Strength to Face the Future: Homily for the First Sunday of Advent – Year C

In today’s gospel Jesus tells his disciples
to “stand erect and raise your heads
because your redemption is at hand.”

In a bit of personal irony,
I woke up this weekend unable to “stand erect”
because of an excruciating pain in my back.
I guess I must have tweaked something
putting up the Christmas tree
or carrying the box of holiday china.
But it’s starting to feel better,
and I have great hope that it will continue to heal.

We human beings cannot live without hope.
We’re unique among the animal kingdom
because we can think about the future.
We can worry about what it will become,
and we can yearn for it to be better.

Hope is so essential to being human
that we can’t live without something to live for,
without something look forward to.

As Fr. George Haspedis used to say,
hope is to the heart what breathing is to the lungs.
Stop breathing and you die.
Stop hoping and you die.
Keep breathing and you live.
Keep hoping and you live, and live with purpose.

Hope gives you strength to face the future.

But there are many things in which we can place our hope,
there are many things we can choose to live for.
Whatever we hope in shapes the way we live our lives.
We can hope in the promises of God
or we can hope in the promises of the world.

Today we begin the beautiful season of Advent,
and one of the blessings of Advent
is that it teaches us what to hope for.

That’s one of the reasons we read the Old Testament during Advent.
The people of the Old Testament knew how to hope,
and we can learn from their patient waiting.

Today the prophet Jeremiah tells us of the Lord’s promise
to raise up a just shoot.
The Old Testament peoples had hope in the promises of God
so they had the strength to wait centuries
for their fulfillment.

They weren’t always faithful to the promise,
but they never forgot it.
It fueled their imaginations
and gave them something to live for
during the long years of slavery, exile, and oppression.

As today’s psalm puts it,
“you are God my savior,
and for you I wait all the day.”

Last January 1st, Brenda and I began listening
to a brand new Bible-in-a-Year podcast
featuring Fr. Mike Schmitz of Ascension Press.
Every day since last New Year’s Day
we’ve been listening to Fr. Mike read from the Bible,
starting from the book of Genesis.
We read through the entire Old Testament,
Genesis, Exodus, and Leviticus,
through Job, the Psalms, and Sirach,
through Isaiah, Jeremiah, and Malachi.
We read every law and genealogy,
counted every cubit and ephah.

And as we listened, day after day,
we waited and waited for the New Testament to come.
Just like the people of the Old Testament,
we waited for the promised Messiah.
And we heard the promises,
the same promises we will hear during Advent:
“In days to come the mountain of the Lord’s house shall be established
as the highest mountain.”
“They shall beat their swords into plowshares
and their spears into pruning hooks.”
“The Lord of hosts will provide for all peoples
a feast of rich food and choice wine.”
“He will destroy death forever.”
“The deaf shall hear…the eyes of the blind shall see..”
“The tyrant will be no more.”
“Streams will burst forth in the desert…”

We finally reached the New Testament in the second week of November.
It took over ten months to read the Old Testament.
That’s how much of the Bible takes place before the time of Christ.

But as long as that seemed to take,
it’s nothing compared to how long the Chosen People actually waited
for the Messiah.

But all during those long years
their hope in that promise gave them strength to face the future.
In the face of disease they had the strength to hope for healing.
In the face of division they had the strength to hope for unity.
And in the face of war, they had the strength to hope for peace.

With the coming of Christ,
their hope was justified.
Jesus came to be our healer,
Jesus came to gather us all into one family,
and Jesus came to be peace for our souls.
The Chosen People hoped, and their hope was justified.

Hope for the Christian believer is more than wishful thinking.
Hope is an unshakeable trust and assurance
that the promises of God will be fulfilled.
It’s a trust based on what God has already done for us
in his son Jesus Christ, through his death and resurrection.

Hope is the gift of the Holy Spirit within us
that yearns for the kingdom of heaven.
It keeps us from being discouraged,
it sustains us when we feel alone,
it inspires us to do good in the face of evil.

Christmas is coming.
We are getting ready to celebrate
God’s entrance into the world in history,
his coming to us in a more intimate way in the present,
and his promise to come again and redeem the world .

We are given the season of Advent
to focus our attention on this marvelous, beautiful, mystery,
not to focus on wish lists, shopping, and parties.
For the next four weeks,
we can choose to hope in the world,
or to hope in Christ.

Jesus warns his disciples,
“Beware that your hearts do not become drowsy
from carousing and drunkenness and the anxieties of daily life…”
Where is my heart at the beginning of Advent?
Is it weighed down with anxieties?
It is numbed by all the distractions of the culture?
Am I half-asleep moving through my day,
with no sense of hope for the future?

If so, then Advent is here just in time.
Advent is here to remind us to be vigilant,
to pray always.
to teach us what to hope for.