The First Sunday of Advent, Year A, November 30, 2025

Holy Cross Monastery, West Park, NY

Br. Randy Greve
The First Sunday of Advent, November 30, 2025

• Isaiah 2:1-5
• Romans 13:11-14
• Matthew 24:36-44

Click here for an audio of the sermon

He had a vision.  Jesus spoke to him - gave him the date (dates, two, actually).  He said he was one billion percent certain.  It was his mission now to share this great vision, this direct voice, with the world.  Christians must prepare now.  And thankfully we are not preparing in theory, preparing in a metaphorical way, but preparing for a date, a date certain.  Pastor Joshua heard from Jesus about the rapture, when Christians will be snatched up and away into heaven and the tribulation will commence, conveniently without us.  September 23 OR 24, 2025 were the dates - one of these days is when the rapture would happen.  “About that day or hour no one knows” Jesus says in the gospel.  But that does not mean we will not know about TWO days, just not THAT day, but one of these days!  What good is a vision if kept to oneself?  No good at all!  On to YouTube he goes, describing in detail what Jesus said, even how he looked, and the need to prepare.  Viral sharing and commenting commence, and, since it is 2025, a general stir is created among those Christians for whom the rapture is a sure and certain hope.  What else could “caught up to meet the Lord in the air” possibly mean?  True believers quit jobs, sell cars and furniture, and prepare.  Last time I checked, pastor Joshua had updated the new dates of the rapture at least twice, this time not creating quite as much stir or as many views as with the original video.  It seems that misremembering the details of a vision of Jesus that many times negatively affects one’s credibility.
This is not new, of course.  Even the disciples, in the very moments before the Ascension, ask Jesus, “Is it now?”  It is the Lord’s fault, I contend.  Ask us to watch and wait for something to happen with no date, no prelude, no way to access any concrete information about when it will happen.  Watch and wait.  Just watch and wait.  Can we have a clue?  No.  A little hint?  No.  What if we pray very sincerely to know the time, will you tell us?  No. And don’t ask me again.  I don't even know.  It’s not fair.  It leaves open too many possible misunderstandings and false predictions - manipulation and deception.  Perhaps better to announce the date and let us sort it out when it gets closer, maybe an hour before.  What we have now is too vague - it’s not practical.  It’s not helpful.
We begin Advent with the confession that we are not generally a highly formed culture of waiting, especially of open-ended, don’t-know-how-long-we-will-have-to-wait-or-what-we-are-waiting-for kinds of people.  Just note the lifting up of Christmas trees after Halloween and all of the hustle and bustle which has already commenced.  When viewed at the surface, Jesus’ seemingly contradictory insistences on the need to be alert and the impossibility of knowing exactly what we are being alert for tie us up in logical knots.  His principal focus, however, is the presence of God in the human heart which enters us into a different way of knowing, an altogether mysterious and foreign realm of “already and not yet.”  We begin by remembering that we will not “figure it out” by thinking more or be “better” at Advent by trying harder.  What we enter, if we dare, is a realm beyond time, a process that moves, but at its own pace and in its own way, that can only be thwarted by insisting on looking outside ourselves and ignoring the blossoming of readiness growing in our souls.  Waiting and watching are not problems that are solved by more data, they are ways of being which usher us into God’s time that is beyond our limited notions of past, present, or future.
Scheduling the Parousia is God’s job.  Being ready is our job.  Jesus helps us by an example of what being awake is NOT.  He says that the people of Noah’s time were in an unconscious trance of the everyday and ordinary.  What happened yesterday is what will happen today.  What happened today is what will happen tomorrow.  Boy, those are some dark clouds, but it has rained before.  Wow, this is some heavy rain, but I’m sure it will stop soon.  Their lives were a kind of entitlement of continuity that rendered them unable to perceive the nature of the flood that had commenced.  When the soul loses touch with meaning and wonder, the spiritual life animating us and the world, it loses the expectation that life can change, that something new might happen, that this world is passing away.  “And they knew nothing until the flood came and swept them all away.”  Their ignorance of and indifference to their own condition and the condition of the world around them is the cautionary warning of what NOT to become.
Readiness is a slippery state.  It’s like humility - as soon as I know how humble I am, I am no longer as humble as I think I am.  Watchfulness is always becoming.  It is something like the acknowledgement that fresh insight, deeper understanding, fuller presence is always being offered to us and called forth out of us.  I have a picture in my office of a sign posted on a tree in a wood that says, “You are NOT almost there.”  This inner dynamic becomes a gift to the world - a precious and dangerous gift.  Once we are willing to see, we can perceive the nature of the principalities and powers at work among us.  We can name the systems and structures of evil and we can also reveal gratitude at the beauty and joy of life.  Joy and peace and justice break forth in our world as we are faithful in our call to be stewards of making straight paths where no path seems possible.  Christ will come on the last day, for sure.  But it is also true to say that every day is the last day, every day is the day of judgment, every day reveals the quality of our presence and our engagement with announcing the urgency of the moment - life is short, time is passing, we are promised no certain number of future days, we can take nothing for granted, we continually rely on and entrust our lives to God who made us and who will receive our souls back we know not when.  When in response to the travails in our country people say, “it can’t happen here”, “things will go back to normal” I wonder if it is the equivalent of saying, “Boy, those are some dark clouds, but it has rained before.”  “Wow, this is some heavy rain, but I’m sure it will stop soon.”  Is that not the same denial and avoidance used in Noah’s day?  The myth of normalcy can still sweep us away, blind to the reality of the moment.  Salvation is waking up and finding refuge in the Ark that is Christ, our only hope.
  The glory of salvation is that God’s promise is salvation in - in these bodies, in this world, in this time.  Not from them, but in them.  Not escape, but renewal.  One of the classic jokes in my family is that my father once asked my mother whether she wanted to be buried in a casket or cremated.  Her response was, “I don’t know, surprise me.”  Come and surprise us, O Lord, with aliveness today and life in the age to come beyond all we can ask or imagine. Amen.

The First Sunday of Advent C - December 1, 2024

Holy Cross Monastery, West Park, NY

Br. Aidan Owen

The First Sunday of Advent C - December 1, 2024

• Jeremiah 33:14-16
• 1 Thessalonians 3:9-13
• Luke 21:25-36

Back in September I walked St. Cuthbert’s Way, a 63-mile pilgrimage route that starts at the ruins of Melrose Abbey and ends at Lindisfarne, a tidal island off the east coast of England where St. Aidan founded his monastery in the 7^th century. Near the start of the trip, one of my brothers who had also walked St. Cuthbert’s Way texted me “You’ll have moments of intense feelings of aloneness that are hard and sweet at the same time. A lot of important stuff will come to you from those. Embrace them, and remember that when you’re done, you’re coming back to your community that loves you and will be very happy of your return.”

The first few days of the trip, I really didn’t understand what he was talking about. The walking had been pretty moderate. Being the UK, the weather was grey and cool, but that wasn’t so bad. I met kind and generous walkers along the way, and I enjoyed my time alone. There really were no difficult feelings—only gratitude and awe for the beauty that surrounded me.

