines how time is
measured. But here in
the eucharist we make memorial…not simply of the past or
present, but of what has not yet been.
Here we find a glimpse of God’s plan of the reign of God.
What we are waiting for, longing for, is imaged here,
around this table. This is what Advent longing is all about.
Marcel Proust wrote, “the future lives in us without our
knowing it.” Here
we can begin to know it. That
is the advent, the arrival, that changes our lives.
The eucharist is about that future taking hold of us.
Eucharist embodies not simply what we are, but what we will
be, will see, will love. It
offers to us a gift…a gift we cannot fully welcome or
comprehend…yet.
They asked John, “Who are you?” He said, “I am the voice of one crying in the wilderness, ‘Make straight the way of the Lord.’” The transformation John was preaching, the way through the wilderness of our searching, can begin to be understood in this great season of Advent. The arrival for which we prepare ourselves is already here, but not quite yet. It is up to us. We will celebrate the power of the story of Christ’s birth in less than two weeks, but between now and then, and all the weeks after that, we will gather around this table, and know the possibility of the Kingdom come…that Advent is every Sunday of the year. There is One among us, whose face we both see and cannot see.