Homily: Advent Hope

Year B / Advent / 4th Sunday

Readings: 2 Samuel 7.1-5, 8b-12, 14a, 16 / Responsorial Psalm 89 (R/v 2a) / Romans 16.25-27 / Luke 1.26-38

Many of us have been playing it on our iPods and car stereos this Advent. Some of us are probably singing it now and again. I know I have dreamt it for the past 5 years in Boston. What this is is the song “I’ll be home for Christmas.”

Whether it is sung by Diana Krall or the Carpenters or Bing Crosby, “I’ll be home for Christmas” is more than a Christmas standard; it sings of a most deep-seated longing we all have: to be at home.

A theme in today’s readings is “home,” in particular about God wanting to come to us and to be at home with us.

Our 1st reading describes where for God home is. For David, the tent over God's ark is not a suitable home; God deserves a better and more permanent dwelling. But God politely turns down David’s offer not because it is unworthy but because God wants to freely choose where he will dwell in: with his people. “I will fix a place for my people, and it will endure in my presence,” God says in this reading. God’s announcement situates God’s people geographically in Israel. More importantly, it proclaims the truly good news that God’s people should live in no other place but in God’s space. 

Our gospel reading about the Annunciation tells us how God comes to dwell with God’s people: by entering into our lives. Mary’s ‘yes’ is the doorway for God to enter human form and to take it on. Jesus is the human embodiment of God in our midst. This is how we come to know that our human form is where God wishes to dwell in.

Why the human form?  Not because it is perfect for will decay and die. Not because it is holy for its condition is scared by original sin. Not because it is strong or rich for it is prone to frailty and weakness, to impoverishment and want. 

But because it is poor. Not poor in the economic sense of lacking, but poor in that richer theological sense of hoping. Yes, our human form is poor because God has formed it to necessarily hope. And to hope is to do what God always does: to hope in us.

God hopes for us to become like God. And, we hope in God to actualize God’s hope in us: that we become more divine by becoming a lot more human. That Jesus inhabited human form in all ways but sin, and showed us how to be fully human and so more divine, testifies to this. 

Isn't this why God comes to dwell in human form? To show us in Jesus -- in him who inhabits our human form -- how to realize God's hope for our eternal happiness.  If you, like me, agree with this truth of who Jesus must be for all humankind, then, how can our human form to be intrinsically bad and sinful, as some in Church condemn it to be? In Jesus we see how our human form must be fundamentally good, good enough for it to be God’s choicest dwelling space to live in, so as to be one like us and one with us. 

More importantly, God dwells in human form as Jesus, the one human being who does show us the way, the truth and life of how God loves us into our salvation. Yes, God comes amongst us by inhabiting no other space but our human form.

In these final Advent days, the Church offers us readings that proclaim the immediacy of Jesus’ coming. As we read or hear them, I believe, we cannot help but acknowledge the need to make a place for Jesus, a place where hope can grow as he did in the virgin womb of Mary. 

For the Trappist monks of Spencer in Massachusetts, this space is our very being. Here is where our hope in Jesus will grow. But it begins when each one of us honestly admits to the fear and helplessness we experience in our lives.  This is how we can open the creaky, low door of our imperfections to the Child Jesus to come into our lives and to mature in us for mission, just like Jesus did in Mary who bore him not only within her but to the world. 

This is how “our fears and sorrow become a great open place to welcome him,” the monks point out. They add, “From this most unlikely of places—as smelly as the straw of a Bethlehem stall—from this of all places, a tiny hand will reach out toward us. God is crying a message that ‘we need not be afraid.’ We can be unafraid for we are dearly loved by a God who dares to become a little Child.” 

In my opinion, God does this in the only way God must do as the hope our God is: by coming home to each one of us.

"I will be home for Christmas." We are all familiar with this first line from the chorus of the song. It ends with these words: "you can count on me." 

What if God is singing this whole line to you and me, gently and softly, with a love beyond all telling, in this early morning quiet to just say this: “yes, I will be coming home to you, and yes, you can count on me"? 

How now shall you and I receive God’s homecoming in Jesus this Christmas day? 

(with inputs from the Trappist monks at Spencer Monastery)

Preached at St Ignatius Church, Singapore
photo: april hoeller (christmasmagician.blogspot.com)