I love this season – the Advent wreath, with its candles, the fragrance of fresh evergreen branches, the hymns, the readings, the expectant anticipation – the whole marvelous thing.  However, it seems like every year Advent gets shorter.  Christmas decorations took over the shelves at Menard’s right after Halloween.  Santa Claus has already appeared in dozens of Thanksgiving Day Parades, and even at the university, the stable was set up last week with Mary and Joseph, the donkey, shepherds and wise men and the baby Jesus already in the manger.  Our Christmas party is scheduled for Tuesday, right before the Lessons and Carols – the Episcopalian ceremony invented years back as an alternative to Midnight Mass.  Archbishop Cupich blessed the manger scene down in Daley Plaza yesterday. What’s left to anticipate?

Isaiah 63:16-17,19; 64:2-7
Ps 80
1 Cor 1 :3-9
Mark 13:33-37

I love this season – the Advent wreath, with its candles, the fragrance of fresh evergreen branches, the hymns, the readings, the expectant anticipation – the whole marvelous thing.  However, it seems like every year Advent gets shorter.  Christmas decorations took over the shelves at Menard’s right after Halloween.  Santa Claus has already appeared in dozens of Thanksgiving Day Parades, and even at the university, the stable was set up last week with Mary and Joseph, the donkey, shepherds and wise men and the baby Jesus already in the manger.  Our Christmas party is scheduled for Tuesday, right before the Lessons and Carols – the Episcopalian ceremony invented years back as an alternative to Midnight Mass.  Archbishop Cupich blessed the manger scene down in Daley Plaza yesterday. What’s left to anticipate?

We’re just not very good at waiting any more. We want it all and we want it now. There’s hardly any surprise left, even when it comes to presents.  Today children hand a list of expected toys to their parents, moving Santa Claus completely out of the picture.  His letter bag has all but dried up.  Kids now accompany their parents to big-box stores to pick out what they want or just order them on line.  It seems like Advent, that beautiful, quiet, subdued period of joyful anticipation has been swallowed up at both ends by commercialism and the entertainment industry.

And in case it escaped notice, it isn’t even called Advent any more.  It’s now the Holiday Season.  Even Thanksgiving, once the favorite American holiday, is being engulfed by the rising tide of buying and selling.  And fighting and shooting.

So here we are, increasingly out of the swirl of things, in the wake of Gray Thursday, Black Friday, Polka Dot Saturday, and Cyber Monday… trying to recall why we do what we do, we crazy Catholics.

Besides being the first Sunday of Advent, today is also World AIDS Day – as it has been since 1988 – a special day of remembrance and resolve.  AIDS is still a world-wide affliction threatening millions of people here and especially in poorer nations – far worse than the Ebola virus.

Like cancer, the news that someone has the Ebola virus or AIDS is one of the most fright-ening things a person can ever hear.  People often turn to God when they learn of it.  Not in prayer, or in hope, but in disbelief and anger.  I suppose we all have a tendency to hold God responsible when things go wrong.  After all, isn’t God supposed to take care of us?  Especially if we say our prayers and try to keep the Ten Commandments and put our envelopes in the collection every Sunday.  We even hear Isaiah trying to lay the blame on God…. “Why do you let us wander from your ways and harden our hearts so that we fear you not?”

Whether it’s AIDS or an earthquake, a drive-by shooting or a terrorist attack, or even bad weather, we want protection and ultimately we want it from God.  But if we think for a bit, the way Isaiah does, we begin to realize that the real question is not why God lets such awful things happen, but why and how we do.  Something seems particularly wrong when senseless tragedies befall the innocent.  But is it God’s fault that children are dying of hunger and disease in Syria and Iraq?  Or that families are wiped out because of faulty gas pipes or improperly placed space heaters?  Or terrorist attacks?  Or AIDS?