Midway through the walk I had my mountaintop experience. I climbed to the highest point of the route with 360 degree views of rolling hills and the sea in the distance. It was the most perfectly stunning day you could imagine. Clear skies, warm sunshine, and miles of visibility. I was literally singing “The Hills are Alive with the Sound of Music.” This is called foreshadowing, by the way.

The next day couldn’t have been more different. I set out in the driving rain. I could literally see sheets of rain blowing in front of me. Within fifteen minutes my waterproof boots were soaked through, not to mention my pants. As I wound my way through the Cheviots, I kept worrying that I’d miss a signpost because I was staring straight down at the path to keep the wind out of my face. It was a far cry from the mountaintop! Even as I was enduring the rain and the wind, I started to call that day my Day of Affliction.

I found myself yelling at God, literally screaming at the top of my lungs. There’s not much opportunity for that kind of prayer in a monastery, so I took advantage of my solitude to let it all out—all the frustration and the resentment and the fear and the anger and the disappointment that I wasn’t aware I had inside me. At my lowest point that day, my brother’s words came back to me: “You’ll have moments of intense feelings of aloneness that are hard and sweet at the same time. A lot of important stuff will come to you from those. Embrace them, and remember that when you’re done, you’re coming back to your community that loves you and will be very happy of your return.”

Now I understood what he meant. I did feel alone and afraid. I did feel resentful of the circumstances of my day and some of the circumstances of my life—some of which I had freely chosen, and some of which I had not. I was miserably and wonderfully alive, perhaps more alive in that moment than I had been in a long time. I hated every minute of that walk that day, and I was also surrounded by God’s love and the abundant beauty of God’s creation. I was held in my affliction—given the gift of the full experience of my life. I was also held in love by this beautiful community 3,500 miles away.

Advent always begins with a Day of Affliction. Each year we hear about the signs of the apocalypse when “People will faint from fear and foreboding of what is coming upon the world. The powers of the heavens will be shaken.” Nations and temples will fall down around us. There will be wars and earthquakes, and we will be afraid.

This is the context in which hope is born. This is the darkness into which the Light of the World comes to us to save us and free us from our self-destruction. We don’t need hope on the mountaintop. We don’t need light when the sun is shining all around us and the hills glow with the golden beauty of God’s abundance.

Jesus comes to us in the moment of our greatest need, when the light seems to be failing and the world is crashing down around us. That isn’t to say that God is not present in the sunshine. But our need for God draws God to us in a way that contentment and wellbeing often do not.

Writing of the Crucifixion in a powerful essay on affliction, Simone Weil writes that “This tearing apart, over which supreme love places the bond of supreme union, echoes perpetually across the universe in the midst of the silence, like two notes, separate yet melting into one, like pure and heart-rending harmony. This is the Word of God. The whole creation is nothing but its vibration. […] Those who persevere in love hear this note from the very lowest depths into which affliction has thrust them. From that moment they can no longer have any doubt.”[1]

The stance of hope to which Advent—and this historical moment—invite us is first of all perseverance in love. If we can manage not to run from our fear and our anger and our dismay, if we can manage to shout them out into the driving rain and the threatening darkness, we will hear the pure and heart-rending harmony of God’s love echoing back to us, assuring us that we are not alone. Then we can no longer have any doubt that God holds us tight and will never—can never—let us go.

The key is to love ourselves enough to remain awake to our experience, not to dull our inner senses with our drug of choice. We can be numb, or we can be alive. The choice is ours.

Rebecca Solnit writes that “the world often seems divided between false hope and gratuitous despair. Despair demands less of us, it’s more predictable, and in a sad way safer. Authentic hope requires clarity—seeing the troubles in this world—and imagination, seeing what might lie beyond these situations that are perhaps not inevitable and immutable.”[2]

Despair is its own kind of drug, numbing us both to the pain we are experiencing and to the possibilities of new life with which God is constantly seeding the world. Our salvation will not look like whatever we imagine in our limited desire for perfection. Into the darkness of Advent comes, not a mighty warrior to vanquish the violent overlords of the world, but a small and defenseless baby. Salvation comes to us as new life—a life that must be guarded, tended, fed, encouraged—and most of all, loved. This kind of salvation is a far cry from a lottery ticket we can clutch to our chest, sure that our worries are over. But it is so much better for that—for the salvation to which God invites us is the renewal of our own lives in hope and love.

We cannot persevere in love on our own. We need one another to remind us of the light and the love that await us on the other side of the storm. We need to be signposts for each other of the love of God that never lets us go. We need to sing a counterpoint to one another’s songs of affliction—not to overwhelm them but to accompany them on the way, to create together a truer and deeper harmony of the love and affliction that give birth to authentic hope. We need to be that love and that hope for one another.

“The final thing,” Rilke wrote a friend in 1920, giving just this kind of encouragement, “is not self-subjugation but silent loving from such centeredness we feel round even rage and desolation the finally enfolding tenderness.”

My brothers and sisters, in this life, you will have moments of intense feelings of aloneness that are hard and sweet at the same time. A lot of important stuff will come to you from those. Embrace them, and remember that when you’re done, you’re coming back to your community and your God that loves you and will be very happy of your return.

Come, Lord Jesus, and show us the way home to you.

---

[1] Simone Weil, “The Love of God and Affliction,” in Waiting for God, p. 72.

[2] Rebecca Solnit, Hope in the Dark, p. 19.Before I came to the Monastery I used to go to an Al-Anon meeting on Friday evenings. It was quite an eclectic group of people, the kind you can get in a 12-step meeting in New York City, and I loved it. At the end of the meeting, we’d all gather in a circle in this cramped church basement room, hold hands, and say the serenity prayer. Then we’d boisterously shout “keep coming back. It works if you work it, so work it—you’re worth it!” The last cheer is meant to end the meeting on a high note, an energetic encouragement against despair and a reminder that the program is the solution.

