1st Sunday of Advent - The Smell Of God

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

1Cor 1, 3-9 / Mark 13, 33-37

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.

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