If Isaiah seems to suggest that God lets such things happen because of our guilt, it is by way of saying that our thoughtless way of living brings such tragedies on ourselves and others, including the innocent –and if God does not prevent it, that is not because God wants it that way.  St. Paul simply tells us that God will strengthen us to the end, so that we can be blameless on the day of Our Lord Jesus Christ.  He does not say that God will miraculously protect us from the consequences of our sins—or even the sins of others.  God will strengthen us.  That is what he promises.

That is why it is important to pay attention to the theme that links today’s readings – waiting on God.  Waiting for God. “No ear has ever heard,” Isaiah says, “no eye ever seen, any God but you doing such deeds for those who wait for you.”  The word appears again in the second reading, from St. Paul’s letter to the Christian community at Corinth, that wild Greek port town.  “He says, “the witness I bore to Christ has been so confirmed among you that you lack no spiritual gift as you wait for the revelation of our Lord Jesus.”   The gospel from Mark does not mention waiting, but watching, although the connection here is important.  What we do while we wait is watch.  When I looked up the word “wait,” I found that it comes from an Old German root, wahta, which actually means “to watch.”  Watching means to look for someone, keeping vigilant, staying awake, which is one of Mark’s favorite ways of saying “waiting.”

All the gospels warn us that unless we watch out, unless we stay awake, waiting for God, we will miss out.  For Christ comes like a thief in the night.  Jesus is telling us to be mindful, to pay attention to the presence of God hidden in the events of our daily lives, whether minor exasperations or major crises and real tragedies.

Such waiting demands patience, stamina, and courage.  We may not tire of promoting justice, of making peace, of being merciful, of letting love guide our words and actions, no matter how long the wait.  In Isaiah’s words, “Would that you might meet us doing right, that we were mindful of you in all our ways!”

And that is why we wait.  And watch.  As Advent begins, let us pray, then, that as we wait in joyful hope, we will also watch out for Christ in the person of the least and lowliest of those he calls his sisters and brothers.

7 December 1941

If a man had no more to do with God than to be thankful, that would suffice (Meister Eckhart, the 14th-century Dominican preacher and mystic, Sermon 34.)

The news over the last few days has been crowded with reports of the protests and disturbances in Ferguson, Missouri, and elsewhere following the verdict of the grand jury in the Michael Brown case.  My inboxes have been stuffed with requests for petitions as well as protests and expressions of anger directed from and at both sides in the dispute.  One thing has become very evident to me – there is much more to all this than the shooting of an 18-year-old black youth in Missouri.

It’s that time of year when our thoughts turn liturgically to advent – that shrinking season that has been eroded into near non-significance by Halloween on one side and Christmas on the other, two commercial tsunamis with the shrinking island of Thanksgiving – or at least Black Friday — in the middle.  Jesus once said that you can’t serve both God and mammon, and it looks like Mammon is winning.

In any case, next Sunday we begin that beautiful season of waiting and preparation for the coming of our Lord and Savior, and, in a slightly underplayed theme in scripture, our king.  This Sunday we are celebrating the Feast of Christ the King.  It’s something of a puzzle actually.

Readings:

Ezek 34:11-12, 15-17
1 Cor 15:20-26, 28
Mat 25:31-46

It’s that time of year when our thoughts turn liturgically to advent – that shrinking season that has been eroded into near non-significance by Halloween on one side and Christmas on the other, two commercial tsunamis with the shrinking island of Thanksgiving – or at least Black Friday — in the middle.  Jesus once said that you can’t serve both God and mammon, and it looks like Mammon is winning.

In any case, next Sunday we begin that beautiful season of waiting and preparation for the coming of our Lord and Savior, and, in a slightly underplayed theme in scripture, our king.  This Sunday we are celebrating the Feast of Christ the King.  It’s something of a puzzle actually.  It appeared in the Church’s calendar only in 1925, when Pope Pius XI instituted it as a rejoinder to what he correctly perceived as the advancing tide of secularism and atheism.  But it didn’t do much for the kings of the earth themselves.

