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It is hard to believe we are entering another liturgical season while under the grasp of the pandemic. And while it would be easy to preach on the Advent themes of waiting and watching without discouragement, let’s save that for another time. Even more important, in my mind, is the need to reflect on the spirit of Isaiah’s question to God in the first reading. He writes from the heart and his inspired words shed insight not only into the human heart and its yearnings but also the Divine Heart of God. Today’s reading starts with a question many of us have asked before. “Why do you let us wander, O LORD, from your ways, and harden our hearts so that we fear you not?” In other words, Lord, why do you allow so much evil in the world? Can’t you just make it stop? Fix us so we cannot do the terrible things that happen every day around the world! Just make us do what you want.
The prophet is longing for the love of God. But what he finds instead he cannot bear: God seems angry; God appears gone and feels distant. The experience the prophet describes might be familiar to us who see so much evil in our world. God is angry and has hidden his face; he is somewhere above the heavens, and we cannot find him. How can this be? Doesn’t God love us? Where is he? Why does he feel so far away? Why isn’t he here?
The prophet answers these questions, and in the saddest possible way. The reason for God’s apparent distance lies in our choices. God is not gone from us nor has he forsaken us. Our weaknesses, our selfishness, our pride, our failure to love, our failure even to accept the love of others—all these things have made us wither and dry up. Hollow and unclean, we have been blown away from God by the winds of worldliness. God is here, where he has always been. We are the ones who have been swept away by evil and selfishness. We are the ones who have run away from Him; not he from us.
This perspective reminds me of when I drove a car with a manual transmission. Sometimes, when I was waiting on a hill for a light to change, I would unconsciously relax my left foot which was on the brake and my car would slow slide backwards. I would notice the motion but think the person next to me was inching forward impatiently. “What a fool” I would mutter, only to realize a moment later that they were not moving at all; I was the knucklehead rolling backwards! So too with God, who NEVER moves away from us. But in our sinful, unreflective state, we often think he does because we fail to see how our wayward thoughts, words, and actions make us slide backwards from his loving presence.
This movement away from God is called sin and there are two types in our world: original sin, passed down to us from Adam and Eve at the dawn of creation. This fundamental fault disposes us towards the things we ought not like or want and makes it hard to chose the things which are best for us and for others. Original sin has put our world out of sync with God and his loving plan. But there is also actual sin, offenses that I choose to commit. Deliberate thoughts, words and actions that drive me away from God and from other people and bring about hurt, selfishness, and destruction. If you boil down any bad thing in our world, any of the reasons for why they take place, you will eventually trace it back to both personal and original sin, which is nothing more than humans wandering away from God.
And that is where the season of Advent and today’s readings tie in. We are reminded that God is near us every moment of our lives. Our Faith reminds us that Christ wants to draw us back to him and put an end to our destructive wandering. He wants our freedom to be used for peace, service, worship, healing, and loving. That is the message for us on this first Sunday of Advent. Our gospel tells us to be watchful, to look for the Lord’s coming and return to him. Jesus makes it clear that we must be prepared if we are going to be ready to receive him when he comes. This is a test we do not want to fail as people that bear his name; when he returns, we want to be waiting and ready.
But because of our sinful tendencies, because of our inclination towards chaos, we need this season of Advent. We need this time each year to examine our lives and ask ourselves if we are living in a way that puts Christ in the center of our hearts; have we wandered away?
The amazing thing about our faith is the trust that God puts in us. Especially when you consider how so many behave. Despite the risks, God entrusts us with his gifts, with building up a piece of his kingdom and all he asks is "do your best, behave well, and be alert for my return."
Christ is coming again, and we need him to come again; too many in the world have become unruly and self-centered. But, while we long for his return, as Isaiah longed for his coming, while we long for the time when the world will be a place of harmony and peace, for the time when all things will be finally straightened out, the time when the wicked will get their just desserts and the faithful their reward, --while we long for this time, we need not be overly concerned about when it will come, we need not worry because we have our work cut out for us and we can trust God to honor that work, and to keep his promise to be merciful and kind to those who have lived by faith in him.
The Lord will come, and the faithful and the unfaithful alike will see him coming. They will see him coming with his angels in the clouds with great power and glory, and the angels will be sent out to gather his elect from the four corners of the earth, and there will be justice, there will be peace. A peace greater than that which any earthly court can render, a justice more just than that which any law can guarantee.
This is our hope, this is our Christian faith, and this is the time in which we show our Lord that we indeed can be trusted and that we want to stay close to him. It is not our job to sit around and point out the faults of everyone else; we each have more than enough work to do within ourselves!
During this advent, let us allow the words of Isaiah in the first reading to resonate in our hearts and in our lives: “You, LORD, are our father, our redeemer you are named forever. Return for the sake of your servants. Would that you might meet us doing right, that we were mindful of you in our ways!”
