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Year B
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What follows is cast as a homily for December
1, 2002, the First Sunday of Advent, Year B.
This homily, and similar efforts to follow,
is an exploration of how the rites we do, as
well as the scriptures we read, are integral
in preaching. This effort should be considered,
month by month, a work in progress that invites
your comments (gabeandtheresa@gmail.com.
In some congregations, these texts might make
useful discussions for those involved in preparing
the liturgy (the committee or board or whatever
entity or individual takes that responsibility).
Gabe Huck
What does it mean to name this day the beginning
of something called Advent? What does it mean
that we call all the days until Christmas by
this “Advent” name? Will this time
called Advent matter to the way I think, work,
speak, spend time these four weeks? Is Advent
only a name we Catholics have for the way gift-giving
and card-writing and various kinds of parties
happen in the weeks before December 25?
It is hard to live by more than one calendar,
though most of us have to try because we have
a calendar of work and a calendar of school,
or a calendar of extended family and a calendar
of church and community involvements. And each
household can have multiple calendars running
at the same time: work schedules, vacations,
school examinations, medical needs, finances
coming in and going out, entertainment, just
plain survival. On top of all that, here comes
the church saying: Excuse me, but it’s
Advent. Sure, we know it is the Christmas shopping
season in some parts of life, and it is post-Thanksgiving
recovery in other parts of life, and it is for
some the stresses and joys of the extended family
coming and going, and schools each have their
break schedules to deal with, and what are our
gift and our social obligations for the coming
holidays? But excuse me, it is Advent.
So what? Am I supposed to walk differently?
Get up at a different time? Eat different foods?
Make decisions about my time or money different
from the way I did last week? Am I supposed
to hum different tunes, watch different shows
on TV, volunteer for more things than I have
time for? Am I supposed to be more kind to my
spouse, children, co-workers, and boss? Am I
supposed to do something really radical and
just ignore all the Christmas windows, Christmas
shows, Christmas pressure, Christmas parties — until
Christmas actually gets here? Am I supposed
to get one of those wreaths with four candles
and try to remember to light it every night?
Or one of those calendars that count down to
Christmas?
These seasons of ours weren’t invented
by scholars or committees then imposed on all
the churches. They came from the ways Christians
devised to deal with living in and loving the
world, with living from their scriptures and
knowing that these were not just some lovely
stories about what happened a long time ago
but were always, every time, about today. The
seasons came from people’s own need for
times that are more gentle and times that are
more raucous, from coping with cold and heat,
from food in abundance and food in scarcity.
They came from the way it seemed right to open
the Bible to some various stories every year
at the same time. They came too from the flow
of life in the community, especially the initiation
of new members.
In time, the seasons took hold. It was good
to do some things each year at the same time:
to sing the same songs but only for these weeks
each year, or to read these certain scriptures
but only on these days, or to have the blessing
of the seeds or the blessing of the harvest
or of the fishing fleet, or to remember all
the dead. Ways to do these things became more
fixed, and the Christians of the generations
that followed took them on.
How a community kept a given season, an Advent
or a Lent, continued to evolve, but life changed
too, and the church went to places where the
rhythms of life were quite different. Some of
the easily done parts of the seasons remained,
but often they lost all that surrounded them
and held them together and filled them with
meaning, all that had once made an Advent or
a Lent a whole way of life for the community
during its December or during its springtime.
Some Christians decided that these seasons like
Advent and Lent now added nothing to being good
Christians and they got rid of the seasons;
other Christians tried to hold on.
We are some who held on, but where are we now?
Do we call these weeks Advent because our grandparents
and their grandparents and their grandparents
called it Advent, even though we can’t
quite figure out why or what it might mean to
the twenty-first century person living in this
culture?
Start with this: The ancestors who drew together
certain scriptures and songs and customs and
foods and ways of living in the weeks before
Christmas were working with their culture and
their needs, yes. How else could they work?
But what they found was perhaps a way to express
or confront a whole lot of big and specific
things about living as a baptized person. What
happened, for example, when they began to juxtapose
scriptures that seem to be about those last
things like death and judgment with scriptures
about the coming of the messiah? Or to juxtapose
beautiful images from Isaiah with the preaching
of John and the stories from Luke or Matthew
about what led up to the birth of Jesus? What
happened when they chose to associate these
weeks with certain tunes and words, sounds and
melodies that were sounds and melodies of longing,
incomplete sounds, and lyrics whose images came
from all over scripture and beyond?