Advent 1 B - December 3, 2023

Holy Cross Monastery, West Park, NY

Br. Robert James Magliula OHC

The First Sunday of Advent, Year B, December 3, 2023

 

Isaiah 64:1-9

1 Corinthians 1:3-9

Mark 13:24-37

Click here for an audio of the sermon

 

Every year on this First Sunday in Advent, the beginning of the Church year, we hear a gospel about endings.
“In those days, after that suffering, the sun will be darkened, and the moon will not give its light, and the stars will be falling from heaven, and the powers in the heavens will be shaken.” (Mark 13:24).
Jesus and his disciples have just left the temple, the center of Jewish life and identity. One of the disciples, impressed by the temple, remarked, “Look, Teacher, what large stones and what large buildings!” “Not one stone,” Jesus says to him, “will be left here upon another; all will be thrown down” (Mk. 13:1-2). He’s not predicting the future or giving us signs to look for so that we can predict the future. He’s describing a present reality. He is telling them that the story of their life and identity will be changed and replaced with another. He’s describing what it feels like when there’s been a ending in our life---when the stars by which we once navigated no longer point the way, when the powers on which we depended are no longer dependable. If you have ever experienced significant change in your life, whether desired or dreaded, you know about Advent. You know what it is like to enter the darkness of change.
All change brings an end, some kind of loss of what is comfortable, familiar, safe. Jesus is telling them, and us, that one will need to let go of their old view of life, the world, themselves, and even of God. Every beginning starts with an ending. There’s more to our lives and our world than a single beginning and ending. So today’s gospel is about “an” end and not “the” end. Beginnings and endings are two sides of the same event, possible moments of growth and transformation.
Our entry into the Season of Advent sounds ominous and it is, because it is not just a liturgical season. It’s a reality of life, including the life and world in which the Son of Man comes. The lectionary holds this before us because endings are what we face and live with. They come at various points in life, not just the weeks before Christmas. Naming such times in our life is our entrance into Advent. Our Advent preparation for the coming of Christ invites us to look at the ways our endings have shaped and defined our life, how they have narrowed our view of God, the world, others, and ourselves. We need to ask ourselves whether we are willing to accept the necessary endings so that His coming is the beginning of our new life. This takes time. Maybe this year we can create more space than we did last year, be more trusting of the darkness and the necessary endings. What we do on this First Sunday of Advent, will, in large part, set the tone and context for how we will experience the coming of Christ throughout the rest of this year.
Instead of being concerned with where God is and what God is doing, we ought to first be concerned about where we are and what we are doing. Instead of starting with what’s going on in the world around us, we ought to begin with what’s going on within us. More often than not we do not see other people and the world as they are, but as we are. When we are tense and anxious, we’ll want to run away. When we are living in the past, we’ll miss this present moment. When we are frightened, other people can easily become threats and enemies. When our life is full of problems, we’ll be quick to judge others. When we are filled with guilt, we’ll look for someone to blame. These are not the circumstances around us; they are spiritual conditions within us.
In those threshold moments when our world is shaken we mostly want someone to fix it and make it like it used to be. We echo the prophet Isaiah’s cry, “O that you would tear open the heavens and come down” (Is. 64:1 ). The God of Advent does not redo our life but redeems it. Advent confronts us with a necessary ending that makes space for a new beginning.
Advent times are liminal times of waiting, times of transition. Advent invites us to receive the God who comes to us in the darkness. If we run from our darkness, we run from God. Darkness is not our enemy. If we allow them, the dark places of life can draw us deeper into the divine mystery by reminding us that we are not in charge, that we do not know everything, or see all possibilities. Advent challenges us to let go of our ways of knowing, and to question our ways of seeing. Too often we use the darkness to deceive ourselves into believing there is nothing worth waiting or watching for. So we close our eyes and become part of the darkness, refusing to see the One who is always coming to us. We fall asleep whenever fear controls our life, when hope gives way to despair, when busyness is equated with goodness, when entitlement replaces thanksgiving, when we choose what is comfortable rather than life-giving. If we are not aware of these things they will overtake us. Jesus says become aware and alert to what is going on. If we do not tend to what is going on inside of us we will project it outside of us.
In the darkness of Advent we listen more than we speak, we hold questions rather than answers. We wait expectantly but without specific expectations. Waiting in darkness is an act of faithfulness and surrender to the Coming One. Waiting becomes our prayer, a prayer that is and will be answered by God’s presence.
The entire Season of Advent echoes with challenge, assurance, and promise. A new awareness within ourselves changes the way we see with a clarity and objectivity we did not have before. We become connected to that original goodness and beauty that resides in each of us, that has always been there; maybe forgotten, but never lost. We are always waking up to the truth, so we can reconnect to the beauty of life, the mystery of love, the wonder of creation. We awaken to hope, alert to the presence of God in unexpected places and surprising ways.
Time does not separate and define our beginnings and endings. It is Christ who joins and unites them. So every beginning finds its fullness in an ending and every ending is the context for a new beginning. All happens in Christ, the one who called himself the Alpha and the Omega, the beginning and the end.  +Amen.

Advent 1 A - November 27, 2022

Holy Cross Monastery, West Park, NY

Br. Randy Greve, OHC

Advent 1 A - November 27, 2022

Isaiah 2:1-5

Romans 13:11-14

Matthew 24:36-44

Click here for an audio version of this sermon

We begin the liturgical year at the end of the age. This is profound, because the narrative of holy scripture is urgent to set before us our end and the world’s end as we have known it.  God’s good creation, marred by sin and evil and groaning for its liberation, is comforted in hope that new creation is our end and home.  The whole Christian revelation falls apart without the promise that the world will ultimately be set right, suffering and death vanquished, and our own selves, resurrected in bodies incorruptible and perfect, will enjoy the direct and unmediated presence of the Lord forever.  

All of the life of discipleship is informed by and moves toward that hope.  Evil and suffering are real, but will not ultimately triumph.  Death and the grave are the next to the last things that happen to us.  The declaration of the nature of Christ’s coming again in glory is not a far away wispy dream, not a threat of violent revenge on the disobedient, but the bedrock of why and how to bother with following Christ at all.  How we live in the present, what we believe about our service and prayer and love for one another is inextricably linked, whether we are conscious of it or not, to what we believe is coming for us and for our world.  We know God is God because God is a God of promise and God keeps promises.  Our hope for the future is grounded in our memory of God’s saving acts.  I am not a Christian in order merely for the afterlife payoff, but I cannot remain a Christian without the promise that the world toward which I work and pray and groan is surely to come. 

That is the liturgical prelude. Now a prelude on this gospel reading: the Jesus of Nazareth whom we read about in the gospels is jarringly present and open.  He keeps showing us and telling us who he is.  He is also a mystery because we cannot fully comprehend his identity.  He acts in surprising, even shocking ways. He does not bend to our ideas of Messiah, or even much care about our ideas.  He is simple, but never easy.  Spend a lifetime pondering and living his words, and you will barely scratch the surface of their meaning.  From beginning to end, he does the Father’s will by modeling and proclaiming God’s love for all. He announces that this kingdom and way of love is alive in God’s covenant faithfulness in a way of being human and in a community that loves neighbor as self. The triumphant justification of us and the world in a new heaven and a new earth is coming, so our vocation is to live now in anticipation of what is to come.

Now to the reading itself.  Our finitude and that of the earth forces the questions of meaning.  The spiritual value of apocalyptic speech is the seriousness of choice, the necessity of awakening to reality - to look, to see.  We wake up especially to those realities we would rather avoid, that make us uncomfortable, that confront us with our duplicity, our double-mindedness.  Christ believes in our power more than we do.  He sees our freedom at times when we would rather escape it.  He is not going to force us onto the ark of salvation, but it is there and we have to make a choice.  Jesus continues to be the great Illuminator still.   To the receptive and willing, the good news is their greatest joy and hope.  To the resistant this same good news stirs confusion, misinterpretation, opposition, and hate.  This language does not condescend to our categories of analysis.  

