Homily: Advent Stillness

Year B / Advent / 2nd Sunday

Readings: Isaiah 40.1-5, 9-11/ Psalm 85 (R/v 8) / 2 Peter 3.8-14 / Mark 1.1-8

It's Wednesday, August 4. It's unbearably hot in Pesaro, Italy. Michele Ferris' phone rings. He answers it. He hears a voice saying, "Ciao, Michele, è Papà Francesco." At first he thinks it is a joke, then, he begins to realize it's for real. Pope Francis has called to console Michele after reading his letter about the painful loss of his brother criminals gunned down.

This is how Elisabetta Piqué ends her biography of Francis: with a description of loving care. This image of Francis lovingly caring for Michele that I read about this past week remained with me as I prayed the readings of this 2nd Sunday of Advent; they too speak of loving care—of God’s loving care for humankind.

This reality of God’s immense love that cares for us into our salvation is the base note in today's readings. To hear it is to remember that God so loved the world that he gave us his only son (John 3.16). Advent encourages us to focus more attentively on this truth of our Christian faith.

Some of us might hear today’s readings and miss this truth because we’ve been taught that they focus only on human sinfulness. Others, upon hearing this truth, might lament “Really?” because they have encountered some in our Church who insists that God will never truly welcome the remarried, the divorced, the homosexual. Still a few of us hearing today’s readings may feel unworthy because of how we have sinfully squandered away our lives this year. 

Yet, at the heart of our readings today is God's love for us—always faithful, always enduring, always saving.

By using today’s readings to focus our Advent preparations on repentance, the Church, like a good mother, assures us again that God's love in Jesus is the divine balm—the holy medication, if you like—that will redeem us from sinfulness. We would be so, so wrong to misinterpret today’s readings as permission to continue fixating ourselves on our unworthiness because of sin. 

Advent exists to redirect our gaze again onto the singular Christian truth that God's redemption comes to us in no other form than in Jesus who incarnates God's love with his birth. A graced way we can more fully experience this truth in Advent is to practice stillness at this time.

Being still in order to be mindful of God is how Jesus lived his life. Recall the many times in the gospels when Jesus stilled himself in prayer to more be aware of God’s presence and action in his life: before he heals and when his day is done are just two examples. Jesus calls us to do likewise because being still to be mindful of God is his way of shaping us to better live in God's love and to more wholeheartedly experience God’s forgiveness. 

The Jesuit Larry Gallick once described this practice of Advent stillness as holding "our breaths as God does a fantastic athletic act of leaping from eternity into time, from heaven to earth, from Spirit to Flesh, and from mystery to history, for this is how we can begin to see God, the Divine Artist painting and sculpturing our image within His." 

This mindfulness of God’s incarnation is really what Christmas is about. Knowing this can help us to answer this Advent question better: ''What will Jesus' birth once in history and even now in my life story, mean to me especially, if not differently, this coming Christmas?"

As a time of grace, Advent stillness affords us the space to answer this question by reexamining the quality of our Christian life as we prepare for Christmas. And isn't such a reexamination before God in order to align our lives with God’s life what repentance is all about? 

“Never pass up an opportunity to shut up.” I like this phrase because I think it is an apt description of how Advent stillness is a necessary disposition we can adopt to better prepare for Christmas. Shutting up helps us to really listen to our hearts’ desire for Christmas. Shutting up also helps us to still ourselves before God; this enables us to open ourselves to consider more honestly the response we are making to God with our live—both to the mystery of God's action at the first Christmas and to each day as Jesus comes to birth into our lives anew and always.

Shutting up and being still in Advent does not mean that nothing is going on; rather, something is in fact going on. This something is like two friends who have come to that remarkably beautiful point of not needing to say much because they intimately know each other, and now have the opportunity to deepen their honesty, trust, ease and commitment together in the silence. Advent stillness invites us into this same experience with no other but God. Then, we can be truly mindful of God and God’s loving actions in our lives, particularly of God’s mercy.

In our first reading, the prophet Isaiah reminds the exiled Israelites that God will always come to console all that await God. But he also reminds them elsewhere in his writings that as long as their inner voices of self-recrimination keep shouting their guilt and shame, words of Gods “comfort” cannot be heard. 

And isn't this also true for us if all we are concerned with, even obsessed about, in repentance is our sins? What gets lost is the good tidings of God’s peace on earth that comes with Jesus forgiving us.

In fact, aren’t we in danger of forgoing this good news whenever we lose ourselves to the unrestrained commercialism of Christmas gift-giving and festivity, or whenever we busy ourselves too much with the minutiae of Christmas preparations only to miss its true spirit?

This is why John the Baptist's cry to "repent, prepare the way for the Lord, and make straight his paths" this evening must jolt us out of our year-in, year-out way of living Advent time. Nothing good can come out if we indulge ourselves once again this year in our complacent familiarity with John's message of repentance. 

Much of God’s good will however be ours if we but dare to heed his call, and to make the only truly human response we can to the excessive goodness of God’s mercy: that we repent out of love for God and not because we have to settle accounts with God.

The hope our readings offer today is that repentance rooted in love of God will lead us into living more gently with God. Who amongst us here does not like sitting by a quiet stream or to be close to a person who has a gentle stream within them? Perhaps the best gift each of us can receive through repentance at Advent time is “a quieter-inside self whose mountains of resistance have been leveled, whose valleys of inferiority have been filled in and whose roughness has been smoothed by God’s gentle presence” (Larry Gallick). 

If this gentleness with God is what you truly desire for Christmas, then don’t hesitate to imitate what Michele did by sharing his life with Francis. Share with God in your Advent prayer about your life and, more so, about your heartfelt desire for forgiveness to live with God gently. 

Then, be open to God’s reply: whether in prayer, in someone’s words, in a consoling experience, God will respond because God comes to us as Immanuel, God-with-us and God-for-us, always.

Drawn in parts from Larry Gallick, SJ

Preached at St Ignatius Church, Singapore

photo: april hoeller (christmasmagician.blogspot.com)