2nd Sunday of Advent - Cycle B 2020

Isaiah 40:1-5, 9-11 | 2 Peter 3:8-14 | Mark 1:1-8

Almighty and merciful God, may no earthly undertaking hinder those who set out in haste to meet your Son, that may our learning of heavenly wisdom grant us abundance of life and admittance into his company through our Lord Jesus Christ, your Son, who lives and reigns with you in the unity of the Holy Spirit, one God forever and ever, amen.

I love that image of wonder and wander, because it seems to me that, in the journey that you and I are invited into, we are always being asked to make a decision about what is happening to us.  How do we read it?  How do we think about it?  And one of the mistakes that so often we make is that we’re looking for nice, clean, clear answers or nice, easy steps.  Do this, then this happens, and that happens.  You and I know that life is made up of a promise that God has made to us, that he’s going to take us to a place, and he promises to feed us, to gather us, to carry us, to lead us, to be a shepherd for us.  And the most difficult part of that is that, when he promises that he will lead us and take care of us, the one thing he’s asking us to surrender to is a thing called suffering — suffering. 

So it seems that this first reading in this set of readings is saying, “Okay, I want you who are suffering to receive something.”  Jerusalem was suffering because of their sins.  Suffering means you’re going through something painful, and the one thing about suffering is that it is something that is natural to human nature.  When something’s not right, something’s not going well, we feel pain, we feel uneasy, we’re not sure, and we get anxious and sometimes filled with too much shame, because maybe we caused it, or fear that it’s never going to get better.  This first reading is talking about comforting people who are going through suffering, and what is the nature of suffering?  The nature of suffering is not just that you are in pain, but it’s that you are called to surrender to it, to accept it and to grow from it.  And what this set of readings is pointing out is that there is this process we’re going through.  It’s very mysterious.  It’s only the mystic in us can really understand it when we surrender to something we can’t fully figure out with our brains but we kind of feel or sense or know inside, “Yeah, this makes sense.”  And the suffering we go through is the constant, slow exposure of everything that is negative and everything that is a lie and all that it creates in terms of pain, and you’d say to God, “God, why would you allow us to go through all this suffering?  Why can’t you just give us the way to live?  Why don’t you just tell us?  Give us the energy we need to do what’s right.” 

There’s a lot of us out there that have thought about religion as a way of saying, “Okay, God, make me perfect.  I want you to give me everything I need so that I will stop being imperfect, a sinner, a mistake-maker.”  Well, he’s not going to step into your life and make you into something you’re not as a kind of gift, like poof.  No, he trusts in something inside human nature that is we don’t want to be given something as much.  We want to work for it, but the thing we forget is working for it is not something on our own.  It’s something that God promises that he’s going to do with us.  He promises that.  “We’ll do this together.  I’ll be in you.  You’ll be in me.  We’re going to be into this incredible, interesting journey.  It’s going through all the sufferings, the joys, the pain, all that in life, and somehow, as dark as it gets or as good as it gets, I’m going to be there to keep you level, to keep you grounded, to keep you authentic.”  It’s the road that is talked about in that first reading.  The deep valleys, it’s going to make them level.  The high peaks that are too high to reach, he’s going to lower that.  We’re going to be on this path, and the path is God’s incredibly intense desire to enter into your life and mine and feed us and gather us and carry us and lead us to a kingdom.  And the kingdom is truth and authenticity.

