Parish of St. Ignatius of Loyola; Chestnut Hill, MA
16 December 2012; 5:30 p.m. mass.
3rd Sunday of Advent – Year C
Zephaniah 3:14-18a; Isaiah 12:2-3, 4, 5-6; Philippians 4:4-7; Luke 3:10-18
There it is. The pink candle.
If you cannot crane your neck to see it from where you are sitting,
be sure to come up and take a look at it before you leave today.
It is there to be seen.
And today, we need to see it.
Each year there is a bit of irony on this day,
a day that the church calls Gaudete Sunday.
The name comes from the entrance antiphon of today’s mass,
the short prayer that Fr. J.A. would have said
had there been no music during the procession.
The first word of that prayer, in Latin, is gaudete,
which is a command, telling us, “Rejoice!”
The second reading today, from Philippians, contains the full antiphon:
“Rejoice in the Lord always; again, I say, rejoice. Indeed, the Lord is near.”1
Normally, the irony arises from the character we unfailingly encounter on
Gaudete Sunday: John the Baptist.
Matthew’s gospel tells us that he “wore clothing made of camel’s hair
and had a leather belt around his waist,
[and that] his food was locusts and wild honey.”2
In paintings, John often appears unkempt and unshaven.
He called the crowds who came out to see him a “brood of vipers,”3
and in today’s gospel John speaks of winnowing fans, threshing floors,
and unquenchable fires.4
He openly criticized Herod for marrying his own brother’s wife,
a line of attack that ultimately cost John his life.
His image and his message, I think we can agree, are not especially joyful.
So, yes, each year there is a bit of irony on this day, and John has a hand in it.
But this year is different.
By now, no one has failed to hear Friday’s profoundly un-joyful news:
a man, having already killed his mother,
walked into Sandy Hook Elementary School in Newtown, Connecticut,
and killed 26 more people, the vast majority of them young children.
1
Philippians 4:4-5.
Matthew 3:4.
3
Luke 3:7.
4
Cf., Luke 3:17.
2
Last of all, he killed himself, bringing the death toll of the day to an astonishing 28 people.
I call this news “unjoyful,” of course,
to contrast it with the name of Gaudete Sunday.
But if I had to name what it was, as opposed to what it was not,
what could I possibly say?
Tragic? Awful? Evil? Terrible? Sinful? Heinous?
No matter how large the thesaurus is, I doubt that our language – or any language –
has the right term for this.
Words simply flee.
But the pink candle remains.
The candle for the Third Sunday of Advent is pink, or rose, because,
compared to the purple candles, it has a certain brightness to it,
a reminder that Christ, “the light of nations,”5 is near.
It is not completely bright, the way a white candle would be,
but there is a luminosity about it nevertheless.
This might be another reason why we hear from John the Baptist each year on this day.
In the Gospel according to John,
we read that the Baptist “was not the light, but came to testify to the light.”6
That same gospel reminds us,
“The light shines in the darkness, and the darkness has not overcome it.”7
Surely, this is what the people, who,
in today’s gospel, realized when they came to John asking him,
“What should we do?”8
After all,
they “all were asking in their hearts whether John might be the Messiah,”9 the light.
So they felt it appropriate to say to him, “What should we do?”
And, today, is not our question the same?
Are not the people of Newtown asking it as well;
and the people of Newton, and Chestnut Hill, and Brighton too;
and anywhere else someone in this building happens to be from?
What should we do after what happened on Friday?
I think we should remember;
literally, re-member, make this a part of us again, a member of us again.
Because it would be easy to mourn today, and then to forget tomorrow.
Genuine remembering is not, to use the words of one theologian, a cheap grace.
5
Lumen Gentium, §1.
John 1:8.
7
John 1:5.
8
Cf., Luke 3:10, 12, 14.
9
Luke 3:15.
6
2
It is a costly one.
It means that I cannot glaze over things and pretend they did not happen.
Another theologian talks about the concept of a dangerous memory,
the sort of remembering that prompts action in us.
An action that looks at the staus quo and says, “No.”
How should we begin remembering?
At the risk of being too secular,
I take my first cue from an editorial in yesterday’s New York Times, which asked,
“What are their names?
What did they dream of becoming?
Did they enjoy finger painting?
Or tee ball?”10
Sadly, I cannot answer any of the final three questions.
But I can answer the first one. Their names.
Charlotte, Daniel, Olivia, Josephine, Ana, and Dylan.
Madeleine, Catherine, Chase, Jesse, and James.
Grace, Emilie, Jack, Noah, and Caroline.
Jessica, Avielle, Benjamin, and Allison.
Rachel and Dawn.
Nancy and Anne Marie.
Lauren and Mary and Victoria.
Of course, there is one more name,
the name that prompts the most dangerous memory of all: Adam.
What should we do?
We should remember these boys and girls, these heroic women who taught them;
and, to the extent that we can at this point, the man who did this.
But what else should we do?
Tonight, as we continue our prayer,
as we do what Jesus once did with his friends,
who were dejected,
who were mourning an inexplicable death,
who stopped for the night in a town called Emmaus,
let us come back to where we started.
The pink candle.
Tonight, it is more than a dyed column of wax with a string running up through its center.
It is much, much more than a liturgical peculiarity on the way to Christmas morning.
It is a light.
It is a light that, frankly, could be much brighter tonight.
But it is also a promise:
“The light shines in the darkness, and the darkness has not,” and will not, “overcome it.”
10
New York Times, Editorial, “Death in Connecticut,” 14 December 2012.
3