Sunday, December 4, 2011

2ND SUNDAY OF ADVENT - Am I Expecting?

Is 40, 1-5; 9-11 / 2Pet 3, 8-14 / Mk 1, 1-8

Advent is a time to look forward – to have expectations.  Our expectations are of all sorts.  We can look forward to gifts – to shopping, to giving and receiving presents.  Or our expectations can take us to the sights, sounds and smells of the holidays – the tree all decorated, good food and drink.  And then we have our religious expectations – looking forward to our religious celebrations and hymns, to hearing again the story of the birth of Christ.

But I must tell you this season of Advent is given us to call all our expectations into question.  Advent wants to awaken us – awaken us to the realization that our expectations are far too genteel and respectable.  It wants to awaken us to recognize that our expectations are far too meager.

This season we will hear again all the gospel stories surrounding the birth of Christ.  Well known scenes will be repeated: the Annunciation to Mary by the angel Gabriel – Joseph’s confusion and dream telling him to marry Mary – the star, the magi, the manger, shepherds guarding their flocks, the slaughter of the innocents.

But using the voices of prophets like Isaiah and John the Baptist – as in today’s readings – Advent will yell to us: “Repent, for the kingdom of heaven is at hand!”  Advent wants us to change – to repent – to undergo a depth transformation of mind, heart and spirit.  “Repent” means to hear differently – to imagine differently – to expect differently.  Only then will we be able to see and enter the kingdom of heaven.  Repent – change and then you’ll be able to see God’s kingdom right in front of you.  Then you’ll be able to enter into God’s own world and way.  And it is God’s own world and way that Advent wants us to enter – not the nice, tidy religious realm we imagine God fitting into.  Advent wants to upset – overturn and tear down our tame – manicured images of God.  Once that happens, then will we see, sense and enter into God’s unexpected, unimagined presence in life.

Let me give an example of the kind of transformation Advent wants to work in us – how we are to hear, imagine and expect differently.  A well known and beloved scene for us is the Annunciation.  The angel Gabriel says to Mary: “Hail, full of grace!”  Mary responds: “As you have spoken, so be it done to me.  I am the Lord’s servant.”  Now comes the Advent difference – our hearing and imagining differently.  See a girl in her teens suspected of a capital crime – adultery.  That is Mary’s real situation.  Then in this – her real, lived situation – hear again the words: “Hail, full of grace!”  “…so be it done to me.  I am the Lord’s servant.”  We might also hear the words of this criminally pregnant woman to her cousin, Elizabeth: “My soul proclaims God’s goodness and greatness.”

Mary’s Yes – her Fiat – makes her “full of grace” truly – but also a woman to be held in contempt and disdain – a woman to be avoided.  Her expectations of God are changing.  Following God’s lead does not necessarily lead to applause and approval.  Yet she is and remains “full of grace” – proclaiming God’s goodness and greatness.

We are to hear God differently – imagine God differently – expect from God differently.  Such would Advent have us learn and do.  Perhaps we need to learn to listen to the Word of God – not so politely and not so piously.  Perhaps our genteel and pious approaches to God and God’s Word only get in the way.  Perhaps they only serve to feed a presumed familiarity with what is really being said that actually decreases our ability to find God’s presence and action in our lives.  Our piety and respectability might give us a nice, respectable God – but will we have a living God who only wants to baptize us with his own Spirit and with fire?  Certainly we will not have the living God who can move a pregnant, unmarried teenage girl from fear to joy and praise.

I want to conclude with a parable told by an Indian Jesuit, Anthony De Mello.  It’s a parable of repentance.

A group of tourists sits in a bus traveling through gorgeously beautiful country.  There are lakes and mountains, green fields and rivers.  But the shades of the bus are drawn down.  The travelers haven’t the slightest idea of what lies beyond the windows of the bus.  And all the time of their journey is spent squabbling with one another over who will have the seat of honor in the bus.  And so they remain till journey’s end.

A sad story.  The prophets – John the Baptist – Advent – all yell at us: Repent!  Change the story!  Get rid of the shades on your bus!  Remove the shades from your lives!  Then you will come to real life and to God’s real presence – God’s unexpected, unimagined presence in your life. Change!  Make straight God’s way into your life!

Fr. Pat Earl, SJ

Sunday, November 27, 2011

1st Sunday of Advent - The Smell Of God

Isaiah 63, 16b-17, 19b, 64: 2-7

We’ve entered a special time of year.  It’s my favorite time of year.  I like looking forward to Christmas.  And I like the coolness – even chill – in the air.  On Friday I drove to Lake Lure.  Driving on that curving, twisting road I drove slowly.  I had the windows down and could smell the shrubs, the trees and the earth.  In Apple Valley I stopped to buy some apples and cider.  And they were doing something there I absolutely love: burning leaves – burning lots of leaves!  The scent filled the air.

Special times create special expectations.  And expectation makes us alert to things – alert to what is around us.  And so we become alert – aware of the good things in our lives.  That is so good for us.  We need to do that: to let the goodness of our lives come to life for us.

Advent is just such a time – a time for letting the goodness of our lives really come to life for us – letting people, places, events come to mind and heart.  A word we will frequently hear throughout the Advent season is the word “awake”.  In the gospel reading from Mark Jesus says to us: “Be watchful!  Stay alert!   I say to you and to all: Stay awake!  Be watchful!”  But our awakening, our becoming alert presumes we’ve been sleeping – somehow not alert.  Advent is there to call us from our sleeping – to call us from our un-awareness.

