December 18, 2024
Paulist Fr. Rich Andre preached this homily for an Advent communal reconciliation service on December 16, 2024, at Old St. Mary’s Catholic Church in Chicago, IL. The homily is based on the day’s readings: Luke 1:57-79.
Over the past nine days at Old St. Mary’s, we have celebrated the sacrament of reconciliation with a remarkable number of people who have been away from the sacrament for years. If you’ve been away for a long time, we wish you an especially warm welcome back to this beautiful sacrament tonight! May this time of reconnecting with God help us each find our way forward in our journey of discipleship, especially for those of us who have felt “stalled” for a while.
In 2022, the Paulist Fathers made a commitment to try to address the toxic polarization in our nation and our Church. Tonight, we will focus on how we each contribute to the polarization in our society. Our gospel passage includes part of the Benedictus, the blessing that John the Baptist’s father gave him shortly after his birth. We pray the Benedictus every day of the year in morning prayer, and it will be the gospel passage on the final morning of Advent, just hours before Christmas Eve. Tonight, we ask ourselves: how are we, like John, called to prepare God’s way, to give people knowledge of God’s salvation through the forgiveness of our sins?
Let us pray:
Lord our God, you are patient with sinners,
and you accept our desire to make amends.
We acknowledge our sins
and are resolved to change our lives.
Help us to celebrate this sacrament of your mercy
so that we may reform our lives
and receive from you the gift of everlasting joy.
We ask this through Christ our Lord. Amen.
At the time of our gospel reading, it had been a thousand years since God had promised David that his house would last forever. In Zechariah and Elizabeth’s time, the kingdom established by David was occupied by the Roman Empire, the latest in a series of powerful nations that had threatened, occupied, or obliterated the nation for more than 900 of the intervening thousand years.
Zechariah was a devout Jew, who had long studied the prophecies about the coming of a Messiah who would deliver the people from captivity. And yet, when the angel Gabriel said that his wife would give birth to a child who would fulfill the final verses of Malachi’s prophecy, he didn’t believe it.
Perhaps we’re not that different from Zechariah. We despair about the incivility, the disregard for life from womb to tomb, the systemic racism, the exploitation of workers, the environmental degradation, and the neglect of refugees and impoverished people around the world. Our nation and the Church within our nation are severely weakened by toxic polarization. Many of us have offered specific prayers about how we want God to remove these scourges from our society.
And yet, by the time of our gospel passage, Zechariah understands that God is delivering on the promises made long ago, just in a different way than Zechariah had anticipated. Nine months after being struck mute, Zechariah recovers the ability to use his voice to further God’s mission.
Maybe, for some of us, tonight is the night we regain our voices after being stunned into a long silence by the toxicity around us. Do we believe that we, too, like John, are called to be prophets of the Most High? We are the ones called to go before the Lord to prepare God’s way. We are the ones called to give God’s people knowledge of salvation by proclaiming the forgiveness of their sins.
The pandemic has taught us that there are some bad things in our world that are beyond our control. The virus is endemic, and we have needed to adjust our lives to accommodate it. Too often, however, we respond to the social sins of our world as if they were endemic viruses. We think that we need to accept them and fudge our ethics to work around them, rather than recognizing that humanity has the power to eradicate these sins.
None of us can eliminate social sins alone, of course, but we can each be prophets of the future God promises us. If we each lived out the precepts God articulated to Moses more than 3,000 years ago, we’d be cooperating with God’s vision for the world. Imagine what would happen if we always shared the bounty of our harvests with the poor and aliens around us. Imagine if we never spoke falsely about the people we disagreed with. Imagine if we never exploited our neighbors to make a profit, if we always gave everyone a just wage, if we always treated people with physical and mental limitations as our beloved brothers and sisters, if we doled out justice equally to the privileged and to the disadvantaged.
In big ways and in small ways, we all contribute to the obstacles holding back the dawning of the new day of the LORD. We are all one family. What can we do to rekindle the love for people who have different political beliefs than us, who live in different economic situations than us, who have different skin tones or orientations than us?
If only we could consistently express the tender compassion of our God, then the dawn from on high may break more rapidly upon us. It may shine more brightly on those who dwell in darkness and in the shadow of death.
This Advent, we have prayed for God’s realm to break forth in our world. This evening, we recognize that God’s realm of grace and peace starts with us. We are the people called to guide everyone’s feet into the way of peace.
—Presider:
Loving God, we attempt to become ever more like your Son. Give us the humility to prune what must be cut out of our lives. Give us the enthusiasm to grow in the ways you desire for us.
Lector [pausing 10-20 seconds between bullet points]:
- Am I willing to love my neighbor as myself? Am I willing to love even my enemies? How will I do this?
- Do I build bridges of unity and peace within my family, among my co-workers and neighbors or do I retreat to the safety of those who think, live act and believe as I do?
- How do I give witness to “the tender compassion of our God” whose dawn is breaking upon us?
- Are there people I ignore or don’t even see? Do I reflect God’s love, mercy and compassion to all?
- How am I willing to change my life and habits so that God can act through me to “shine on those who dwell in darkness” and to guide us all “into the way of peace?
- Do I allow myself to be paralyzed by fear so that God’s grace and mercy cannot shine forth in me?
Presider:
Loving God, hear the prayers of those who call on you.
Forgive the sins of those who confess to you,
And in your merciful love, give us pardon and peace.
We ask this through our Lord Jesus Christ, your Son,
who lives and reigns with you and the Holy Spirit,
one God, for ever and ever. Amen.