Here is what seems yet true: In the soul of
this assembly, this congregation, this parish,
as in the spirit of congregations all over this
city and world, is something that is not complete
and longs to be complete. In the soul of this
assembly is something that will stay awake,
will keep watch, if that is the exhortation
we give to one another, because we know — we
know —
that things are terribly out of joint in the
world where we spend our days, terribly out
of joint despite all the good people doing good
deeds. In the soul of this assembly is something
that needs to cry out, but mostly does not,
in the name of justice against injustice. Injustice
big and injustice little. Like the way the tax
system benefits the very rich and penalizes
everybody else. The way the land and water that
belong to us all and to God are dealt out to
those who will exploit it for their own wealth.
The way the prison population of our country
has grown to be largest in the world, overall
and as a percentage of the population. The way
that schools get their money by bake sales and
military contractors by taxes and the way teachers
get no respect but the sports and entertainment
figures are made into idols.
Each of us and all together can make a long
list of what the soul of this community needs
to cry out about, but does not, what the soul
of this community longs for. And that is getting
close to what Advent is. The poet e.e. cummings
said it concisely if curiously:
King Christ this world is all aleak;
and lifepreservers there are none*
That could be Advent in two lines.
King Christ this world is all aleak;
and life preservers there are none
Isaiah said: “[W]e have all withered like
leaves, / and our guilt carries us away like
the wind. / There is none who calls upon your
name, / who rouses himself>to cling to you;
/ For you have hidden your face from us” (Isaiah
64:5–6).
You have hidden your face, O God. And so we
will have an Advent here and that means that
we shall follow you, God, into your hiding place.
We shall dwell in the dark with you. We shall
stay awake, count the stars. In the beautiful,
embracing dark of December we shall consider
these things that have dried up our lives like
leaves of last summer’s trees. And we’ll
sing, moan some, ponder a few lovely texts of
scripture, and really not worry much about Christmas.
It will come — to this assembly, to our
households —
in its own good time.
One of our church’s most ancient poems
for this season is the Conditor alme siderum, “Creator
of the stars of night.” One of the verses
reads:
As this old world comes on toward night,
you come, but not in glory bright;
as groom to bride, as bride to groom,
the wedding chamber, Mary’s womb.
Advent is not a silver lining season. That’s
not how images of light and dark are used by
us this season. Advent is a dark womb season
in a wedding season. Advent takes the darkness
and loves it, knows it is good. In the darkness,
seeking God’s hidden face, we know the
harshness of the world —
not so much to us perhaps, but to so many, many,
many. And day by day we see how easily we are
distracted from this harshness of the world
to our brothers and sisters, and we get busy
with the odds and ends that, we know it well,
will dump us on Christmas’s doorstep and
we’ll never know where Advent went. It
isn’t easy to submit to Advent and realize
that it is we who “mourn in lonely exile
here,” we who need to be ransomed. Us?
We’re number one. Secure. Rich. In charge,
more or less of our lives, more or less of the
world. So we’re not lonely. We’re
not in exile.
The scriptures through these weeks will be like
promises —
promises that only exiles and needy can hear.
We won’t hear except by slipping quietly
into Advent today — and together. We have
to practice the art of listening for promises,
listening like those who depend on God and God’s
promises. We need Advent because most of us
don’t do well at all at depending on God’s
promises. We depend on the economy, the job,
the routine, the family maybe, and for it all
we depend — it has never been more clear — on
the poor of the world and on the weapons we
wield. But where else can we be secure? Oh,
that is the question Advent is truly all about.
* from “Jehovah buried, Satan dead” in E.E.
Cummings Complete Poems 1913–1962, ©1972
Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, Inc.
Copyright © Gabe
Huck. Used by permission.
Originally written for Celebration,
the worship and preaching resource
of the National Catholic Reporter
(visit their Web site at www.celebrationpublications.org).
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Year
C
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What follows is a homily for Sunday, December
14, 2003. This is the Third Sunday of Advent,
Year C. It might be adapted to any of the first
three Sundays of Advent. The focus of the homily
is the juxtaposition of Advent itself, the scriptures
of this particular Sunday, and the fortieth
anniversary of the Constitution on the Sacred
Liturgy, the first document of Vatican II.
Like other homilies in this series, it attempts
to explore what mystagogical preaching might
sound like. The homily of December 2002 would
also be useful this year as an example of opening
up the meaning of Advent within the assembly.
