Luke 3:1 - 6
Once a long long time ago my older
sister and I, who were about 9 and 12 respectively, pooled our meager
funds to buy our younger sister, about two, a toy rocking horse for
Christmas. We spoke a lot about how happy she would be. We
anticipated squeals of glee and sheer bliss for our little sister.
Finally one day when my mother was out on an errand and my sister and
I were supposed to watch the baby, we couldn’t stand it any longer.
We took the toy from its hiding place and sure enough, her eyes lit
up, she squealed and laughed and mounted the horse and rocked away.
We eventually took her off of it and put the toy away. She fussed a
great deal and we calmed her down with a cookie. Our mother came
home and we thought that was the end of it. But a few days later Mom
wondered aloud why the baby sister was always going into my older
sister’s room and whimpering in front of the closet, where we had
hidden the rocking horse. That’s kind of what we do when we put up
ornaments and play Christmas music during advent; we lose sight of
what Advent and Christmas are all about.
I’m sure you remember Christmas as a
child. Sometimes you kind of knew what Santa Claus was going to
bring you. Other times you looked forward to the surprise your
grandparents might get, which was in my case often the disappointment
of some article of clothing, even though I always hoped for something
more easily played with. But the anticipation was important. It
made Christmas morning so much more delightful.
That’s part of the reason for
Advent. It is not like Lent, a time of penance and fasting. Almost
all the readings reflect instead anticipation. If we listen to them
they speak of something wonderful that is going to happen. It will
come as surely as Christmas morning comes, but it isn’t here yet
We only need to wait a little longer. The prophet Baruch tells
Jerusalem to throw off its garments of mourning and put on the
splendor of glory of God. The apostle Paul prays that his readers be
pure and blameless for the day of Jesus Christ. And Luke pins down
the exact time and place that the coming of the Lord, predicted by
Isaiah and other prophets, will happen.
You and I need to enter into this
anticipation. We need to take time to think about the coming of the
Lord, and whether we are prepared, and if not, what we can do about
it. Isaiah talks about making crooked paths straight, knocking down
mountains and filling valleys, smoothing out rough ways – making
straight the way of the Lord. Preparing for Christmas is kind of a
practice for the real thing – the coming of the Lord once and for
all into our lives.
I think making crooked paths straight
means that I try to destroy the delusions I have, that we all have,
about our spiritual lives. We all have excuses, when we think about
it, why we put off our spiritual growth. We haven’t got time, we
get distracted, we really don’t need to go to confession because we
haven’t really done anything terrible, and there are lots of worse
people in the world. We believe Christ is present in the Eucharist,
but that belief isn’t real enough to us to bring us to a few
minutes of adoration before the blessed sacrament. We know the bible
is the word of God, but except for the weekend masses, that’s about
all the bible we care about. Tearing down mountains and filling up
valleys, suggests to me that we need to find those parts of our lives
where we are resisting the Spirit. If you go through a day and look
back, you can always see times when you might have done things
differently, more in keeping with living in the Spirit. Every day we
have the opportunity to receive the fruits of the spirit, to exercise
the beatitudes. When we fail to exercise kindness, when we allow
anger to take over, when we allow things to deprive us of our joy, we
are fighting the Spirit. Only by reflecting on our actual experience
can we hope to tear down mountains and fill up valleys. One of the
best ways to tear down mountains and fill valleys is to develop a
habit of daily reflection; where did we respond to the Spirit? Where
did we exercise the beatitudes? And smoothing out rough ways –
what are we doing well? Where if someone looked at our life, would
they suspect us of being a Christian? Well, lets do those things
better. Lets take our strengths and make them stronger.
The purpose of advent is to prepare
for the coming of the Lord. We are not really preparing for
Christmas – that celebrates a day 2000 years ago. We are not
preparing for the Second Coming; we don’t know when that will be or
how, and it is the Church that must make the world ready for that.
We are indeed the Church and we could ask how we could do this
better, but that’s not the prime issue here. There is a coming of
Christ for each of us, though. As certain as the sun rises in the
morning, a day will come when Christ will come for me, and I will see
once and for all how I am and how I should have been, and the closer
these visions are to each other the happier I will be. And that is
the real coming of Christ for which we are preparing.
My sister and I anticipated the joy
our little sister would have on Christmas morning. Because we
couldn’t wait, all we did was make her sad, and when Christmas came
the rocking horse wasn’t a surprise anymore. So try to enter into
that holy expectation, that time in the near future when we will each
meet Jesus. What will he say? What will I say? Will he see that
the good work he began in me at baptism has been completed? Or will
I be sad because I have squandered the gifts he’s given me?