Part of why beginning Advent with the apocalypse is so powerful is that we enter right away a realm where time gets bent, answers become questions and questions become answers, and our safe and small categories of truth and security are shattered in the light of God’s wild and wide passion for the whole universe.  In Advent we do away with the introductory pleasantries and plunge right into the nature of the paradox of the words themselves:  we are waiting for Christ. Christ is already here.  We long to see the promise of our hope. We already see it.  The hope of Advent is born in the meeting of our desire and God’s desire; we send our waiting from the present into the future.  God sends the kingdom of peace from the future to the present.  We believe they meet and that meeting is called hope.  

The waiting is the surrender.  This kind of waiting is not like waiting for the train.  Advent waiting is the active, open-ended expectation of the real but unknown and unknowable.  For Christ, the human vocation is to enter into this disequilibrium, not avoid it or explain it.  We are most fully human when we know ourselves as creatures and entrust our mortal creatureliness to the one who made us and will remake us anew.  The good news is that the waiting is already the very offering that forms in us the eyes to see and the ears to hear Christ’s coming among us.  

When we lapse into passivity and indifference, may Christ the Prophet break in and steal our apathy and stir in us the cry, “Come, Lord Jesus.”  When we are overly impressed with our own power and believe we know best how to fix the world, may Christ the Savior break in and steal our pride and groan within us, “How long, O Lord?”

I conclude with this beautiful quote from Megan McKenna: “Advent is about judgment and standing in the presence of the thief, the Son of Man, not flinching, looking God straight in the eye, and rejoicing…  The Holy One is coming to visit and is intent on stealing us away from all we are attached to and binding us to one another in peace.” Amen.

Advent 1 C - November 28, 2021

Holy Cross Monastery, West Park, NY

Br. Luc Thuku, OHC

Advent 1 C - Sunday, November 28, 2021

Jeremiah 33:14-16

1 Thessalonians 3:9-13

Luke 21:25-36

As we well know, the term Advent comes from the latin adventus which means “to come” or “coming” or “arrival”. It doesn’t signify an event that has taken place or that will only take place in the future but an ongoing event as well, a process if you like, a coming that is ongoing.

Right from about the 4th Century AD, Christians have had this special time of preparation towards Christmas. Just like in Lent, traditionally the season of Advent was observed as a time of fasting and prayer, a time of spiritual renewal or cleansing of hearts to be able to receive the Lord.

As we begin to prepare for the liturgical and social celebration of Christmas, already commercially begun in stores, the liturgical celebrations of the coming weeks invite us to prepare for the end of time and second coming of Jesus, a theme that has been very clear in our readings during the office of Martins for several weeks before the end of the liturgical year B, just concluded.

In the Gospel passage we just heard this morning from Luke, we hear the statement “They will see the Son of Man coming in a cloud with power and great glory”(Luke 21:27) We know the term Son of Man refers to Jesus Christ but what does the coming of Jesus Christ really mean? 

The coming of Jesus can be understood in three ways. The first coming is plain enough and took place at a certain moment in history when the second person of the Trinity took human flesh and was born on earth, now going to almost two thousand and twenty years, as Jesus of Nazareth. This we call the mystery of the incarnation.

The second understanding of the coming of Christ is of something we await in hope. This is when Christ will return in glory at the end of time, a future event. Though a core belief of Christianity, it is a difficult subject to comprehend partly because of the trauma emanating from some misguided preaching of the event which makes it sound like an event I would rather not experience. It is stuff that has been a source of nightmares for me personally and of untold mental anguish to alot of people. On the other hand, the negligence of some preachers especially in many of our main stream and liturgical churches in the West, that do not want to hear of Judgement and eternal damnation of sinners, leave people not adequately prepared for the event through repentance. However, our liturgy especially the creed and the prayers of the Eucharist remind us constantly that it is an event that we should await with joy and hope!

There is also a third understanding of the coming of Jesus. This coming of Jesus is not a past event that is kept alive in our memories nor is it a mere expectation or imagination of a future event. By the power of the Spirit of the risen Lord, the coming of Jesus is continually being enacted even as we speak. Jesus comes in our midst as the word is proclaimed, as the sacraments are celebrated. He comes when Christian community and fellowship is practised, when the sick are being healed and prayed for, when the poor are fed and cared for, when peace is promoted and strived for, when the hopeless are encouraged, and so on, in short, when the good news that Christ lived and proclaimed in his first coming is lived by us his followers in our daily lives!

The solemn feast of the Nativity that Advent helps prepare for, and that we look forward to, should focus us to all the above three comings of Christ. It recalls the historical birth of Jesus the Nazarene even though the exact date of birth is unkown and there is plenty of controversy sorrounding the adoption of the date of the Roman feast of the birth of the Sun God to celebrate the birth of the Light of the World. I will not act as an apologist for the date of the feast nor as an opposer of having it celebrated on a so called pagan festival, although I have plenty of arguments for both sides of the debate. I will simply state the fact that a man, Jesus of Nazareth was born and his birth is rightly or wrongfully celebrated on an adopted date. However, the world was never the same again after his birth!

In the first reading we heard today, the first coming of Jesus is foretold by the Prophecy of Jeremiah. Jeremiah builds a certain expectation among the people about the coming of the Messiah who will be the son of David. “Look, the days are coming, Yahweh declares, when I shall fulfil the promise of happiness I made to the house of Israel and the house of Judah” (Jeremiah 33: 14). Jeremiah was writing to a city that was in imminent danger of attack but even though the worst has not yet happened, he speaks of restoration not simply of daily life, which is very important, but also of restoration of the Davidic line which is one of the major signs of God’s favor for Israel. To a people devasted by loss, Jeremiah’s prophecy offers hope.

Like in the days of Jeremiah, our world today needs a promise of and fulfillment of happiness! We have suffered a devastating pandemic for the last two years and there is no much of an end in sight. We have lost relatives and friends, children have been orphaned, old people left with no one to care for them and all of us are feeling the weight of isolation. Even when there is a glimmer of normalcy, our conscience keeps telling us to be careful and in being careful we are robbed of joy.  We have suffered racism, sexism, violence of all sorts, bad governance. We have been used for profit by companies as our governments turn a blind eye to the exploiters…we need hapiness. Our world has been brought to its knees through corruption, People have lost jobs and livelihoods. Even animals and all of creation is yearning for relief, for joy, for happiness and therefore the promise of the coming of the Messiah, Jesus, is good news indeed!

Our Lord and Savior Jesus loves us so much to let something as sigificant as a remembrance of his birth pass without us being reminded of the second coming   also translated into Latin by Jerome as adventus from what the Greeks call the Parousia. As verse 28 of our Gospel passage this morning reminds us, “we will see the son of man coming in a cloud with power and great glory”(Luke 21:28) This is the advent of faith, this is the advent of hope.