And the suffering that we go through is really interesting, because without it, we couldn’t grow, because suffering engages us, yes, into something that we’re looking at that’s difficult, but what it demands is developing acceptance.  When I ask God, “Please help get me through this situation,” the first thing my brain says, “Yeah, take it away.  Stop the pandemic tomorrow.  We’re tired of working with this thing that seems to be so debilitating for us in terms of who we are and how we like to live.  Take it away.  Take it away.”  And he’s saying, “No, I’ll take it away when it’s time, but what I want you to learn, what to do is to accept it.  Accept it as this is the way it is right now.  This is where it is, and we have to go with that, stay with that.”  Some people want to say, “Well, this is there, because we’re being punished.”  No.  This is there, because we need to grow.  Yes, how do we grow going through something that we don’t like?  By surrendering to it and believing there is something in it for us.  Something in it is going to be a gift.  How do you believe that?  That’s so hard.  Think of your own wound, that thing inside of every human being that is just, “If I could just get rid of that, if I just didn’t have this one problem, this one addiction, this one desire for something I know is wrong, but I keep going back to it all the time, hoping it’s going to produce goodness, and it never does.  And then I’m angry, and I feel shame, and then I go back to it again, over and over again.”  That’s the world we sometimes find ourselves living in and can be very pessimistic about and say, “Well, I never get better, and nothing ever really works.” 

Well, here’s the thing.  The promise of Advent is the coming of God into your life, into my life.  He’s going to be there.  He’s going to be there in a way beyond our imagining, and here’s his promise.  We’re living in a world of time, and as time continues to move on, we are going to grow in our understanding of the insanity of lies and illusions, because we keep going back to them, and they never really give us what we think they can.  We put our promise in something that is not healthy, and we think it’s going to work, and it never does.  And so the way in which the evolution of our species continues to go is that everything hidden, every lie that we’ve ever been engaged in is going to be revealed for what it is.  Everything will be shown for what it is.  What an amazing, interesting way of imagining salvation.  Every lie, every illusion, everything that we get caught up in, greed — think of all the major sins.  Envy, greed, selfishness, using people, we choose those, because we think they’re good.  We think we’re going to get something, and it’s so painful to go through the experience of knowing we’ve been choosing things that are devastating to ourselves and others.  We have to face that’s what we’ve done.  That’s the suffering, and if we can accept that, stay with that, believe we’re forgiven for that but don’t diminish what it is but understand it and feel the regret that comes with repentance, that’s the gift.  That’s the work.

So let me go through these four things I mentioned earlier about the work of God in your life and in mine, and if we are aware of what that means, it means that God has direct contact with you and me inside of our hearts.  We don’t have to go to some authority outside of us.  Those authorities are valuable and helpful, but we have it inside of us, the thing that you know that you know.  It’s not because you’ve been told it, but you know it.  That’s called full awareness, consciousness, and here’s what we need to be aware of, fully conscious of: in this journey on this earth, we are in a process of evolving into something more than we could ever be on our own.  God is in us to help us on this process.  My homilies that I give you every week, what am I trying to do?  I’m trying to open you to the fullness of who God is in you. 

It’s interesting.  I was driving here this morning.  I was imagining that — I was struggling with what I was going to say today, as I always do, driving down Grand Avenue to Fair Park, where I do this recording, and I’m thinking, “God, I wish this was clearer in my head, because I think I know what I want to say, but I’m not quite sure.”  Then I thought to myself, “You’ve been doing this for 33 years.  All you’ve got to — go back in your files and pick out what you said three years ago or six years ago or nine years ago on this same Sunday and just re-read it.”  And I thought — I started laughing to myself.  I’ve never, ever thought of doing that.  What does that mean?  That means that whatever I said back then was where I was then.  What I’m saying now to you today is where I am now.  I’m not the same person I was three, six, nine years ago.  Nor are you.  Nor is the world the same.  So what I’m saying about that is there’s a way to go back to these images that we have in our faith life and reevaluate them over and over again in light of who we are now and what we’re going through and believe with all our hearts that this God is now working with you as you are now in the context of the world we’re living in now. 

Three years ago, the word pandemic didn’t mean very much to me.  Three years ago, I took advantage that I could go anywhere, travel anywhere, be with anybody I wanted, and that’s gone for a while.  There’s hope on the horizon, yes.  A vaccine is coming, thank God, but have you been fighting that?  Have you been angry at that, or have you been surrendering to it?  Have you suffered it?  Have you suffered this whole thing by saying, “I don’t understand why this has to happen, but I believe that, if I can accept it, not resist it, not be angry over it or blame someone for it, if I can just give in to it, there’s going to be life on the other side of it”? 

