4th Sunday Advent B

See Commentary on Luke 1:26-38

Homily 1 - 2005

Gangs of young men have been fighting each other in Sydney, engaging in frighteningly irrational and destructive behaviour.  The extent of the violence, the numbers involved, the shape it has taken may be new, but is it ultimately surprising?

Get the right mix of factors and it can happen anywhere: undealt with angers, prejudice, surging testosterone, dysfunctional family life, fear, emotional immaturity, the power of the in- group.  Dissolve any restraining inhibitions with sufficient alcohol, and the mixture is explosive.  The prejudices determine who is on what side, but what the prejudices are is fairly irrelevant: skin colour, accent, race, gender, religion, sometimes even different football teams – any of them will do.  And our media exposure to world events illustrates the point clearly enough.  Sadly it’s going on around the world.

It seems to me that to deny the prejudice lurking in one shape or another in all of us is to deny the reality of Original Sin.  Of course, we’re prejudiced, afraid, emotionally incomplete and insecure.  To become otherwise, to grow out of it,  is a life-long task, and few achieve it.  To want to be superior, tougher, stronger, smarter, more popular or simply better than the rest is there in all of us.  We seem to think that if only we can make it come true, then we shall know freedom, happiness, fulfilment and peace.  It’s illusion.  In fact, its origin is fear.  

It’s the untruth of sin.  There is no need to deny the reality of sin, to pretend it’s not there, to whistle in the dark.  To deny its reality is to allow it free rein, whether in our own personal unconscious or in the collective psyche of our community.

But the fascinating thing is that along with these destructive impulses there is another energy calling us to life, and empowering us to love.  I am free and at peace when I can say,  not I can crush you (or manipulate you) or I am better than you, but I can love you, indeed I want to love you; there is nothing you can be or do that could ever stop my loving you.  That is the power of Grace.

In the gospel today, Mary got the message: Do not be afraid.  What a wonderful reassurance.  On the strength of it, the fear-less Mary could face anything.  With no clear knowledge of what her future held, she was able to say: Let what you have said be done to me.  Whatever it might be, let it be done to me.

The depth of our celebration of Christmas depends to a large extent on our own hearing the reassuring message: Do not be afraid.  We don’t have to be more powerful, more resourceful, more secure, more popular, more stunning than anyone.  Enough to be ourselves, to know we’re loved, loved by God.  The energy of grace is immensely more powerful than the power of sin.  There is no need to fear: Do not be afraid.  Nothing, no one, can overwhelm the power of love.

The child of the pregnant Mary was born in due course.  It’s what we celebrate at Christmas.  Later on they humiliated him; they degraded him; they tortured and killed him.  But they couldn’t overwhelm the irresistible power of love.  Nor need any evil abroad in our world overwhelm us.  Grace is there, too.  Confident of that, we are able to say with the fear-less Mary: Let what you have said be done to us.  It’s what we celebrate at every Mass.

Homily 2 - 2008 

If Mary really appeared to us, and we were able to hear her and not just the projections of our own minds, what might we hear?  I don’t know.  But I can tell you of the projections of my own mind.  Before that, though, … when you interact with Mary, what is your sense of her age?  For me, I sense her as about my own age: a communication between two adult people.

So, if I could really hear Mary, I think she might say to us: “Be like me! a virgin – not so much physically, but spiritually. Learn to be empty! Unclutter your minds and hearts! Cut loose from all those tumbling, cloying, strident, shrieking desires you learn from others, and listen to those deepest, truest desires arising from your true selves that proceed from the God who, at this moment, is even now creating you!

 “Gabriel said to me that God was with me.  He said I was highly favoured.  The same is true of you: God is with you, too; You are highly favoured.  Believe it! Hear your own heart calling out to be loved.  Just to be loved, not for what you have, or for what you have made of yourselves, or what you hope to make of yourselves, but simply for what you are, for who you are. Be - uncluttered, empty, virginal, like me.

 “Gabriel said I would conceive and bear a son.  I did.  I gave life – I gave life to the one who was God’s Son.  I am mother.  I carried him physically in my womb for nine months.  I carried him spiritually in my spirit every day of his life.  He is still within me.  He shared my life.  I now share his life.  He drew life from me.  Now I draw life from him.  And he is within you, too.  He has made his home in you.  You share his life, just as I do.

 “He is within you now so that you, too, may give life.  Be virginal like me.  Keep your heart uncluttered.  But also, be life-bearer like me.  Hear your own heart calling out to give love.  Bring life, and joy, to the world.  Let his love fill your heart, and overflow from you to others.