The second reading from the First letter of Paul to the Thessalonians chapter 3 verse 9-13 tells us that we must prepare ourselves for this second coming of Jesus, not so much by doing anything other than by just being open to the grace of God.  The last verse 13 says… “and may he so confirm your hearts in holiness that you may be blameless in the sight of our God and father when our Lord Jesus comes with all the holy ones”. 

When first Thessalonians was being written around AD 50, a good number of the Apostles and immediate followers of Jesus were still alive and they strongly belived Christ will return in their own life time and hence the  strong sense of the immediacy of the parousia. The first letter should therefore be read with reference to the second letter which urges the believers to “go on working quietly and earning the food they eat and never to become tired of doing what is right”(2 Thessalonians 3:12) for Christ will come at his own time and as for the coming, He will surely come (2 Thessalonians2:1-8). The immediacy of the first letter is however not diminished but put into perspective!

As we continue to wait in hope for this second coming, we continue to be supported by the word and sacraments and by our living of the gospel message and calling, which invites us to be ‘other Christs’. Jesus comes to us in a real, experiencial and tangible manner and if we open ourselves to his grace, he will support us in holiness as we await the second coming. This will reduce our anxieties and fears that are mainly associated with this coming because he constantly keeps reminding us that holiness, a word that scares many is simply LOVE. 

Spiritual Masters keep reminding us that the only moment we are assured of is the present because yesterday is gone and tomorrow…who knows? I humbly suggest then, that we make a deliberate choice of this continous, real and tangible coming of Jesus in his Word and Sacraments because it is the most important aspect to celebrate. Yes, Jesus comes to us when we are fully alive, when we are caring in love for our brothers and sisters in this global village that we live in, where my good act impacts everyone on earth and where one irresponsible act in one corner of the world affects the entire world as covid-19 and the effects of global warming are loudly shouting in our ears!

May this Season of Advent offer us yet another chance, another opportunity to appreciate the Jesus who comes. Let us contemplate this as we prepare ourselves to recognise Jesus when he comes!

Amen

First Sunday of Advent B - November 29, 2020

Holy Cross Monastery, West Park, NY

Br. Josép Martinez-Cubero, OHC

Advent 1 B  - Sunday, November 29, 2020

Isaiah 64:1-9

1 Corinthians 1:3-9

Mark 13:24-37

Psalm 80:1-7, 16-18

Click here for an audio version of this sermon

Here we are, at the beginning of a new liturgical season and a new Church year, and I, for one, am bewildered. And Jesus wants me to keep awake? What?? I’m exhausted, and to be quite honest, constantly asking in my prayer: “Where are you who brought out of the Nile the shepherd of his flock?” Where are you, God??? 

I cry with the psalmist: “O God, why have you utterly cast us off? Why is your wrath so hot against the sheep of your pasture?” “My God, my God, why have you forsaken us and are so far from our cry and from the words of our distress?” “O my God, I cry in the daytime, but you do not answer; by night as well, but I find no rest.” And you want me to be awake and alert? I am thankful that Scripture writers are not afraid to rage and lament and complain about God’s hiddenness. “How long will you hide yourself, O Lord? Will you hide yourself forever?”

This year more than ever, I need Advent, the season that emerges when the world as we know it has changed; when things are no longer as they used to be; when a cosmic shift has taken place. This year more than ever I need to enter the Christian New Year in lamentation. I find myself with no desire for Hallmark Season’s sentiments. I need the radical honesty of Scripture: "How long will you be angered despite the prayers of your people?" "because you hid yourself, we transgressed." I don’t feel like pretending that God’s apparent silence is just fine. I mean, let’s get real, our world is not okay. We are surrounded by evil and suffering, and I want God to tear open the heavens and come down, so that the mountains quake at God’s presence- as when fire kindles brushwood and the fire causes water to boil. That’s right, this Advent, I need to have permission to express the truth of my sorrow. Our culture of denial, apathy and hedonism is just not cutting it for me. I need God to show up. I need God to restore! I am human, and when we humans stand at the thresholds where our world is shaken, we just want someone to do something about it and make it all like it used to be. Just do something. I want to cry like the prophet Isaiah cries to God in the Hebrew Scripture lesson for this first Sunday of Advent: "O that you would tear open the heavens and come down," God, will you please come down here and do something about this mess? 

I, like Isaiah, have been calling for a God who will do "awesome deeds" like making mountains quake and the nations tremble:

 

- Hearken to my voice, O Lord, when I call; bring this pandemic to an end. 

- Great is your compassion, O God, protect the most vulnerable. 

- Do not let your compassion go unmoved and give strength to all healthcare workers. 

- Lord have mercy on those who are unemployed. 

- O Lord God of vengeance show yourself to all those corrupted politicians in Washington D.C. 

- O Lord God of Hosts destroy systemic racism. 

- Rise up, O Judge of the world; give every greedy corporation their just deserts, for they trust in great wealth and rely upon wickedness! 

- Behold the affliction of your LGBTQ+ children, and deliver them from all ignorant evil doers who are full of hate! 

- Protect this wounded planet before we completely destroy it past saving; then we will be like those who dream. 

- Save us, O God, from ourselves! 

If one thing I’ve learned from praying the psalms day in and day out, week after week, as we monks do, is that it is okay to pray these prayers. Our God is a great God and I really believe that these prayers are but a fraction of God’s own dream. And yet, I know I can’t just dwell in my rage and my lamentation because during Advent, God is calling us to transform our hearts for something else. As Saint Paul says in 1st Corinthians, we "wait for the revealing of our Lord Jesus Christ." This is quite a challenge in a world that favors “press ‘enter’ and you’ll have it right now”; a world that favors end products, more than a process of transformation. Advent tells us that things worth waiting for come to be in the darkness. The Spirit of God hovered over the darkness of the deep waters, preparing to create the world. Next spring's seeds break open in the darkness of the winter soil. The child grows in the deep and nourishing darkness of the womb. 

During Advent we prepare for God, and the God who will turn up is likely to be very different from the one we expect. Our God, whose Name is everlasting and whose renown endures from age to age, chooses a womb, and the equivalent of a hick town, and a brief life, and an agonizing death on a cross. Our God is a God who wants to be seen in the destitute, the stranger, the sick and the prisoner. This is not the kind of God we tend to expect, so orienting our hearts in that direction requires serious preparation. In order to be ready to receive God as God is and not as I, in my ignorance and weakness would have God to be, I need Advent. 

So the Season of Advent has to do, not so much with where God is, and more to do with where we are. The work needs to begin not so much with what’s going on in the world, but with what’s going on in us. The truth is that we tend to see people, the world, and God, not as they are, but as we are. When I am anxious, the world is difficult, and I want to run away. When I am scared and paranoid, other people are after me and become threats. When I have a hard time loving myself and I’m filled with guilt, I may blame and judge others. When we wake up and become aware of what is going on inside of us, we don’t project it out onto other people, the world and God. 

