27 November. First Sunday of Advent
A call for homily resources from our readers
The Homily Notes proposed for all of December 2016 are now online. Please see them as draft material to be amended & improved with your help. The Notes can be accessed via the December Calendar, on the right of the screen. Active homilists can browse our notes ahead of time. Ideally, some of you will send in alternative homiletic points or stories, to supplement or replace what is already there. Best thanks to those who do so!
Fr. Pat Rogers (rogers @ mountargus.ie)
Theme: “Many shall stream to God’s house” says the prophecy. This will come true when every heart is inspired by the message of Christ, and we are ready to welcome him when he returns to judge the earth.
1st Reading: Book of Isaiah 2:1-5
A happy future promised for all who seek the truth and who work for peace
The word that Isaiah son of Amoz saw concerning Judah and Jerusalem. In days to come the mountain of the Lord’s house shall be established as the highest of the mountains, and shall be raised above the hills; all the nations shall stream to it.
Many peoples shall come and say, “Come, let us go up to the mountain of the Lord, to the house of the God of Jacob; that he may teach us his ways and that we may walk in his paths.” For out of Zion shall go forth instruction, and the word of the Lord from Jerusalem. He shall judge between the nations, and shall arbitrate for many peoples; they shall beat their swords into plowshares, and their spears into pruning hooks; nation shall not lift up sword against nation, neither shall they learn war any more. O house of Jacob, come, let us walk in the light of the Lord!
2nd Reading: Epistle to the Romans 13:11-14
We are to wake from sleep and put on the armour of light
Besides this, you know what time it is, how it is now the moment for you to wake from sleep. For salvation is nearer to us now than when we became believers; the night is far gone, the day is near. Let us then lay aside the works of darkness and put on the armour of light; let us live honorably as in the day, not in reveling and drunkenness, not in debauchery and licentiousness, not in quarreling and jealousy.
Instead, put on the Lord Jesus Christ, and make no provision for the flesh, to gratify its desires.
Gospel: Matthew 24:37-44
Be ready for the coming of the Son of Man
Jesus said to his disciples, “For as the days of Noah were, so will be the coming of the Son of Man. For as in those days before the flood they were eating and drinking, marrying and giving in marriage, until the day Noah entered the ark, and they knew nothing until the flood came and swept them all away, so too will be the coming of the Son of Man. Then two will be in the field; one will be taken and one will be left. Two women will be grinding meal together; one will be taken and one will be left. Keep awake therefore, for you do not know on what day your Lord is coming. But understand this: if the owner of the house had known in what part of the night the thief was coming, he would have stayed awake and would not have let his house be broken into. Therefore you also must be ready, for the Son of Man is coming at an least expected hour.”
Advent Thoughts
(from Stan Mellett CssR)
What’s another year? was Johnny Logan’s winning song at Eurovision 1980! Today we begin another year – a liturgical new year – with the songs of Isaiah heralding the season of Advent. We begin a cycle that carries us right through our Christian story – from Advent to Christmas – on to Jesus’ Public life – into Lent and the drama of Holy Week culminating in the celebration of Easter and the Easter season till the coming of the Holy Spirit at Pentecost. On it goes till Advent time comes round again and the cycle begins for another year. What a gift to have this rhythm and pattern in our Catholic lives! It provides a general framework for all the bits and pieces of prayers, readings and intercessions during the different seasons. More to it, we are called to insert this cycle into the cycle of our lives and rhythms of our family, community and country! And so our lives go on.
And it goes on in this season of Advent with great expectations. Waiting with expectancy not just for the first coming of Jesus at Bethlehem but also for his second coming at the end of time! Before we had cell phones of skype we depended on the humble landline. I knew a mother whose son in New York faithfully rang his mother at eight o’clock every Sunday evening. As it neared the time her eyes were on the phone; no call in or out was allowed as she waited! She would not miss the joy of hearing her son’s voice and all his news. A model of Advent waiting! The key attitude is one of being alert – being ready – so as not to miss the time of his coming – ‘you must stand ready because the Son of Man is coming at an hour you do not expect’. Time was when those words sounded like a warning calculated to instil fear. A God ready to pounce and catch us off guard with our affairs not in order!
A little reflection reveals how incorrect such a reaction is. The coming of the Son of Man at the first Christmas was and is the best of good news. A gift beyond all gifts – a welcome gift beyond all our imaginings! It calls for rejoicing and gratitude. The appropriate emotion must be one, not of fear, but one of awe and wonder. ‘Is it true? and is it true, this most tremendous tale of all…a baby in an ox’s stall? The Maker of the stars and sea become a child on earth for me…that God was man in Palestine and lives today in bread and wine’ gives expression to the utter amazement of the poet. (John Betjamen)
Wander into that stable on the first Christmas night! See there a poor young woman with her man and a new baby. Retrace your steps to the holy city of Jerusalem and tell the priests what you saw. Tell them that helpless vulnerable baby is the Anointed One, the long awaited Messiah – the Son of God. They would tell you that you were out of your mind; they would tell you that you are blaspheming; they would tell you that God is not like that. They have studied the scriptures and they know God is not like that. But God is like that.