Only about a dozen real kings are still in evidence today. Plus two queens, a couple of Grand Dukes, a prince or two, and a smattering of sultans and the like who aren’t real kings although are still absolute monarchs.  All the kings and queens, except one, King Mswati III of Swaziland, are constitutional monarchs, meaning they don’t have the kind of power and authority that once made the title feared and generally loathed.  In the United States, France, Ireland, and other Republics, we simply got rid of kings one way or other.  For democratic republicans or for that matter republican democrats, being called a king is not a compliment, which seems to be the bottom line in the recent display of annoyance expressed by Mr. Boehner and President Obama.

Still, even in the United States, we have a kind of nostalgic admiration for what might be called the true king, as seen in the popularity of stories and films such as The Lord of the Rings and King Arthur.  We have fond memories of the Kennedy administration’s Camelot image, an echo of the affection we have for Arthur. These stories tend to turn on the quest for the true king, the real king, who will restore the rule of justice, love, and peace that false kings and queens have squelched.  There’s a little of that in Game of Thrones, but not much.  In that, as in the actual history of the world, kings tend to be bloody, violent, mean, and nasty.  It’s helpful to recall that when the Israelites first demanded a king. The prophet Samuel took them to task and when they finally prevailed warned them that their kings would be tyrants, thugs, killers, and bullies.  That included the best of them, David, whose moral compass got lost in the shuffle soon after he killed Goliath.

Years back, the novelist and scholar Robert Graves wrote a book called King Jesus which turned on the teachings of Jesus as a wise philosopher rather than a ruler, and the title was meant as a kind of gentle irony.

Jesus himself had some major reservations when the king business was brought up.  When after the miracle of the loaves and fishes, his countrymen were about to come and take him by force to make him king, “he withdrew again to the mountain by himself” [John 6:15].  Even before Pilate, as we read in all the gospels, Jesus refused to acknowledge the accusation that he had made himself a king.  John’s gospel has the longest account:

Then Pilate entered the headquarters again, summoned Jesus, and asked him, “Are you the King of the Jews?”

Jesus answered, “Do you ask this on your own, or did others tell you about me?”

Pilate replied, “I am not a Jew, am I? Your own nation and the chief priests have handed you over to me. What have you done?”

Jesus answered, “My kingdom is not from this world. If my kingdom were from this world, my followers would be fighting to keep me from being handed over to the Jews. But as it is, my kingdom is not from here.”

Pilate asked him, “So you are a king?” Jesus answered, “You say that I am a king. For this I was born, and for this I came into the world, to testify to the truth. Everyone who belongs to the truth listens to my voice.”

Pilate asked him, “What is truth?” After he had said this, he went out to the Jews again and told them, “I find no case against him.”  [John 18:33-38].

In today’s readings, we hear more about sheep and shepherds than we do about kings, and that tells us more about the kingship of Jesus than the shouts of the crowds on Palm Sunday and, not to be forgotten, Good Friday.  For Jesus came preaching the Kingdom of God, the reign of God, a reign of truth, peace, love, and freedom, as the liturgy proclaims.  As the human face of God, Jesus came to inaugurate that Kingdom, and he started it by preaching salvation to the poor, reconciling sinners, healing the sick, feeding the hungry, curing the blind, and welcoming outcasts, the wretched of the earth, and all the lost and lonely.  Today’s gospel reading, the complement to the Beatitudes that Matthew places at the beginning of his gospel, tell us what our role must be to take our place in that kingdom.

Christ the President, or Christ the Prime Minister, Christ the Chairman, or even Christ the Queen hardly has the same impact as Christ the King.  As Lord and sovereign, the human face of God for us, Jesus is likely to remain the King, but as always not the King of Infinite Space, but the King of Hearts.  And so, in the weeks ahead, let’s get ready to meet the King by making sure our hearts are in the right place, not only at Christmas, but at all times.  And let us pray that our actions will express our allegiance as they should so that at his coming we will hear “Come, you that are blessed by my Father, inherit the kingdom prepared for you from the foundation of the world [Matt 25:34]…

Conventionally, money can’t buy happiness.  Today, apparently, it can buy elections.  And now the hard part begins.  Let the buyer beware…