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First Sunday of Advent Year B - November 30, 2014
Church of Saint Ignatius Loyola
Joseph M. O’Keefe, S.J.
ISIS, Ebola, Sandy, Ferguson, Afghanistan, Ukraine, income inequality,
political polarization, gridlock, unemployment, astronomical student debt,
spiraling health-care costs, evaporating pension plans, catastrophic climate
change, dissolving family structures, empty churches, death of the American
dream, pervasive cynicism. God, where are you? “O that you would rend the
heavens and come down!”
In every age, people have bemoaned the woundedness of their era. And,
sadly, as Isaiah acknowledges, many of those wounds are self-inflicted. “Why do you
let us wander, O LORD, from your ways, and harden our hearts so that we fear you
not? You have hidden your face from us and have delivered us up to our guilt.”
Every year, as we enter into this season, we prepare to celebrate anew the
birth of Jesus. During these days of Advent, we reflect on God’s breaking into history
in the past; we acknowledge in the midst of our troubles the spirit of Christ in the
present; and we look forward with hope to Christ’s coming again. We ponder the
present in light of the past and with an eye to the future.
We ponder the present in light of the past, yesterdays that too often appear
much better than today. I will never forget a wise piece of advice given to me by
Jesuit John O’Malley, who directed my licentiate thesis in Church history. “Joe,” he
said, “remember – memory sweetens the past.” During the holiday season, we are
deluged with prompts that sweeten the past, a sugar-coated version of reality.
That’s great if you want to sell schmaltzy holiday cards, listen to new renditions of
tired old songs, or put yourself into even deeper debt because you are convinced
that the only way to tell people you love them is to buy this particular gadget or that
particular brand. During this season of sentimental longing and wistful affection for
the past, it is liberating to keep in mind the work of social historian Stephanie
Koontz . The title of her book, The Way We Never Were: American Families and the
Nostalgia Trap, is telling. Don’t let an idealized version of the past blind you to the
goodness and blessings that are all around you in the present.
We ponder the present in light of the past; we also ponder the present with
an eye to the future. In the mid 90’s I was invited to consult with people at the Jesuit
Faculty of Pedagogy in Krakow. As you know, earlier in the decade, Poles were
euphoric about the fall of the Soviet Union, a new political climate of freedom, and
endless possibilities for prosperity and peace. Then reality hit. One of the major
newspapers had this headline, which has always stuck with me: “Yesterday,
tomorrow was better.” Pundits and pollsters tell us time and again that we, as a
nation, here and now, have come believe that “yesterday, tomorrow was better.”
For example, a Gallup poll last year found a declining belief, one that I was taught to
believe when growing up, that every successive generation would be better -happier, more productive, more comfortable -- than the last. Don’t let a pessimistic
version of the future blind you to the goodness and blessings that are all around you
in the present.
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Advent is a time to acknowledge that we need God. Advent is an invitation to
take an honest and balanced look at ourselves and our world, with its triumphs and
tragedies, with its goodness and its flaws. It is a time to ponder the way we live, the
extent to which our values and actions and congruent with God’s dream for the
world, a world of justice and peace. And we acknowledge that we, like clay, need to
reshaped by God the potter, to reorient our lives as we await the coming of Christ.
And our waiting is not hopeless or helpless waiting, but, in the words of today’s
gospel, a matter of being “alert,” and “awake,” attentive to the times and places
where opportunities for kindness, forgiveness and mercy and faith present
themselves.
We are believers in a God who came in the flesh centuries ago to bring us
salvation, whose spirit– though sometimes oblique – is here in the present, and who
will be with us to the end of time. I began with a litany of woes, a curmudgeonly
account of all that is wrong in our world today.
I close with words from a familiar poem, written a few miles away across the
Charles by Henry Wadsworth Longfellow one hundred-fifty years ago, a year of
sadness and tragedy for him personally and for the nation torn apart by a ghastly
war. As we face our troubles today, and as we anticipate Christmas 2014, let us take
comfort in his words
I heard the bells on Christmas Day, their old familiar carols play,
And wild and sweet, their words repeat: Of peace on earth, good will to men.
And in despair I bowed my head, “There is no peace on earth,” I said,
For hate is strong and mocks the song “Of peace on earth, good will to men.”
Then pealed the bells more loud and deep: God is not dead, nor does he sleep;
The wrong shall fail, the right prevail, with peace on earth, good will to men.
My friends, as we prepare for the celebration of Christmas this Advent, may
the bells peal loud and deep; may we watch and wait in a spirit of joyful hope.