Christ came, Christ is with us, Christ will come again is all one in Kairos, God’s time- the time of the company of saints and of eternal life. Jesus’ exhortation to “beware” is better translated from the Greek as “to perceive,” and has everything to do with opening our eyes to the revelation of Christ’s presence here and now. It is this revelation of Christ that transforms our interior life and leads us from darkness to light, and from external appearances to deep insight and wisdom. It is through this revelation of Christ that we can orient our heart to find salvation in meaning instead of achievement, in quality instead of quantity, in being instead of doing, and in the power of the God within us that can turn all of life whole and good. After all, it is only through our own transformation that we can transform the world.

May we pray and be transformed in God’s time. May we orient our heart to Christ, who came, who is with us, and who will come again. And may we all have a blessed Season of Advent. ¡Que así sea en el nombre del Padre, del Hijo y del Espíritu Santo! 

Amen,

Advent 1 C - Sunday, December 2, 2018

Holy Cross Monastery, West Park, NY

Br. Scott Wesley Borden, OHC
Advent 1 C - Sunday, December 2, 2018

Click here for an audio version of the sermon.

First, let me wish you a Happy New Year... since the beginning of Advent is just that – the beginning of a new liturgical year. At the end of December there will come a time that also calls itself New Year's... but it's an imposter.

Advent is the beginning of something, but it can feel like little more the prelude to Christmas. Everything in Advent seems to point to Christmas – whether it is candles on a wreath or chocolates behind little doors in a calendar... Advent is only important because what comes next is extremely important... And that is just not true, even though it is not false.

I’ve been reading a new book by Murray Stein. He may not be a household name, but he is perhaps the greatest teacher and interpreter of Carl Jung alive today. And not just Jung the Psychotherapist, but Jung the Theologian. In this new book Stein begins a section with a quote: “Look afar and see the end in the beginning.” Be sure to note that is IN the beginning, not FROM the beginning.

Where does this pearl of wisdom come from? Not scripture. Perhaps in Jung’s writings... maybe in some eastern source that Jung was fond of. Surely Stein is referencing some weighty source, but surprise! Stein found it in a fortune cookie. God works in mysterious ways.

See the end in the beginning. Here we are, just at the beginning of Advent. What of an ending can we see?

It would be no fun at all if there were only one ending showing itself in this beginning, but the most obvious end that shows up now is Christmas. We are waiting for the coming of Jesus – that is an end of Advent that we can see in its beginning.

As a sort of collective secular/sacred amalgam we have a social concept of Christmas. It is a happy, warm, lovely thing... all sweetness and light... all Currier and Ives and Grandma Moses paintings with young people on sleds in the snow and chestnuts roasting on an open fire... yuletide carolers outside and hot, spiced cider inside. This is what I want to prepare for in Advent. I see this in the beginning of Advent.

This is, sadly, not a very substantial view of Advent nor the reality of Christmas and Jesus doesn’t come into a fantasy world. However well we decorate, this is not a world of joy and happiness. It has great beauty, but it is also a world of sorrow, of injustice, of genocide, of prejudice, of corruption. In other words, it the same world into which Jesus was born two millennia ago.

It was a cruel and a dangerous world then as now. Jesus did not arrive in a world of decorated trees and eggnog and cozy scenes. They didn’t have tear gas then, but if they did, it surely would have been in use. Jesus arrived in a world that had no space for him at all. He arrived in a barn and bunked with animals – because the polite society (that’s us) couldn’t accommodate him – we live in the same world.

Anyone with their heart set on a silent, holy, calm, and bright Christmas night, needs to look afar and see the end in the beginning. Pay attention to Luke. In the Gospel for today, Jesus tells us there will be signs among the stars (these are warning signs) and there will be distress among the nations. People will faint from fear. It's completely inappropriate, but I hear Bette Davis in All About Eve warning us to fasten our seatbelts... it's going to be a bumpy ride.

Welcome to Advent.

I gave serious thought to ending this sermon here... it would be dramatic and clever... but it wouldn't be right. A message that says things are bad and they will only get worse is not the message of Advent. It is true that things are bad, and they likely will get worse. But that isn’t seeing the end in the beginning. It is only seeing the beginning.

The message of the Gospel, the good news of Jesus, is not one of sorrow. At the same time, it's not one of simple happiness. In a culture of sound bites and slogans, the complex and rich good news of Jesus too often gets simplified into one of two messages – Jesus loves you very much, so repent or you're going to hell; or Jesus loves you very much and wants you to be very rich. Neither of these has much to do with Jesus. Neither of them is the message of Advent.

In the middle of this, according to Luke, there is a fig tree. As summer approaches, its limbs grow tender and it puts forth leaves. It does what fig trees do.

Please – could I have a much more obvious illustration...

Jesus seems to be saying that as you can tell summer is coming by watching the fig tree, so too you can tell that God is coming by watching... something...

But the fig tree doesn’t do anything out of the ordinary. It doesn’t do anything unexpected. A philosopher might say it expresses its essential “fig-tree-ness.” As summer approaches, its limbs turn tender and it puts out leaves. But it wouldn’t be a fig tree if it didn’t. And a skilled agricultural society, like the world into which Jesus was born, hardly needs a fig tree to tell them summer is coming...

Perhaps this fig tree is telling us something more complex. Perhaps its lesson is not about changing seasons, but about ways of living. It lives in the world and responds to it by doing fig tree things.

Trees turn up in a number of places in our tradition. We start in the beginning with the Tree of Life and the Tree of Knowledge of Good and Evil. The tradition is littered with fig trees. When post-apple Adam and Eve seek to cover themselves, they turn to leaves of the Fig Tree and the Land promised in Deuteronomy is filled with milk, honey, and fig trees. In the Gospels, Jesus curses a fig tree and it withers. And in this morning's Gospel, we are asked to consider a fig tree. But the great tree reference is, of course, the cross. Jesus is nailed to the tree. See the end in the beginning.

So, this image that Jesus gives us to consider, the fig tree, is ancient and complex... Beautiful and terrible.

In asking us to contemplate the Fig Tree, I think Jesus is calling us to live in the world and be present. As the fig tree does what it is called to do, so we, followers of Jesus, are to do what we are called to do. Signs and warnings notwithstanding, we are to get about the business of following Jesus.

What Jesus calls us to do is not obscure. If we are to live our baptismal covenant with integrity, then we will have to care for the sick, the poor, those who have no power and no defense. We will have to pray and worship God and be prepared to treat the least of God’s children as nothing less than God’s children. We will have to resist the seductive call to accumulate wealth. We will have to be humble. We will have to love our neighbors and ourselves. We will have to make peace. Simple enough... Can we see these ends in this beginning?

Be on your guard, Jesus says, so that your hearts are not weighed down with drunkenness, dissipation and worries. Now maybe it's just me, but I thought drunkenness and dissipation were the things we do to keep our hearts from being weighed down...

Being on guard is not a waiting game. Maybe this is another lesson of the fig tree. The fig tree isn’t in any way waiting for spring, or anything else. It's just doing the right thing at the right time. This is a lesson we can well learn in Advent.

