Second Sunday in Advent
Homily
Repent and believe, the Baptist cries, for the Kingdom of God is a hand!
Repent! Not a very good marketing slogan today. Who wants to repent. I'm quite happy the way I've arranged things in my life, already, thank you. Maybe take care of a war or a famine or something else more in your job description, God, and just leave me alone to live my little life the way I choose.
Repent and believe....the Kingdom of God is a hand!
But repentance means I have to obey, and obedience is not exactly one of my favorite things. Yeah, it's true, I knelt down over there and placed my hands between those of the Bishop and promised obedience and respect, but that was a long time ago, And I was still a kid, and It was a part of the rite. And plus, I'm not a bad person...I do a lot more than some of those other people...there are a lot worse than me...why don't you go preach to them for a while.
Repent and believe!
I'm not too thrilled by obedience, and it comes out in the strangest ways sometimes. Ask my best friend, who turned to me one day after a long period of my spouting all knowingly and said, you know James, you're the only one I know who can make me cry with frustration.
Ask your spouse how good you were at obedience to love in the middle of that argument you had over the turkey, or your mother how obedient you were when you wouldn't get out of bed last week, or your daughter how obedient to love you were when you screamed at the top of your lungs because you were so tired and you just couldn't deal with her anymore,
Better still, ask yourself what John the Baptist means today when he says to me and to you...yes you!.....repent and believe, right now! For the Kingdom of God is a hand!
We are made for obedient love, and from the moment we went down into those waters of Baptism with Christ and were joined to his death, it's all we've been about. A constant conversion to life from death, and to purity from sin, and to light from darkness.
Such a continuing conversion is rooted in a sense of self that emerges from a radical humility, an assuredness that I am not God....the Shema Israel, which heralds and caps every act of Jewish worship, says it all: "Hear, O Israel: the Lord our God, the Lord is one."1 It's a takeoff on the first commandment: “I am the Lord your God and you shall have no false Gods before me.”
Such conversion to humility, to the constant conviction that I am little and God is big, that I am child and he is father, results in a radical obedience, not to my self-actualization, but to the plan God has for me and for my life.
Yet is there anything which I fight against more instinctively than the sense that I am not God. I once heard a certain Roman cardinal utter the ultimate sharp comment to a staffer who was heatedly trying to convince him of something: Suppose, Father, just for a moment, that you were not God.
The same could have been said to our first parents, whose sin, ultimately, was not the fruit stolen from the tree, but the disordered conviction that they could be God if the just ate the right kind of fruit.
You see it in every three year old, possessed by the absolute conviction that he is the center of the universe, the ultimate arbiter of meaning, justice, and truth, in other words that he, stamping his feet, screaming, crying, and turning blue, is God.
The follower of Christ is called to the opposite conviction and the opposite way of life. For he is taught by the life of his Lord, by an obedience that does not deem equality with God something to be grasped at...but rather empties itself, taking the form of a slave, and becoming a little child, opening its arms upon a cross in perfect obedience to the Father's will.
We are made for obedient love. It is our dignity. It is our destiny. It is our purpose for being.
And its not just a question of doing God's will so I can go to heaven: obey the rules and win the prize. Its a matter of being so much more in love with God than I am with myself, that I will do his will not because I dread the loss of heaven and the pains of hell, but because I love God and I want nothing so much as to be his obedient son,
I've always been challenged by Saint Benedict's description of the three ways of loving God. At first, Saint Benedict tells us, we love God because we love ourselves. I don't want to go to hell, so I do what he wants.
At the second stage, I love God because he is lovable. I have no choice. I have so deeply fallen in love within him that I want only to do his will.
And then there's the third stage of loving God, the one which few reach but the only state in which true holiness and purity reside, wherein I love me only because God loves me. Only then does my every waking moment seek the will of God. My next breath has value only if it is part of God's plan. My fondest hopes and my deepest desires are but cinder and ash unless they are a part of his plan. In other words, it is not my will but his, not me, but Christ Jesus in me, it is I, like the John the Baptist, who must decrease and he who must increase.
That's what it means to make straight his paths, to prepare a highway for our God. The highway is me. To repent and believe that kingdom of God is at hand is to radically hand myself to God, even unto death, death even on a cross.
It's like what Saint Augustine once preached, a favorite saying of this preacher, too: God does not want your gifts. God wants you. All of you. Your mind, your heart, your entire being.
For he made you for obedient love. The kind of love that’s less interested in being God, than in being God’s beloved child child. The kind of obedient love which is the reason we are and is what we were made to be.
Monsignor James P. Moroney
Rector