Gabe Huck
What does it mean when someone tells me over
and over,
“Don’t be afraid!”? These
Advent Sundays in the third year of our three-year
cycle of scripture readings have many variations
on that simple command: Do not be afraid. At
the beginning of Advent, we had Jeremiah talking
about days to come when the people will at last
live in safety, without fear. We had the letter
to the church at Thessalonica talking about
strength for our hearts, and the gospel text
where Jesus talks of terror to come, people
actually dying of fright. Today the prophet
Zephaniah says, “Fear not, be not discouraged.” And
Paul writes, “Have no anxiety.” Instead,
he tells the church at
Philippi
, be filled with thanks, and then fear will
give way to a peace that surpasses all understanding.
Note well: This peace will surpass all understanding.
The exhortation “Do not be afraid!” binds
together Advent and Christmas. The angel Gabriel
says this to Zechariah and to
Mary
and to Joseph. Angels say the same to the shepherds.
And thus do Advent and Christmas transcend so
many of the things that would preoccupy our
hearts and heads these days. “Do not be
afraid. Fear not.” These words make a
home for us
— for who needs to hear “Do not
be afraid” except those who are afraid?
Advent expects us to be afraid. The scriptures
and gospels expect it. They know this life of
ours, they know what humans are always doing
to one another. O come, Emmanuel. Come, Lord
Jesus, come quickly. These are the songs and
cries of honest hearts in fearful times. We
are the church, and it is our business to keep
our eyes fixed on the world — and you
can’t do that without being afraid. Even
the condition of our sad, hobbled institutional
church is frightening. So Advent brings this
tension. Look, Advent says, look clear-eyed
at the world, at the church. And when we do,
we tremble at what is happening. Listen, Advent
says, listen to God’s promise. God calls
you from fear to — what? Some would say
to foolishness, to believing the promise, to
lives built not on fear but on the sturdy word
of our God.
After what our church and our world have been
like these recent years, Advent gives us room
and time to stop rushing about and to ask: From
what are we running? What do we fear? What do
we fear about our church, what do we fear about
our world, our community, our household, ourselves?
Those who know their fears can then ponder the
hard words of Advent and of Christmas: Do not
be afraid. Baptized people live in this tension
of fear and promise.
Before we leave this year 2003, we can ponder
our fear and God’s promise by summoning
two memories. Just days ago we marked the fortieth
anniversary of a great turning point in our
church. On
December
4, 1963
, the bishops of the world approved the document
called Sacrosanctum Concilium. This was
the first work of the Second Vatican Council,
and it is usually called The Constitution on
the Sacred Liturgy. Some of us remember that
day. The New York Times not only made
the liturgy document front-page news, it printed
the English translation in its entirety. The
vote in the Council had been overwhelming (only
four of the world’s bishops opposed the
final document).
But most of us here this morning don’t
remember, so the story needs to be told. When
Pius XII died in 1958, the cardinals choose
an old man to be pope. Angelo Roncalli was already
in his late seventies. After five or so sleepy
years, they thought, we can gather again and
it will be clearer who should be our next long-lived
pope. They were right about the five or six
years, but wrong about everything else. Angelo
Roncalli, now John XXIII, called a Council,
the first in nearly a century. He stood up to
the church bureaucracy that wanted no part in
any such meeting. He called the naysayers “prophets
of gloom,” and he called for the stuffy
church not to be afraid, but to open its windows
to the fresh breeze of the Holy Spirit. The
world’s bishops assembled, unsure of what
they might do. For starters, the bureaucrats — who
wanted this whole Council business over with
quickly — gave them a blah-blah document
on the liturgy that put them all to sleep. But
somehow the window was open. They rejected the
document in the fall of 1962 and by December
of 1963 they had, with expert help, crafted
a new document whose vision would be the work
of several generations to come.
By the time this Constitution on the Sacred
Liturgy was finished, it called for some of
the reforms that we’ve all grown up with,
such as liturgy in our own languages, but beyond
this, it called for a liturgy that was the work
of the people themselves. It said every baptized
person had the duty and had the right — both! — to
do this liturgy fully, consciously, actively.
It said that when people did the liturgy in
this way, the whole assembled church doing its
hard work, then their liturgy would, little
by little, put a Christian shape to their lives.
It called for all the rites of the church and
the calendar of the church to be reformed according
to these principles.
