God is with us – Matt 1:18-24

4th Sunday of Advent, Year A; St. Joe parish.

I used to be associate pastor at Holy Cross parish, and while I was there, I taught the confirmation class for the grade school kids. The first mini-essay I’d assign each year would be to ask them to explain which virtue they most wanted to grow in over the course of their confirmation prep. Each time I assigned that essay prompt, a full half of them would choose courage. The rest, by the way, would be split roughly evenly between faith, hope, and love. I was somewhat disappointed that none of them ever chose prudence, which I think is something many twelve to fourteen-year-olds could probably do with growing in… But, courage, that was the most popular choice for virtue they most wanted to grow in. And they were able, in general, to write about big bold displays of courage, but they concentrated in their responses on little things, on resisting peer pressure, standing up for someone being picked up, or defending what they believed was right.

God makes the deserted bloom – Matt 11:2-11, Isa 35:1-6a, 10

Advent, 3rd Sunday, Year A; St. Joseph parish.

“Here is your God.”  Behold, your God.  These are some of the words we heard from the Isaiah.  He has more to say about God: that He comes with vindication, with divine recompense, he comes to save you.  It goes on, talking of all the miraculous healing that will happen, all great cause for rejoicing on this Gaudete Sunday, the Sunday of rejoicing.  Advent is a lot about waiting for the future. It’s also about remembering the past, building up our trust and hope that Christ will come again by remembering that he came. But the readings we heard today shift our focus from both past and future to present. “Here Is your God.”  Not, here’s the spot where he will be, just hang on; certainly not, there’s where he will be, but he’s distant now, so don’t bother Him.  No. Behold Him.  Here is your God.  The cry might go up… “where?”

God gives us the gift of being givers –Isa 11:1-10

2nd Sunday of Advent, Year A; Holy Infant parish.

We use cute kittens for praising friends. If you were to ask anyone who prepared for the sacrament of confirmation through Holy Cross grade school, South Bend, IN in 2014 or 2015 what the seven gifts of the Holy Spirit are, I’d hazard a guess that, before answering, at least a few of them would recite in their heads: “We use cute kittens for praising friends.” The reason is that in those two years, I was teaching the confirmation prep class for the kids in our parish grade school, and I knew that, as part of Bishop’s homily at their confirmation Mass, he would ask the confirmandi to provide for him each of the gifts of the Holy Spirit. So, I made up that mnemonic, in which the first letter of each word in the sentence matches the first letter of the gift, to help them remember. We, wisdom; use, understanding; cute, counsel; kittens, knowledge; for, fortitude; praising, piety; friends, fear of the Lord. Only once on a quiz did I have a kid claim that the seven gifts of the Holy Spirit were wisdom, understanding, counsel, kittens, fortitude, piety, fear of the Lord. And that list of gifts is important, because it’s a long-standing way of naming what it is God strengthens in a Christian when they receive the sacrament of confirmation. The -firm- part in the middle of the word “confirmation” means “strengthens,” and it’s not primarily about the recipient of the sacrament strengthening their commitment (though, if they do that, that’s wonderful); the sacraments are all about God’s action, not ours, about God’s strengthening of God’s gifts to God’s people.

God stirs up our longing to run to Christ – Adv I collect, Isa 2:1-5, Rom 13:11-14

Advent I, Year C; Holy Infant parish.

Collect:

Grant your faithful, we pray, almighty God,

The resolve to run forth to meet your Christ

With righteous deeds at his coming,

So that, gathered at his right hand,

They may be worthy to possess the heavenly kingdom.

Through our Lord Jesus Christ, your Son,

Who lives and reigns with you in the unity of the Holy Spirit,

One God, for ever and ever.

--

Advent is for waiting – if people know one thing about Advent, it’s probably that.  We’re waiting for Christmas, which isn’t very long to wait and we’re waiting for Christ to come again, without knowing how long that will be.  Regardless, we’re waiting.  So why did our opening prayer, our collect, talk about running?  “Grant us the resolve to run forth to meet your Christ.”  That’s what we prayed at the start of Mass.  Running: it’s a fascinating and compelling characterization of what Christian waiting looks like.

God brings us into the light of day – Mal 3:19-20

33rd Sunday of Ordinary Time, Year C; Holy Infant parish.

I have a somewhat ambivalent relationship with the sun. Not the Son of God, Jesus, I mean the big fiery thing in the sky, the sun with a ‘u.’ Most pragmatically, like all life on this planet, of course, we’re totally dependent on it, both for warmth and so that plants can grow and give us things to eat and oxygen to breath. It also feels good. There’s just something about a sunny day that just feels better. This time of year, the sun gets up right up when I do, which makes getting up a lot easier. “Feeling the sun on your back” is a common expression for the pleasantness of being out, being active, on a sunny day. But, given that there is not a lot of a sun in the land of my people, my skin is pretty terribly adapted to sun. I burn really easily. I have so little pigment in my eyes that it’s actually really hard for me to see well on a very sunny day, without shades for my glasses. Actually, in one place I lived, the place I went for my eye exams was an optometry school, and the students and instructors would always get excited when they started examining me because I’m so low on eye pigment that, apparently, you can see various features of ocular anatomy on me that you can’t easily in most people, because of the greater amount of pigment, and they’d generally start calling people over to look at my eyes. Less personally, I know what increased exposure to the sun’s rays is doing to our planet, and its capacity to be hospitable to human life. Heat and light and the sun play ambiguous roles in our lives: necessary, often pleasant, sometimes onerous, potentially dangerous.

God gives us windows to holiness, and will open them fully – Luke 20:27-38, 2 Thess 2:16-3:5

32nd Sunday of Ordinary Time, Year C; Holy Infant parish.

I don’t know how many of you have ever been to the Broadhead Center at Duke. Formerly known as West Union, it’s the central campus dining location, and it’s a really beautiful building (as well as having reasonably priced good food!). One face of the building is glass, or at least some other transparent material, and because of a kind of cut away in the first floor, from the garden level up, you have two stories of continuous glass-like wall, letting in natural light and opening the space up. One day, I was sitting in that lower, garden, level, facing towards that wall that is a window, but reasonably far back from it, and I saw a student, one of the brightest and best that we pride ourselves on attracting at Duke, walk towards the glass wall, and walk straight into it and get knocked back. Once a few people had verified that this student was entirely uninjured, apart from with respect to his pride, someone shouted out, “That is the best compliment you could pay to the cleaning staff.” The student had failed to notice the window was a window, and thought it was just the outside.

God sees past our sin – Luke 19:1-10, Wis 11:22-12:2

31st Sunday of Ordinary Time, Year C; Holy Infant parish.

More than one astronaut has talked about their surprise at going up into space, all excited about going to space, to explore radically new things, dreaming of investigating moons, planets, stars, and then being suddenly taken aback by their view of something that they thought was familiar: earth. NASA astronaut Ron Garan calls this the “orbital perspective.” He described his sudden awareness that “we’re all travelling together on this planet and, if we looked at it from this perspective, we’d see that nothing is impossible.”