God strengthens our hearts – Luke 21:25-28, 34-36, 1 Th 3:12-4:2.

1st Sunday of Advent, Year C; Holy Infant parish. [Note: the parish was doing its "share your Christmas" collection this week. The parish works with various charities who create lists of families who can't buy toys for their children this year. The families make requests and parish families agree to buy the toys. This week people brought the gifts to church and during the offertory, the brought them up and they were arrayed across the sanctuary. Unfortunately I didn't get a picture! By the time I was done greeting people after Mass the people that coordinate delivery had already moved them all.]

Very soon, the sanctuary will be filled with gifts. The primary purpose of this gifts, of course, is the service of our neighbors here in Durham, a practical way of helping them have a livelier more joyous Christmas. Advent is the season to prepare for Christmas, and this is one moment, an important moment in which we help others prepare and thereby help ourselves prepare. But, there are other places we could store them. Everything in the sanctuary is here to help us pray. So, can these gifts help us pray?

Where I’d like to start with that is the starting point for everything: God’s action. When we see those gifts, the first thing they can turn our spirits to is God’s action in our lives, the gifts that God gives us. And that’s actually something wonderful to do frequently in our lives, to remember what God has given us, to give thanks for that and ask how we’re meant to use these things in the service of the church and the world. In our second reading, though, Paul prayed for a very particular gift from God for the Thessalonians, and I think Paul continues to pray that prayer for us. He prayed that God would make them (/us) increase and abound in love, so that their hearts might be strengthened, and we might be found blameless in holiness at the coming of our Lord Jesus.

There are a few stages to that prayer. The first is God’s gift of love to us. Not just the gift that God loves us, but the gift of love, the capacity we have to love. It seems kind of odd to thank God for our virtue, as if we’re saying, “Thank you, God, for how wonderful I am!” But, that’s not really what it means to pray about God’s gift of love. That kind of prayer starts with awe that God loves us, and then moves to gratitude that God does will to form us to love too. It recognizes that we don’t do that as fully as God does, and it asks God to form us deeper and deeper in the virtue of love, recognizing that we often grow in virtues through really hard things.

And just as we build our bodies through training and discipline that’s hard, it’s through the hard task of loving when loving doesn’t mean letting ourselves feel fluffy feelings, but truly desiring the good for others and acting so as they might have it, through that training and discipline, Paul prays for our hearts to be strengthened. Now, he wouldn’t have been thinking about the heart in a sentimental or romantic way, but as a place of feeling and thought, our deepest place of reflection and decision making. And Paul prays that God would make that strong and the way he would make that strong is through helping us to love better. It’s notable that the gift isn’t something completely outside of or foreign to ourselves, but it’s taking what we have, what we are in a real way, our love, our hearts, and make those abound more, be stronger. God’s saving action in our lives doesn’t look like make us something other than ourselves, but making us more loving, stronger, more authentically ourselves. And that’s what Paul calls holiness. Being blameless and holy when Christ comes again. That’s what we’re preparing for too in Advent, which means ‘coming,’ to be blameless and holy when Christ comes again.

And holiness really is God’s preserve. For God to make us holy, is for God to make us like Him. And if our first prayer when we see these gifts is to see what God is giving us, our next is to see what we give. What we give God, what we give our neighbor.

These gifts that will physically be in the sanctuary can serve as a symbol of all that we give, all the sacrifices we make. There’s a moment in the Eucharistic Prayer where the priest asks God to look upon “the oblation of your church,” the offering, the sacrifice of God’s church. And in that moment certainly we’re naming the bread and wine that was offered and that by that point in the prayer has become of the Body, Blood, Soul and Divinity of Our Lord and Savior Jesus Christ. We’re certainly talking about the sacrifice Christ made for us on Calvary that formed the Church that is re-presented to us in Mass. But we’re also talking about all we’ve offered, all we’ve sacrificed, especially since our last Mass. Look, God, upon every your church, everything each of us and all of us have offered, and accept it. Accept it as you accepted your Son. Sanctify it, bless it, make our sacrifices bear fruit, in the service of the church and the world now if it can, in eternity if it can’t.

God accepts it all. All the sacrifices, all the times we choose the right even when it’s hard. All the times we choose hope, we choose even joy when all around seems bleak. That’s how Jesus described holiness in the gospel, in the midst of scary things, stand erect, raise your heads… because our redemption is at hand. Strong hearts, abundant love. Heads held high missionary disciples, who acknowledge God’s gifts in our lives, and offer them. God accepts them. God blesses them, and God uses them, to fill us all the more.