By the time the bishops of the world said their “yes” to
this, good Pope John was dead. He had died in
June of 1963. Shortly before his death he wrote
to a friend: “By God’s grace, I
haven’t behaved badly: so, not a day more.
If the Lord wants me to remain a little longer,
well and good, otherwise — we’re
off.” Perhaps only a person with such
lightness of heart could have borne the turmoil
and the disdain of those who took their power
in the church so seriously. Pope John was one
who knew there was much to fear, and he looked
those fears in the face because he believed
God’s promise.
So it was that two months before he died, John
XXIII had done a final beautiful deed for us,
and that is the other fortieth anniversary we
have celebrated this year of 2003. In April,
he wrote a letter to the whole world, an encyclical
called Pacem in Terris, Peace on Earth.
In a way, these two deeds, the liturgy constitution
and John’s last encyclical, set the path
for our generations of Catholics.
Pacem in Terris did many things. It was
1963, the heart of the cold war, the age of
nuclear standoff, the world dominated by two
superpowers who played out their rivalry in
various wars around the world. Catholics in
the
United States
had come more and more to equate their religion
with their anti-communist patriotism. John XXIII
looked hard at the conflicts, at the injustices
that thrived at the heart of one system and
those that thrived at the heart of the other,
at the injustices suffered by the poor of the
world while the rich grew richer and the armaments
of the powers grew more and more fearsome. This
is the Advent wonder of John XXIII. He saw all
there was to fear and he knew how real and awful
it was. But he did not keep silent, and when
he spoke, he did not speak as a prophet of gloom.
He said: Face up to what is unjust in your systems
of power, in your economies, in your treatment
of the world’s poor. He said that it will
be immensely difficult to change — change
ourselves, change our economies, change our
relations — but we have to do it.
That is the Advent word of promise, God’s
promise and our own. Here, for example, is what
John XXIII wrote forty years ago about the relations
of sovereign nations:
There has been a great increase in the circulation
of goods, of ideas and of persons from one country
to another, so that relations have become closer
between individuals, families, and the intermediate
associations belonging to different political
communities, and between the public authorities
of those communities. At the same time the interdependence
of national economies has grown deeper, one
becoming progressively more closely related
to the other, so that they become, as it were,
integral parts of the one world economy. Likewise
the social progress, order, security, and peace
of each country are necessarily connected with
the social progress, order, security, and peace
of all other countries (#130).
He calls for a worldwide public authority that
seeks the universal common good in concrete
form. He says that such an authority must be
set up by common accord and not imposed by force,
and that the purpose of this world authority
must be “to create, on a world basis,
an environment in which the public authorities
of each political community, its citizens and
intermediate associates can carry out their
tasks, fulfill their duties and exercise their
rights with greater security” (#137).
He praises the United Nations as the bare beginning
of this.
We are forty years down the path. Forty Advents
away from John XXIII and these two documents.
This Advent summons us Catholics to face up
to the fears we have and should have, to the
promises we are baptized into. The documents
of 1963 put direction on our age. The Constitution
on the Sacred Liturgy said we had to get this
Sunday eucharistic deed into our hearts and
souls, our muscles and our bones. We had to
come together here and together work hard that
God’s word might be heard and pondered
by the church, by us; work hard that the needs
and troubles of the world might here be clearly
seen and loudly voiced in homily and intercession;
work hard that our hearts be shaped by our giving
of thanks to God for all, doing so in Jesus
who grappled to the death with the powers of
greed and destruction and who is each Sunday
our paschal meal.
Doing this Sunday by Sunday, what kind of a
people shall we be? A fearless people? Hardly.
Perhaps a people with the wisdom to fear what
is indeed fearful. We should fear the gap that
separates the way we few live from the way the
many of the world live. We should fear a nation,
our own, that has rejected Pacem in Terris for
Pax Americana, and a politics that sees fear
as a way of control and manipulation. Doing
what we do here Sunday by Sunday, doing it seriously,
will ready us to hear: “Do not be afraid.” That
is what John XXIII heard. There is much to fear;
know that. But, knowing that, believe what God
is doing with us.
Copyright © Gabe Huck. Used
by permission.
Originally written for Celebration, the
worship and preaching resource of the National
Catholic Reporter (visit their Web site atwww.celebrationpublications.org).
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These homilies
may be copied and adapted for your own use;
however, they may not be commercially published
without permission of the author.
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