Rejoice always. Pray without ceasing. In all circumstances give thanks.

 

Third Sunday of Advent  B  2020

 

Who are you?  The Jews from Jerusalem asked this question of John the Baptist.  As we pray over today’s Scriptures, this same question is asked of us:  Who are you?  After you give your usual contact information, the question is still asked of you before the Lord:  Who are you?

John the Baptist knew his identity.  He knew who he was and who he was not.  John said: “I am not the Christ…I am the voice of one crying in the desert, make straight the way of the Lord.”  John went on to say: “There is one among you whom you do not recognize.”

John’s mission was to help people recognize the presence of Christ who is in our midst. 

As disciples of the Lord, do we know who are and who we are not?

In today’s Scriptures the prophet Isaiah and John the Baptist are models for all of us.  We are called to be prophets in our world; we are to bear witness to Christ; and in the wilderness of human greed, injustice, racism, and falsehood, we are called to make straight the way of the Lord.

The mission given to us at our Baptism is the same mission that was given to John.   We are to witness to the presence of God in our midst.  In so doing, we rejoice.  We rejoice even in the midst of the violence that surrounds racial conflict and the threat of terrorism that we live with. We rejoice during these Advent days even though Covid-19 has forced many, many restrictions on our way of life.  We rejoice because God is present among us.

The question of faith for all of us:  Can we genuinely rejoice when we struggle with all the challenges that we are dealing with?  We rejoice because God goes with us.  Are these just pious words or is this the truth of our life?

 

 

 

 

This third Sunday of Advent is Gaudete Sunday -- Rejoice Sunday.  We light the pink candle of the Advent wreath.  We wear the pink vestments expressing that the joy of Christmas is beginning to invade the Advent season.

In ten words, St Paul expresses the theme of today’s liturgy:  Rejoice always.  Pray without ceasing.  In all circumstances give thanks.

My hope for myself and for you is that the joy of Gaudete Sunday is the joy that you experience everyday as a disciple of Jesus:  rejoice always; pray without ceasing; in all circumstances give thanks.

How can one possibly pray without ceasing?  St Augustine gives us a beautiful example of praying without ceasing.  St. Augustine tells the story of his life as a prayer to God.  He shares his anxieties, successes, discoveries, frustrations and even his sinful behavior in his classic autobiography entitled Confessions of St Augustine.  Augustine shows how every moment of his life can be a conversation with God.  May you have a faith perspective that enables you to view your whole life as a conversation with the God who created you and loves you with an unending love.

In all circumstances, give thanks.  At every Mass, we begin the Eucharistic Prayer with the preface dialogue, we say:  Let us give thanks to the Lord our God.

The Gaudete message is true joy and happiness is found only in God.

But we get fooled because John the Baptist is in the desert eating locusts and wild honey.  He may not seem like a person with an infectious smile out there in the desert.  Yet, make no mistake about it, John the Baptist experienced the joy of knowing the Lord.  Joy is one of the characteristics of God’s spirit in the human heart.

So, we ask ourselves the question:  What helps us to recognize the presence of Christ that is in our midst?  Also, we need to humbly ask what blinds from recognizing the presence of Christ in our midst.  We might be so intent on something that we miss the gem right before us.

 John was filled with a faith-filled vision in recognizing Christ.  John lived his life deflecting attention away from himself so that the focus might be fully and directly on Jesus.  John had plenty of time to focus on Jesus because nothing else mattered to John.

May we in this Advent season exercise a John-like role directing attention away from ourselves and witnessing to the Christ who is in our midst.  May we find joy, Gaudete, in helping others recognize the presence of Christ.   It is my prayer that my preaching can help others know Jesus in their lives.  Yours is an even more important witness.  You are to preach without words.  How?  By a simple smile that communicates friendship, and in all the ways we wash the feet of God’s poor, we witness to the mystery of Christmas.  Our God is present to us in human flesh – in your human flesh and in mine.

As we well know, for months our pandemic has prompted the letting go of a million things everywhere.  Here in Church, we are wearing masks; we are keeping socially distant from one another; our sharing of the sign of peace is very constricted; and we are asked to receive Communion in the hand. To keep the coronavirus from spreading, we have asked everyone to receive Communion in the hand.  I realize full well for some Catholics, receiving on the hand is a challenging, even disturbing practice.  For some, receiving in the hand fails to give the body of Christ the reverence it is owed.  Again, it can simply feel wrong.

I invite you to revisit the way we think about receiving Communion.  Because for some it is a profound sacrifice to receive in the hand, maybe it is a profound opportunity to serve the sacrificial lamb himself.  Taking Communion on the hand could be a way to shed the usual contours of how we think we must receive God and let God in fact receive us.   Perhaps Communion is as much about God receiving us as we are receiving God.  God wishes to receive us in our helplessness before this disease, our frailty, our sacrifice, our shedding of habits and customs we thought were non-negotiable.  For what reason we ask:  all for the common good, for preserving the life of the wider body of Christ.  I invite you to consider:  Who are we to deny how God comes to us?  Who are we to deny that Jesus can come to us as we receive Communion in the hand?

At the Last Supper, at the First Mass, Jesus simply said:  Take and eat.  For this is my Body.  The real grace of this sacrament is not so much how we must receive God; the grace of Communion is that God wishes to come to us in our unworthiness.

May the Church of the Holy Spirit in this Advent season herald, give witness, give voice to the presence of Christ in our midst.  May our Advent attitude be: “Rejoice always.  Pray without ceasing.  In all circumstances give thanks. 

Come Lord Jesus.  Marantha.