We look for the coming of Jesus, but we do not wait for the coming of Jesus. It would be nice if, as soon as Jesus gets here, then we can get to work following Jesus, but it doesn’t work that way. We stay on guard, awake in our faith... faith that must be lived. Christian faith is active. We live our lives in the faith that Jesus could return at any moment and we live our lives in the faith that Jesus has already returned, is already with us. We see the end in the beginning.

Being on guard doesn’t mean sitting around silently, pensively, nervously drumming our fingers. It means using the gifts we have been given to build God’s kingdom just as the fig tree gets about the business of being a fig tree.

This is Advent, the start of a new year. If we look afar, we can see the end in the beginning and the beginning in the end.

Is there a place in what we see for eggnog and carols... decorated trees and scenes from Grandma Moses? I surely hope so. A vision without beauty is no vision. It’s a horror show.

But if we think we have made the world beautiful because we have decorated, then we are living an illusion. In this beginning time, this Advent, we don’t just see the end, a beautiful world where justice flows like a mighty river... we become the end in this beginning. We become the healing power of God’s love in a very hurting world.

First Sunday of Advent -Year A

Holy Cross Monastery, West Park, NY
Br. Roy Parker, OHC
First Sunday of Advent-Year A - Sunday, November  27, 2016

"But about that day and hour no one knows, neither the angels of heaven, nor the Son, but only the Father..." That day and hour refers to the suffering of the days in which the sun and moon are darkened, the stars fall from heaven, the powers of heaven are shaken, the sign of the Son of Man appears in heaven, all the tribes of the earth mourn and see the Son of Man coming on the clouds of heaven with power and great glory.., and so forth. For our purposes it will be useful to describe the wider Biblical background of that imagery. That is, the cosmic disruption, the darkening of the sun and moon, the falling of the stars, and so forth, occurs three times in the Hebrew Bible in association with oracles of doom against Egypt, Edom, and Babylon, kingdoms which have subjugated Israel, and each of those three Doom Oracles is accompanied by an Oracle of Promise for the restoration of an entirely devastated Israel, an Israel reduced to the point of nothingness.

This background scenario of the Gospel passage suggests that such a point of nothingness would be essential to understanding the return of Jesus in glory. It will dawn upon us that whatever may constitute the Great Advent of Jesus in divine glory attended by angels, there are plenty of dress rehearsals in terms of that point of nothingness about which I owe you a larger description. I should say that my words on this are indebted to the work of Walter Brueggemann, a leading scholar of the Hebrew Bible.

When I speak of Israel here, be mindful that God's intention for Israel, expressed in intervention on behalf of an abused and suffering people, carries over to what is considered to be the new Israel, the Church of God, described and celebrated in the proclamations of the Easter Vigil. In what is said about Israel of old, be mindful of its potential in the life of the Christian Church.

The great theological reality of the Hebrew Scriptures is the failure of Jerusalem, the end of its hegemony, the deportation of Israel, and the reality of exile, a dismal ending that was the termination of all old faith claims. It is impossible to overstate the cruciality of this fissure in Israel's self-understanding. This was for Israel a genuine and profound ending. Judah came to an end. 

The public, institutional life of But beyond that Israel made the theological judgement that God had abandoned Israel and had nullified all the old promises. The political-military experience of an ending is transposed into a deep theological crisis.

It is this moment of failure that is called the point zero. It is the moment when Israel has two tasks that belong definitively to its faith. The first -- long practiced in the Psalms of lamentation and complaint -- is to relinquish what is gone, to resist every denial and every act of nostalgia, to acknowledge and embrace the ending God has given. Jerusalem is gone! Israel will not soon have done with its sense of loss, variously expressed as grief and as rage. Israel's second task is to receive what is inexplicably and inscrutably given by God, to resist every measure of despair, to await and affirm what God, beyond every quid pro quo, now gives. This is an important point: the faith of Israel envisions no automatic move from relinquishment to reception; one does not follow necessarily from or after the other. Israel's poets, singers, and speakers of oracles, heard as the very assurance of God's own voice, arise precisely in the point zero. Amos Wilder had it right: "Accept no mitigation, but be instructed at the null point; the zero breeds new algebra."

We are here at the center of the mystery of Jewish faith that receives, in Christian perspective, its dramatic enactment in Easter. There is a "breeding," a hidden generativity of newness, just at the zero. The "breeding" at zero is not simply necessity. The "breeding" at zero is not only Israel's act of will for newness or wishful thinking. The "breeding" at zero is not simply buoyant poets in their extreme imagination. Perhaps it is all of these; but beyond these is the wounded but undefeated, affronted but not alienated, shamed but not negated resolve of God to have a people as God's own people in the world. And therefore, it is clear in the canonical text of Jews and Christians, there will be a new Israel, reloved, healed, ransomed, blessed, brought home rejoicing -- by no claim of its own but by the nonnegotiable resolve of God to have a people.

The rhetoric of hope whereby Israel, in its hopelessness, must receive its new gift from God is given in many voices. Indeed, Israel requires endless generativity in order to speak the unspeakable newness from God that is beyond explanation. One such voice is that of the Latina Junot Diaz who talks to her sister about radical hope in the wake of the recent election.

"What now? you asked. And that was my students' question too. What now?l answered them as poorly as I answered you, I fear. And so I sit here in the middle of the night, in an attempt to try again.

So what now? Well, first and foremost, we need to feel. We need to connect courageously with the rejection, the fear, the vulnerability that Trump's victory has inflicted on us, without turning away or numbing ourselves or lapsing into cynicism. We need to bear witness to what we have lost: our safety, our sense of belonging, our vision of our country. We need to mourn all these injuries fully, so that they do not drag us into despair, so repair will be possible.

And while we're doing the hard, necessary work of mourning, we should avail ourselves of the old formations that have seen us through darkness. We organize. We form solidarities. And, yes: we fight. To be heard. To be safe. To be free.

For those of us who have been in the fight, the prospect of more fighting, after so cruel a setback, will seem impossible. At moments like these, it is easy to feel that one can't go on. But I believe that, once the shock  settles, faith and energy will return. But let's be real: we always knew this wasn't going to be easy. Colonial power, patriarchal power, capitalist power must always and everywhere be battled, because they never, ever quit. We have to keep fighting, because otherwise there will be no future -- all will be consumed. Those of us whose ancestors were owned and bred like animals know that future all too well, because it is, in part, our past. And we know that by fighting against all odds, we who had nothing, not even our real names, transformed the universe. Our ancestors did this with very little, and we who have more must do the same. This is the joyous destiny of our people -- to bury the arc of the moral universe so deep in justice that it will never be undone.