That is the surprise. The presence of God among us is not what we expect, not where we expect. That’s how we miss it. As we begin the season of Advent we are warned not to miss it. Be alert. Be ready. Be awake and look in the most unlikely places. Look in the doorway where the homeless sleep. Look in the refugee camps. Look in the hospitals and the nursing homes. Not the most comfortable places and spaces! Look at the new born babies. Look at the wrinkled senior citizens. So wonderful to be alive wide-eyed like a child at the beginning of our new year of grace! Give it a heartfelt and expectant cead mile failte!
WITH OUR EYES WIDE OPEN
[José Antonio Pagola]
The first Christian communities lived through very hard times. Lost in the vast Roman Empire, in the midst of conflicts and persecutions, those Christians sought strength and encouragement by hoping for the prompt coming of Jesus and by remembering his words: «Keep watch. Stay awake. Have your eyes open. Be ready». Does this call of Jesus to stay awake still mean something to us today? What does it mean for Christians today to put our hope in God, living with our eyes wide open? Do we let the hope in God’s final judgment lie completely played out in our secular world for all too many of the innocent victims who suffer without any guilt?
The easiest way to falsify Christian hope is to wait for God to give us eternal salvation, while we turn our backs on the suffering in our world right now. One day we will have to recognize our blindness before Jesus our Judge: when did we see you hungry or thirsty, a stranger or naked, sick or in jail, and we didn’t help you? This will be our last dialogue with him if we live with our eyes closed.
We need to wake up and open our eyes wide. We need to keep vigilant in order to see beyond our own small interests and concerns. The Christian’s hope isn’t in being blind, since we can never forget those who suffer. Christian spirituality doesn’t consist in only looking inside, since our heart pays attention to those who are left on their own.
In our Christian communities we need to take care all the more that our way of living in hope doesn’t lead to indifference or to forgetting the poor. We can’t isolate ourselves in religion in order to close our ears to the cry of those who die from hunger each day. We aren’t allowed to nourish our illusion of innocence in order to defend our peace and quiet.
Hope in a God that forgets those who live in this world who are unable to hope at all – wouldn’t such a hope be considered to be a religious version of a kind of optimism that we hold onto whatever the cost, lived out without clarity or responsibility? A seeking of our own eternal salvation with backs turned away from those who suffer – wouldn’t such a seeking be accused of being a subtle «selfishness stretched out to the great beyond»?
Probably the lack of sensibility for the immense suffering in our world is one of the most serious symptoms of today’s Christianity that has grown old. When Pope Frances calls for «a Church that is poorer and that is of the poor», he is shouting his most important message to us Christians of the well-off nations.
A time of heightened awareness
Advent is a time of heightened awareness that invites us to see ourselves as God sees us, insofar as that is possible. Both liturgy and life are pointing us towards the future. Isaiah calls us to confess our sins and hope for better days. Saint Paul’s message in Corinthians is confident and upbeat. Mark warns us against complacency, since the end is coming sooner than we expect. Amid such disparity, we might go with the first and third readings, about being prepared for the day of the Lord.
God’s Word invites us reassess where our ways may be leading us. This annual reminder that the world as we know it will one day end, is more appropriate during the northern Wintery season, when daylight is shorter and darkness seems to be winning over the light. But the positive side of this is that a new day is dawning, when Christ will come again into our lives with power to save us.
In his letter, The Joy of the Gospel Pope Francis encouraged us all to remember what we have to be joyful about, as followers of Christ. Advent would be an excellent time to take his message to heart and maybe even make a new beginning in our Catholic lives. Now is the time to open our hearts and invite the Lord to come more fully into our lives and lead us on. We begin Advent feeling the need for his coming. Our first reading puts this need into words, “We have all withered like leaves and our sins blew us away like the wind.” The whirling, withered leaves of autumn are a familiar scene, these past few weeks. Isaiah proposes whirling leaves as symbols of all that is dried up and withered in our lives. But he also calls us to look for a better day. God is still in charge of creation, and our personal lives are under his loving care. We pray with fervour this Advent, “Come, Lord Jesus,” and make our own the words of the psalm, “Visit this vine and protect it, the vine your right hand has chosen.” It is a central plank of our faith that the Lord never abandons His people.
Have you watched the behaviour of people at airports, waiting for loved ones to arrive from a flight? They look excited, eager for the first appearance of familiar faces, ready with the broad smile of greeting. Do w await the Lord’s coming with equal eagerness, because we long for his presence? Advent is meant to be is an alert, active waiting, with a spirit of excitement, or as Jesus puts it, “Be on guard, stay awake”. He wants us to have a clear purpose in life, to mature in our relationship with him and with others, to give time to prayer, and to live with his message in our hearts. That’s what our Advent should be like. And while we wait, we can enjoy his promised gifts. St. Paul assures us: “You will not be without any of the gifts of the Spirit while you are waiting for our Lord Jesus Christ.” We can experience these coming weeks with hope and awareness, in the spirit of an Advent people.
St Fergal of Aghaboe
Fergal or Vergilius was a monk in the monastery of Aghaboe, Co. Laois, when in 745 he left Ireland on peregrinatio pro Christo (pilgrimage for Christ). He settled first in France, later in Bavaria where he founded a monastery at Chiemsee, and then moved to Salzburg where he became Abbot of Saint Peter’s and then bishop of Salzburg c. 767. He seems to be responsible for the Salzburg Liber Vitae (Book of Life) containing the names of all persons in spiritual communion with Saint Peter’s monastery, and who were to be prayed for at the daily mass.