 “I said to God’s messenger, to Gabriel: Let it be done to me!  I trusted God; I grew like God; my heart and God’s heart came to beat to the same rhythm.  Like I did, say to God: “Let it be done to me! … Your will be done!”  Trust God.  Believe God’s love.  Let yourself become like God.  Let your heart and God’s heart beat to the same rhythm.  Like God, learn to love the world, the broken world, the world that needs so much to be loved; the world that turned on him and murdered him.  What a need it has for love, for healing, for hope.

The world needs to know what is possible, that there is another way, his way.  It needs to see that way of love in three dimensions.  It needs you to show it what is possible.  I brought him into the world.  I nourished him, I nurtured him.  I shared with him all I had and all I knew.  Don’t let his coming be in vain!”

If Mary really appeared to you, do you think that she might talk like that to you? But then, she doesn’t need to appear to you for you to know what she is like and how she thinks.  You have read the Gospels.  This Advent time, when you pray to her, be still, be quiet.  Don’t do all the talking.  Don’t be forever asking.  Just listen.  Be still … your heart and your mind as empty as possible, and just be with her.

Homily 3 - 2014

There is a lot of violence in our world: the hostage siege in Sydney last week; the domestic tragedy in Cairns on Friday; the massacre by the Taliban of 130 innocent school children in Pakistan; the revelation of systemic torture carried out over recent years by our nation’s allies. Personally I regard the enforced indefinite detention of refugees on Nauru and Manus Island as a form of cruel psychological torture. Violence to me speaks of profound unhappiness, not just of its victims but equally of its perpetrators. Happy people are not drawn to violence. On a more mundane level, I ask myself whether the lead up to Christmas serves to raise or to lower the happiness threshold for people around us.

I have been reflecting on all this with the opening line of last Sunday’s Epistle still echoing in my head: Be happy at all times. Pray constantly. For all things give thanks to God. Was St Paul living on a different planet? One thing, I believe, is clear: If my happiness depends on others behaving differently, then I may as well give up. Paul suggested that we pray constantly. The image comes to my mind of those dogs that you sometimes see at International Airports that have been trained to sniff out drugs in passengers’ luggage. The constant praying that Paul was talking about is the kind of prayer that trains us to pick up the scent of God – anywhere, everywhere.

I scent the presence of God even in the tragic incident in Sydney last week. It is almost as if there has been a backlash against the threat of backlash against the Muslim community in general. That “I’ll walk with you” initiative, and the way it was picked up by thousands, were both inspired.

In today’s Readings, I find beautiful alternatives to violence – fail-safe recipes for happiness. In the Second Reading Paul spoke of the obedience of faith. In the Greek language in which Paul wrote, the word translated as obedience carries the meaning of a sensitive tuning in to the heart of another. And the word translated as faith has the sense rather of trust, complete trust. The obedience of faith is then a confident, trusting tuning in to the heart of God, to the God who loves and who yearns to give life to the full to everyone. In the real world of everyday life, obedience of faith speaks of the constant search to pick up the scent of God, to sniff out the presence of God who cares, who loves; and who in that loving care, is calling and enabling us to grow and even to flourish in the midst of whatever is going on.

I see the attitude exemplified in the trusting, quiet, peaceful confidence of Mary as she faced into, and willingly took on, an uncertain but daunting unknown: Let what you have said be done to me. Already she had learnt to treasure experience, to ponder it, and to pick up there the scent of the loving God whom she could completely trust.

That to me is the way to life, the way to happiness and fulfilment. It does not depend on others. But we need constant training if we are to pick up the scent of God and to discover ever more clearly the compassionate heart of God and God’s commitment to life to the full for all of us. As Advent builds up to Christmas, in the few days that are left, no matter what goes on in the world out there or nearer home, may we all experience an irrepressible underlying current of vibrant, confident, trusting happiness.

Homily 4 - 2017

It’s not Christmas yet. It is still Advent. It is so hard for us to live in the present moment, to experience it, to be present to the here and now. Just try praying, and you find that out very quickly. In no time, I have either slipped back into the past, or begun to anticipate the future. Our analytical minds cannot process the present moment. As soon as I look at it thoughtfully, I stop .. while it continues on; I step away from it. It is our senses that put us in touch with the present moment, and our contemplative mind – but we have to train, to discipline, that contemplative mind. We need practice. And even with practice, the present remains always slippery.

