Advent I, Year B; St. Adalbert's parish
Video (homily starts at 14:40).
We live with all kinds of
distance and separation and isolation right now. And maybe there are actually
ways to use that fruitfully for our spiritual lives. It’s like how we fast in
Lent. Now, hunger isn’t a good thing, hunger is a bad thing we want to
eradicate, but we can use a bit of hunger in our spiritual lives, because what
we feel so easily in our stomachs is just as real, but sometimes harder to
sense, in our hearts and in our souls. We hunger for holiness, we hunger for God,
and a little dose of hunger in our stomachs can help us recognize and name that
and respond to it. In this same way, any pangs we feel of distance and
separation from loved ones, very real, not a good thing, but maybe they can
help us recognize and name that just as real but sometimes harder to sense
distance from God. That distance that led the prophet in our first reading to
cry out, “Would that you would rend the heavens and come down!”
The reading probably comes from the exile, when
the Israelites had lost everything in which they had found God, when the
Babylonians had conquered them and destroyed the Temple. We might imagine this
lament being tearfully prayed in the Temple ruins, brutally honest about the
pain they were feeling, but still rebelling against despair by taking that
painful energy and pouring it out to God in prayer. The plea begins by naming
God, “You, our Father, our Redeemer.” The plea continues: “Return.” Come back
to us. The prophet remembers some of the awesome deeds God had done in the past,
he remembers with gratitude, but it’s tearful gratitude, that dares to ask: “Return.”
The prophet expands on that call to return,
making it vivid: “Rend the heavens” – break a hole in the sky – “and come
down!” Be God with us, be with us. And then he prays: “Would that you would
meet us doing right!” It’s the same prayer for God to come and be with us, but
expanded again. For not just any meeting with God is desired, but a meeting in
which God delights in being with us. It’s the child who’s desperate for their
parents to be at their recital or game. Be with us, and see us doing good! But,
it’s not a boast, for the very next line confesses, “We are sinful.” It’s not a
boast, it’s a prayer. It’s a prayer not just for God to come but for us to be
ready for God to come. For God to delight in us. That we would be delightful.
It’s a prayer that cries out for God’s presence, and is very hopeful about
human capacity to delight God, and soberly realistic about the ways we cause
Him sorrow.
And it’s a prayer, an emotional prayer, not a
theological treatise, but I wonder if some of the reasoning behind that request
is contained a little later on, when the people confess, “You are the potter,
we are the clay.” An artist is known in her art. We know God in each other. And
if we want unity with God, if we want closeness with Him, we serve one another.
“Come, meet us doing right!” We do meet God, when we treat one another with the
reverence and love befitting God’s creation.
Our collect, the opening prayer for Mass, is full
of very similar requests. We asked God to give us the resolve to “run forth to
meet Christ with righteous deeds at his coming.”
“Run forth” – let’s start there – God has come,
and God will come again. We so want that closeness with him, want it so much
that we want to run to him, and we know we can’t do that without God’s help, so
we ask for it. We often talk about Advent in terms of waiting, and that’s true,
because God will come again, though we don’t know when. But it’s not waiting in
the sense that we just sit here twiddling our thumbs. No, what we’ve just
prayed for is the grace to run forth.
And then we ask to run to meet him with righteous
deeds. And that’s not a two-step process, as if we accrue enough righteous
deeds then we get to cash them in and meet Christ. No, as we heard in last
week’s reading, we meet Christ in the poor served, whatever we do for the least
of these, we do for Jesus. The righteous deeds are the running, and the
righteous deeds are the meeting. And yes it’s still kind of hidden, it will be
more glorious at the end of time, and we long for that. But it’s still real.
Here in this Eucharist, in every Eucharist, we
come to offer to God all that we’ve offered in the past week. It’s not just the
bread and the wine that get offered, that get transformed, that God uses to
feed us, to meet us. When in the Eucharistic Prayer I say, “look upon the
oblation of your people” (the oblation, the offering, the gifts), I’m not just
talking about the bread and wine, I’m talking about all the ways we’ve given of
ourselves. “Meet us doing good” we’re praying. And God says, “Gladly!” And
bread and wine become Christs’ own body, blood, soul and divinity, that we
might be fed with him and meet him in that most intimate of ways. And all of
our other offerings are transformed too, rejoiced over, and are ways God meets
us.
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