December 15, 2025
Paulist Fr. Rich Andre preached this homily on the 3rd Sunday of Advent (Year A) on December 14, 2025 at Old St. Mary’s Catholic Church in Chicago, IL. The homily is based on the day’s readings: Isaiah 35:1-6a, 10; Psalm 146; James 5:7-10; and Matthew 11:2-11.
Today is Gaudete Sunday. Gaudete is the ancient Latin word for “the day they light the pink candle.” No, seriously, gaudete is a command for all of us to rejoice. In other words, after two weeks of the Church advising us all to wait in joyful hope, it’s time to get excited about the coming of Christmas!
Our first reading and our gospel passage talk about excitement and exciting things. Our second reading, however, is a classic Advent passage that talks about something else: patience. Patience? Is it even possible for us to be patient while we’re excited? We’ll reflect on that today.
O house of Jacob, come! Let us walk in the light of the Lord!
When people come to confession, a lot of them speak to me about not having patience. About 70% of the time, what people describe as a “lack of patience” turns out to be a euphemism for a different phenomenon: they have a problem controlling their anger. Well, perhaps anger is too strong a word for it. Maybe it’s annoyance or frustration. (Those words sound better than “anger,” don’t they?)
Anger is not a sin. (Let’s be clear: wrath is one of the deadly sins. Anger is something else.) Anger is a God-given gift. God has created us with the ability to feel angry. The task of growing in Christian maturity is to recognize our emotions, especially emotions that scare us, such as anger, sadness, anxiety, jealousy, arousal, and loneliness. Once we recognize our feelings, we can ask the Holy Spirit to help us figure out holy ways to channel them.
For example, when I start to notice that I’m angry about something, I need to pray about it. What’s causing my anger? Often, if I take the time to pray with the situation, I discover that my anger is self-induced. For example, when I witness the horrible behavior of service personnel and other customers in a big box store when purchasing a new church emergency phone, I can find myself getting angry. But then I realize that I’m embarrassed that even though I have two engineering degrees, I know less about cell phones than the service personnel making minimum wage. And I’m ashamed that I didn’t follow through on my promise to my brother priests to investigate the problems with our phone before it became a crisis. When I realize that I’m using my anger to mask my underlying guilt and embarrassment, I stop feeling angry, ask the Holy Spirit to help me find a way to give myself the same compassion that God gives me every day, and I stop seething on the inside and try harder to respect the people who are trying to assist me.
Other times, I recognize that my anger is about a situation that I can remedy, if I have the guts to talk calmly with the other people who have contributed to creating the situation. Of course, I need to pray to the Holy Spirit in these cases, too, so I don’t say something stupid and make things worse!
There are other times when I realize that the effort and risks necessary to remedy the situation are not worth it. In those cases, I ask the Holy Spirit to help me to let go of my anger. There’s a catch: lots of us say we’re going to “let go” of our anger, but then we decide to hold onto it anyway. That’s called resentment: swallowing poison and waiting for someone else to die. It doesn’t work!
I have to admit that I don’t have a perfect track record, but I discover that the more I patiently pray about my emotions, the more I understand them to be gifts, not burdens to weigh me down. And the more easily I can get excited about all that God has promised us! As a priest and a hospital chaplain, I have seen the eyes of the blind be opened, the ears of the deaf be cleared, the lame leap like a stag, and the tongue of the mute sing.
But in the other 30% of cases of people confessing a lack of patience, they’re talking about something more difficult. They’re in difficult situations that never seem to relent – perhaps they’re caring for a parent with dementia, working in a terrible environment that they can’t escape, or caring for an infant who’s going through an extended period of fussiness. These people may be able to exhibit patience 23 hours of the day, but there’s always another straw ready to break the camel’s back in that 24th hour.
I think that these are the people to whom James writes when he says, “see how the farmer waits for the precious fruit of the earth, being patient with it until it receives the early and the late rains.”
It’s hard to have patience, unless you hope that something better is coming to you eventually. The farmer knows that the fruit will eventually grow. When we find ourselves in seemingly hopeless situations, I think the thing to pray for is… trust. Trust in God’s plans for the future. The people who heard John the Baptist preach didn’t necessarily know why they were drawn to him: it wasn’t to see the reeds in the desert, and it certainly wasn’t because of the way he dressed. But there was something compelling in what he said. Our God is a God of the future, calling us forward to new, exciting, unpredictable things!
So, no matter whether our lack of patience is temporary or ongoing, the solution is to pray. But not to pray for patience. We need to pray to the Holy Spirit to understand our anger, our anxiety, our envy, or our loneliness. Or we need to pray to the Holy Spirit for a renewal of our trust in God, for a renewal of our hope in God’s promises. The farmer waits for the precious fruit, until it receives the rains. If we can remember back to our confirmation classes, patience isn’t technically a virtue. It’s a fruit… a fruit of the Holy Spirit. The more we fill our hearts with the gentle rain of the Holy Spirit, the more the fruit of patience will grow within us, and the more willing we are to wait for the Lord with excitement and joyful hope.
For the 70% of us whose struggle with patience is temporary, perhaps we can try to ease the anxieties of the 30% of people whose struggle with patience is ongoing. We can’t fully relieve their burdens, but perhaps we can give them a helping hand. As Isaiah has commanded us:
Strengthen the hands that are feeble,
make firm the knees that are weak,
say to those whose hearts are frightened:“Be strong, fear not
Here is your God, … he comes to save you.”