But all the fighting in the world will not help us if we do not also hope. What I'm trying to cultivate is not blind optimism but what the philosopher Jonathan Lear calls radical hope. "What makes this hope radical ," Lear writes,"is that it is directed toward a future goodness that  transcends the current ability to understand what it is." Radical hope is not so much something you have but something you practice; it demands flexibility, openness, and what Lear describes as "imaginative excellence," Radical hope is our best weapon against despair, even when despair seems justifiable; it makes the survival of the end of your world possible. Only radical hope could have imagined people like us into existence. And I believe that it will help us create a better, more loving future... Time to face this hard new world, to return to the great shining work of our people. Darkness, after all, is breaking, a new day has come.

Advent 1 C - Nov 29, 2015

Holy Cross Monastery, West Park, NY
Br. Roy Parker, OHC
Advent 1 C - Sunday, November 29, 2015

Jeremiah 33:14-16
1 Thessalonians 3:9-13
Luke 21:25-36 

The Advent wreath in the church

I need to preface my remarks by saying that they’ve been influenced by a sermon preached by Harvey Guthrie at the National Cathedral last October at the dedication of the Jonathan Daniels Carving in the Civil Rights Porch, and also by the writing of Maria Boulding in her book entitled The Coming of God. 

Some of you may be familiar with the weekly cartoon contest which appears in the New Yorker: a cartoon without caption is printed, giving readers the opportunity to invent a caption appropriate to the drawing. Three submissions appear in the following issue of the magazine and in the week after, the winning caption is printed. 

Several weeks ago the contest depicted a bearded patriarchal God in therapy on the clouds of heaven, an angel seated alongside, taking notes. The winning caption has the angel asking, “When did you first realize you were really a woman?” 

That this caption won the poll seems to me a cultural indicator of a kind of sea change in the popular religious imagination regarding God, a change from what might be called ‘metaphysical masculinity‘ to something like ‘compassionate solidarity.‘ That is, a movement away from masculine images of God, images not easily understood nor much in tune with actual experience, images even uninviting and repelling to our sensibilities; a movement away from those sort of descriptions to a more feminine imagery characterized by the Hebrew word chesed, which appears significantly in God’s self-description to Moses in the thirty-fourth chapter of Exodus: The Lord, the Lord, a God merciful and gracious, slow to anger, and abounding in steadfast love and faithfulness, keeping steadfast love for the thousandth generation . . . 

That key word is variously translated ‘kindness, loving-kindness, mercy’, and ‘steadfast love.‘ No one English word captures its meaning. It seems basically to have to do with loyalty in relationships, loyalty that is considerate of and affectionate toward the sharer of a relationship. It is not used in Hebrew of ‘kindness’ in the abstract. It bespeaks actual steadfast, loving, merciful, kind loyalty toward another. It is rooted in God’s commitment to God’s people, in God’s steadfast, loving, merciful, kind loyalty toward God’s human colleagues in the doing of justice. It is about the kind of relationship God wants people to have with God, and with each and all of their human sisters and brothers. 

It is indeed about sensitivity and responsiveness to the needs and rights of others, indeed about respecting others, but, at root, it is about affectionate, unswerving commitment to others. Which, by the way, will remind us of St. Paul’s gold standard of this in the Letter to the Romans: “(In the utmost adversity) we are more than conquerors through him who loved us. For I am convinced that neither death, nor life, nor angels, nor rulers, nor things present, nor things to come . . . nor anything in all creation, will be able to separate us from the love of God in Christ Jesus our Lord.” 

Attending to today’s Gospel, we’ll note that the signs in the sun, moon and stars, the distress of nations confused by the roaring of the sea, the waves, and so forth were originally stage props to bolster the endurance of first century Christians under persecution who were encouraged to raise their heads and greet their approaching redemption. As if those on the way to salvation need not be that concerned about the surrounding chaos. 

Because the femininity of God is about God’s affectionate, unswerving commitment to God’s human colleagues in the doing of justice toward all persons and toward the environment, it signals the realization that now the distress of nations and the roaring of the sea and waves are no longer merely stage props, encouraging signs of redemption, but have become warning signs of imminent global collapse summoning humanity to radical action. 

At the moment, for example, the Pacific is a troublesome place, creating storms and causing problems for people and marine life across the Pacific rim and beyond, including the strong El Nino system that has formed along the Equator, and another unusually persistent zone of warm water sitting off the North American coast, called the Blob. The warming of the Pacific due to greenhouse gases has been linked to unprecedented harmful algal blooms that have toxified shellfish and shut down fisheries in the Pacific Northwest. It’s really worrisome. If this is a window into the future, it’s not a good future. 

Advent is the celebration of three comings: God’s self-gift to the world at the incarnation, God’s self-gift to each believer, and the final coming which is still outside our experience, expressed in the New Testament hope that Christ will come again in some way earthed in our own expectations, fears and desires. If we are to be more than simply agnostic about the long-term prospects for our race, our most fundamental hope must be that it will not end in meaningless destruction.

If we are going to blow ourselves out of existence or make the planet uninhabitable, there is little point in hoping for anything else. To believe that the human race will eventually reach the end of its earthly pilgrimage is one thing; to equate the end with total destruction is another. The hope that we are traveling towards a destiny, rather than a mere collapse, is linked with the faith that our origins were already purposeful. 

If there is a Creator who stands outside the whole cosmic evolutionary process and yet works God’s will within it by a wisdom and love that are present in its every movement, then human life has a purpose. It begins from God and is on its way to a goal which, however unimaginable, will give meaning to the whole adventure. 

We cannot comfort ourselves with wishful thinking. Though we may admire the courage of those who face the possibility that human life is simply absurd, that there is no future, and that the only option is to live with dignity and kindness as we await our meaningless extinction, this view is not convincing because it leaves too much unexplained. Deeply rooted in our experience is a certainty that our best intuitions will prove to have been the truest. We also want justice, however we may fear it or fall short in practicing it ourselves.

Our hearts demand that the very rough and uneven distribution in this life shall be redeemed within a larger justice. We are radically convinced that good, not evil, will triumph in the end. The assurance of the classic fairy tales that the wicked are defeated and everyone else lives happily ever after is reached only through suffering, danger, courage and endurance, and these stories so appeal because they strike a chord in us. 

Perhaps you know the phrase deus ex machina, that originated in the theatrical device of placing a contraption just off-stage to manufacture a god figure who would enter the play at the last minute to save a hopeless situation. Literally: God from a machine. Part of the sea change in the popular religious imagination is that no deus ex machina solution, no machine-made god who simply eliminates problems can be the coming one to satisfy our deepest desires, but only the one who promises to come and be with us especially in the midst of our struggles and uncertainties.

I suspect another part of this sea change is the information I’ve gotten lately from my Jesuit network to the effect that the idea of the priest as one with special powers is not very popular today in theology. Rather the priest is the sacramental minister whose presence in the liturgy ties the individual worshiping community to all the Christian communities, making it possible for the fullness of the church to be present in the local assembly.

Our calling is to go along with God in doing what is right toward all persons and our planet home, in having a passion for lasting human and humane relationships with God, our sisters, brothers, and the entire creation, and to be open to new and unknown and surprising and scary and devastating things that may involve.