Here’s the way I want to use these images of the Good Shepherd, because that’s who’s coming.  He comes to give us a gift in baptism.  The baptism is the promise that God is going to overlook all of our sins and enter into us with the hope that, if he can show us our sins for what they are, we will change.  We will grow with his help.  That’s the promise, and so when I use these four words — he feeds us, he gathers us, he carries us, he leads us.  I’m going to try it this way.  The feeding is the world you and I are in and the person we are, our life.  He feeds you this mysterious, mystical thing that existed before you were on this earth and will continue after you are on this earth, this thing that you are and I am.  We’ve been fed with a story from our ancestors.  We’ve been fed with a way of seeing from our parents.  We’ve been fed by religion that we’ve lived with.  We have all of these things being given to us, and that’s what is ours.  And it needs to be embraced and accepted, suffered.  When I think about resisting who I am because of what happened to me, and I hate that part of me, and I hate the people that made me into less than I am or all that stuff.  That gets us nowhere.  No, we have to see every single thing in our ancestors, everything in my family of origin, everything that’s happened to me between the day I was conscious and today, every abuse, every gift, everything, both ways, that’s our food.  So accept it.  Suffer it.  Take it in, because he’s going to gather us.  And the gathering is the circle of friends that we’re in right now, the people he’s given to us to share our life with, the people that now feed us and challenge us and irritate us and please us.  So we have to realize, “Okay, I have a history that has been given to me to incorporate into my life, and it’s been given to me so I can share the wisdom that it is for me in the circle I have.”  So we’re always in community, and then he carries us.  And carrying us means that he is there as a way of being able to accomplish this, but he’s not doing it for us.  He’s being there when it’s too much.  He steps in and somehow gives us a strength we never, never imagined having.  So he carries us only when we are almost completely exhausted, when there’s no breath left in us.  When there’s no chance for us to say, “I can’t do this anymore,” he’ll pick us up and say something, give us something that keeps us going.  And then he leads us, and what’s he leading us to?  Life, the kingdom, peace, beauty, love all comes through suffering.  That’s what he wants.  That’s our inheritance.

And so we’re looking at this season called Advent.  It’s about the coming of something into the world that was never here before.  You and I live in the New Testament.  Billions of people lived before that, but here we are in the world we’re in.  And God did the same thing for those in the past that he’s doing for us now, but the comfort we have now is so different than what they had.  And if you don’t believe in this mystical union that is our inheritance, if you don’t believe that there’s a gift given to us so we can understand and see how we’ve been fed and how we’ve been given friends to share what we’ve learned and been taught and that is there, when we really fail, and that he wants us to get to the place that he always promises we can get to: wholeness, holiness, peace, joy.  It’s our inheritance, and to not realize that that is our gift that’s coming to us, we will not enter into the season as we’re intended to.  We’ll still stay on the peripheral, on the outside, wondering, “Why, why, why.  Take it away.  I can’t stand it.  Change things.”  No, it’s all perfect.  It’s all the way it is supposed to be.  Surrender, surrender.  Suffer, suffer.  Accept.  It sounds so easy in a way, and I just know how hard that is.  And if you just know that that’s the way he’s working with you, and then you can maybe go back and say, “Well, this part of it I don’t like.  I don’t want to be around a lot of people.  I don’t want to share what I’ve learned, or I don’t want to learn from other people.  I don’t want to give them what God has given me.  I don’t believe he’s going to pick me up and help me when it’s too much.  I don’t really know if I understand the goal.”  That’s where we need to work.  That’s what we need to do.  That’s the challenge of Advent.

That last piece of music, Lord, is powerfully representing what you long for us to see.The great song, the great gift, the great life force that has come into the world is that you have become one of us, and becoming one of us, you become intimately connected to us in a way that was never possible before.Help us to feel the enthusiasm that your presence brings to us, and take away the negativity that we get caught up in and the fear and the shame that keep us from recognizing the beauty of this life you’ve created.You in us, we in you, being able to share that with one another, it is truly a marvelous and exciting coming into our world of a grace that was not there before.And we ask this in Jesus’ name, amen.