As children we learn the stories of the tribe. But children grow up, and some sophisticate soon tells them they are only stories. And that is where a lot of people get stuck – it’s all stories! They are not true!! They are half right, of course, but they have only the unimportant half. They have only the paper wrapping the Christmas present. The stories are not literally true. But if we turn off our analytical minds, if we turn off one half of our scientific minds, we see that the stories can open us to a whole other truth. We begin to grow up; we begin to mature. There is a lot more to the Christmas gift than the wrapping paper. There is a lot more to life than what the scientific mind can deal with. There is love; there is joy; there is sadness; there is beauty; there is poetry. And there are stories that can lead us into mystery and open us to ever deeper truth.

Tonight we heard the story of the Annunciation made by Gabriel to Mary. Alright. It is Luke’s story. Did it happen that way? Who cares? Luke did not expect his readers to take it as history, but as gateway into further truth, worthwhile truth, wonderful truth. Can you understand the mystery it leads us to? I can’t. But I can contemplate it. I can stay with it. I can be present to it [sometimes]. Give me half a chance, and I could keep talking about it for a long time. But that is not the important thing. What matters is: Can I be present to the truth that God, whoever God is, became human? Can I let “the Holy Spirit come upon [me] and the power of the Most High cover [me] with its shadow”? Can I be present to the love behind that reality? Can I engage with that God now? Can I engage with divine love, here and now, and let God enter into me and saturate me?

Can I engage with Mary? Can I let her love me, here? now? Not thinking about it, not understanding it, but being open to experience it, without even knowing what it might be like, and certainly not trying to, just being there, nowhere – beyond words, beyond ideas, mysteriously. Stories can lead me there, not by being literally true, but by opening me to where to look, what to half-expect.

We don’t know much about Mary. She was no theologian, no doctor of the Law. But what I am tremendously grateful to St Luke for is his observation, “As for Mary, she treasured these things, and pondered them in her heart.” It seems that she was really good at that.

Homily 5 - 2020

We’re in countdown mode — five days to go before Christmas comes upon us. A great way to prepare for the feast could be to recite the prayer we probably all know, the "Angelus" -- a succinct prayer, but carrying a punch. Custom was to repeat it three times a day.

“The angel of the Lord declared unto Mary, and she conceived by the Holy Spirit”. Let us look at it more closely ... The initiative is God’s, the God who is life and love and joy. But this is only another stage in a longer story that began long before.

St John’s Gospel began, declaring, “In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God and the Word was God. All things came into being through him.” [St Paul preferred a more familiar word, the “Christ”, to John’s word “Word”. He wrote in his epistle to the Ephesians, “Before the world was made, God chose us, chose us in Christ … to live through love in his presence”].

Mary "conceived of the Holy Spirit". The Christ [or Word of God] “through whom all things were created” was alive in the womb of Mary. This was through the action of the Holy Spirit.

We first heard of the Spirit in the scriptural account of creation — when it all began. Then, the Spirit hovered over the waters [the code word for the chaos, the “not yet” cosmos. Astronomers [or cosmologists? or mathematicians?] assure us that creation began with the “Big Bang” — from which the whole universe evolved; and they tell us that that was about 13.7 billion years ago. God is patient!

The prayer continues, this time with the response made by Mary. “Behold the handmaid of the Lord. Be it done to me according to your word”. Total trust, without hesitation — perfect openness to the plan of God. When you think of it, that God waited for the “All clear!” from Mary, is incredible. But God did. The creating God waited until creation was ready for total cooperation, the free response, of the creature. And it happened in Mary.

The prayer goes on to say, “The Word became flesh, and dwelt among us”. The Word, the Christ, through whom the universe had been created, became physically part of it. The Word became human, became flesh, one of us — not in a royal palace, no blare of trumpets, but quietly, in a nondescript village in an occupied country, Palestine.

It took 13.7 billion years after the Big Bang for the created universe to become complex enough, developed enough, to support human life that could think and love and understand sufficiently to cooperate thoroughly with God. In Jesus, the Word of God came into the universe created as the climax and the purpose of the whole creation adventure. And it happened in the womb of Mary who said, “Yes”.

But the story does not end there. The Angelus ends with a prayer that we “be brought to the glory of his Resurrection”. We are reminded that our destiny is freely to allow God to give us a share in the Risen life of Jesus. Death is not the end. It is a step into a new way of being more totally human, into a life where we shall be enabled to see and to respond appropriately to the infinite beauty of God, and to the beauty of our selves and of everyone else made in the image of that beautiful God — which has been God’s plan for all those 13.7 billion years. Heaven: people freely choosing at last to love, no exceptions, no holding back — and enjoying it intensely. Thank you, God … and Thank you, Mary.