1st Sunday Advent A - Homily 4

 Homily 4 - 2016

There is an emptiness inside us that strains to be filled. There is something missing. Life surely could be better, is meant to be better. Years back, St Augustine summed up the situation when he wrote, Our hearts are meant for you, O God, and they will not rest until they rest in you. A lot of people are not convinced. They feel the emptiness, want desperately to fill it, but look in the wrong direction. In today’s Second Reading, Paul mentioned orgies, promiscuity and licentiousness. Sounds like Saturday night – people yearning for something. What is behind the ice epidemic? Is it the excitement, or the narcotic? People look everywhere – the body beautiful, the exotic meal, the perfect house, the overseas holiday, whatever. Nothing wrong with any of them, but disastrous if they have to be substitutes for the real thing. And how do you tell? The thing about substitutes is that they become obsessive but they never satisfy. Ask the alcoholic, ask the drug addict, ask the sex addict, the compulsive perfectionist. The yearning for more is there. It is good. It is essential – an indispensable energy source if life is to be lived, if we are to become fully alive.

I think that is what Advent is ultimately about. Isaiah will figure a lot in the Advent readings. Isaiah was a poet; he was a dreamer – not a day-dreamer, but one who dreamt of a better, a perfect future. He had had some initial special experience of God, which he had then nurtured across his life. It was his sense of God that filled his life in the present and nourished his confidence in the future. He knew that God was good and was totally convinced that life was meant to be good. His visions of the future were not just wishful thinking. They flowed from his sense of God. [Peoples] will hammer their swords into ploughshares, their spears into sickles. Nation will not lift sword against nation, there will be no more training for war. We have been waiting a long time. Was he simply wrong? Yes, and no. He was right about God and God’s hopes and intentions for the world. The catch is that the God who creates us in love and respect works together with, and never against, people created to be free.

Jesus insisted that his disciples Stay awake! St Paul, that the believers in Rome to whom he was writing Wake up! And the Church, with the coming of Advent, politely invites us to wake up too. I hear it as a call to keep my eyes open. I do not pretend that Christ will come at Christmas. Rather, I keep clearly in mind that Christ has indeed come, and what is more, has assured us that he is with us now. I take note of how he came at that first Christmas because it alerts me to what to look for as I search for his presence and action today. If we discount the angels that Luke mentioned as his way of informing his readers of the mystery of what otherwise was unknowable, Jesus, the revelation of God, came among us unnoticed, unrecognised and powerless. Yet he was God.

I need to learn that sense of God, to become familiar with that kind of God, if I am ever to be aware of God’s presence today in our world. I need to be alert and responsive to the other signs of God’s presence and action, too – to love, mercy, compassion, wisdom, freedom, peace. Wonderfully, they are around everywhere, even when so often mixed in with their opposites.That was the God whom Isaiah and St Paul had come to know and to love.

Our hearts were made for you, O God, and they will not rest until they rest in you. Advent reminds us that we do not need to look far afield to find that God.

Happy Advent!