I spoke about liking the feel of the chill air.  But something I don’t like the feel of is a cold shower.  I once made a retreat at a Benedictine monastery in Big Sur in California.  The monastery stood on a high cliff overlooking the Pacific.  The view was stunning.  But where I was staying was called “the old ranch”.  We had no heating – no hot water.  So every shower was a cold shower.  Talking about being awake – that’ll do it!

Advent wants to be a kind of cold shower for us.  It wants to shock us out of our un-awareness – and shock us out of our myths about life.  It wants to shock us out of what we have settled into calling God’s presence.  This is the presence we have made of God.  This is the God of our own creation – usually a very American God – reliably nice and polite – even therapeutic: makes us feel good all over.  This is a comforting, churchy God.  Advent wants to stun us into recognizing God’s real presence – God’s holy, living presence.  It wants us to smell God where we normally don’t.

Advent wants to change us.  It wants to fill our senses, our imaginations, our minds and hearts with confusing, perplexing images – images of a world where God is seen, sensed and smelled in human flesh and daily bread.  This fleshy, bready God confuses beyond all expectation.  This God of Advent says: “Take me, eat me, become me.”  “I am already in you; you are already in me.”

Like the cold shower Advent will sting and stun.  But it will only do that to prepare us – to ready us – to make us alert.  Because – at an hour we do not expect – in a manner we cannot imagine – in a closeness that baffles and blesses us – the Son of Man will come to us – will come into our real, ordinary, daily lives.  That’s where he is most at home.

Jesus’ first choice of residence is: us.  We are his chosen tabernacle.  This church, this sanctuary, this tabernacle – they have their use in recalling to us Jesus’ real presence: “I am already in you; you are already in me.” 

Let us awaken and be watchful.  Let us in Advent prepare ourselves for finding in our own lives God’s ordinary presence – God’s preferred place of residence.  Let our lives come to resemble that humbly normal stable in Bethlehem.  Let us learn to smell God there – in our own lives.  After all, we do call ourselves “the Body of Christ”.

Fr. Pat Earl, S.J.

Sunday, November 20, 2011

33rd Sunday in Ordinary Time - The Gift

Proverbs 31, 10-13, 19-20, 30-31
1 Thess 5, 1-6 / Mt 25, 14-30

Jesus, our rabbi, is teaching us today in parables.  That means he wants us to really think.  He wants us to think not on a surface level but deeply – not many pious ideas but deep in our guts where we keep our certainties.  Be warned: Jesus wants to upset those certainties of ours.  What he wants for us is no less than our transformation a completely new way for us to enter into life.

Absolutely critical to understanding Jesus’ parable is the meaning of the word “talent”.  First of all, a “talent” is a sum of money; it is not a personal ability or gift.  In fact, in Jesus’ day a talent was a huge sum of money, 6,000 denarii.  That would be the equivalent of what the average Jew would earn over the course of twenty years.  So in the parable we are talking in terms of huge amounts of money.

The story begins with the man going on a journey.  He gives three of his servants enormous sums of money.  To the first he gives five talents, to the second two talents and to the third he gives one talent.  The point is not the difference in the amounts given but that they were each given an enormous sum of money.  Clearly this man – the master - is extravagantly generous.

 As the story goes on, we see the first two take what is given them and do a lot with it.  And the master is overjoyed at what they have managed to do with the gift he has given them.

But the action of the parable and its point revolve around the third servant.  After dealing with the first two servants the master comes to the third.  Listen closely to how Jesus describes the third servant as he presents himself to the master:
 
Master, I knew you were a demanding person, harvesting where you did not plant and gathering where you did not scatter; so out of fear I went off and buried your talent in the ground.  Here it is back.

Every detail, every indication so far in the story is that the master is an extremely generous man who becomes overjoyed when the servant receives his gift and does something with it.  But the third servant doesn’t see the master this way at all.  He says the master is a demanding person and is, in fact, an unjust man: he harvests where he did not plant.

The obvious question – the question Jesus wants us to ask – is where did he get this idea – this dark image of the master?  Certainly the other two had no such image.  Jesus tells us in the story where the image comes from.  The servant says: …out of fear I went off and buried your talent in the ground.  Fear!  Fear as a way of life – or, perhaps better said, fear as a way of not living.  Jesus is addressing the kind of fear that would take a surprising rainbow suddenly appearing in the sky and make it into a menacing threat!  That’s what Jesus wants us to ask about ourselves.  He wants us to address our own fears.

Jesus wants us to get honest about the role of fear in our own lives. How does fear work in us?  Does it work in us as it did in the servant?  Try to get into the guts of the servant – into his basic life-certainties.  Allow Jesus’ parable to get us into ourselves – into our own guts where we keep our certainties about life.  Does our gut tell us that this day, that life itself are given as gifts – as blessings from a God who is Infinite Goodness and whose only joy is to see that the blessing be received, enjoyed and expanded further?

Or, does fear prevent us from receiving what is clearly intended to be a gift?  Does it prevent us from even recognizing the gift as a gift?  And does fear prevent us from recognizing the goodness that prompted the gift – the goodness of the giver?  In our everyday lives has fear made us suspicious of goodness?  Has goodness become suspect?  Has God become suspect to us – a threat to us – somehow not wanting our good and welfare?

We are moving toward the end of our liturgical and church year.  And we are moving toward Advent.  The Church asks us to reflect on our lives.  If there be fear in us, then let Advent call us out of fear.  Let Jesus transform us and introduce us to a wholly new way of entering into life.  It is time we learned that rainbows are not sinister and that God only wants to call us into his joy.

Fr. Pat Earl, SJ