Homily for Monday, 25 December 2023– The Nativity of the Lord, Mass during the Day

Readings of the day: Isaiah 52:7-10; Psalm 98:1, 2-3, 3-4, 5-6; Hebrews 1:1-6; John 1:1-18

Sisters and brothers, a Merry Christmas to you, our families, our loved ones, our friends!

Increasingly, one of Pope Francis’ favourite words is, “Closeness.” Pope Francis uses the word “closeness” nine times in his encyclical Fratelli Tutti, “Brothers and Sisters All,” which owes its title to an Admonition of St. Francis of Assisi to the friars of his religious community. This Admonition of St. Francis invites the friars to practice fraternal care and kindness toward one another and toward the poor, after Jesus’ example of fraternal closeness with us, with humanity.

The most perfect expression of closeness our world has ever known is when God took on our human nature in the person of Jesus Christ, that first Christmas morning in Bethlehem. But this was not the first time God expressed closeness with us, with the created world. From the very first moments of creation, God has ordered creation, intended it, to exist in closeness, interdependence of one being on another for us to flourish, the “common good.”

John’s Gospel on this Christmas morning takes us back to “the beginning” of God’s relationship of closeness with creation. John’s Gospel recalls God’s intention, from the beginning, that all things, all beings enjoy the same closeness and depend on one another to flourish. “In the beginning,” John’s Gospel begins this morning, “the word was with God, and the word was God.”

Here, in the majestic beginning of John’s prologue, “the word” is logos, the reason everything is. And, in the Greek of the Gospel of John, God is Theos (think of words like theology, the study or pursuit of God). In this beginning, Theos meets logos; God draws into intimate closeness with the reason anything and everything exists, so that these become one. From the very first moments of creation, God is the reason all things exist, why we exist and are called to participate in our own flourishing, God’s own project for our everlasting well-being and salvation.

And the one God, we profess by faith, exists in the intimate closeness of three persons, Father, Son, and Holy Spirit. The Father sent the Son, begot the Son, to live “among us,” John’s Gospel says, in our human flesh. And then the Son would breathe his Spirit upon the earth to continue to ensure our closeness with God, the greatest good of each of us and of the Church, meant to live in closeness with one another.

We are sacred creatures, created in the image and likeness of God, sisters and brothers, but we are also social creatures. As the Book of Genesis says near its beginning, “It is not good for [us] to be alone.” As Pope Francis is fond of saying, “Nobody is saved alone.” God has made us for closeness, between us and God, St. Augustine of Hippo says, “For, O God, you have made us for yourself, and our hearts are restless until they rest in you.” And God has made us for closeness among one another. This is how we have been created, and how we will be saved, how we will be in heaven.

That design of God—for closeness, between us and God, among ourselves, between us and every other creature—is captured in our readings today. That design of God, for closeness, has been from the very beginning, when Theos and logos became one.

God’s drawing us into ever-greater closeness—with God, among ourselves, with all created things—has played out in history. Today the Letter to the Hebrews proclaims that “long ago God spoke to our ancestors.” God spoke his will, his design of closeness to us through prophets. But now God “has spoken to us by the Son.” There can be no greater closeness than God becoming human, one like us in all things but sin in the person of Jesus Christ.

And the prophet Isaiah announces a blessing to the messenger of peace, good news, salvation. “How beautiful upon the mountains,” Isaiah says, “are the feet of [this] messenger”; the messenger who proclaims the closeness God has desired for and with us from “the beginning,” the closeness now fulfilled in God becoming a human being, sharing in our human experiences from birth to death and resurrection.

God made us for closeness—with God, one another, all creation—from “the beginning.” But that is not all, according to John in his Gospel prologue we hear this Christmas morning. John’s language in the Gospel we have heard this morning is, par excellence, the language of closeness. Theos and logos are one “in the beginning.” God, the word, God’s Son Jesus Christ “became flesh and dwelt among us.” The word John uses here for “flesh” is not the more sanitized of the two words Greek has for “flesh,” soma. No, John says, in Jesus Christ God became sarx. God shares in Christ with us every aspect of our human experience, including the messiest, least sanitized aspects like birth, suffering and death.

There is another hidden gem in this phrase of John’s Gospel proclaiming the Incarnation, God taking human flesh in Jesus Christ. John says, “The word became flesh and lived among us.” The word we hear as “lived” among us is an ancient Greek word referring to theatre, not so “lived” as that Jesus “pitched his tent” (skene) among us. We owe the English word scene, as in a play, to the Greek skene. Only God is not acting when God desires and achieves this intimate closeness with us, taking our human flesh and sharing in our human experiences.

God has “pitched his tent” among us, a permanent dwelling, a permanent, intimate closeness. God pitching his tent among us is meant by John to evoke the early history of the people of Israel. Before Israel was ruled by kings like David and Solomon, before there was a fixed temple in Jerusalem as the centre of the Jewish faith, God was said to dwell under a tent, the Ark of the Covenant. The ancient Israelite tribes would transport the Ark of the Covenant wherever they went, so God was always with God’s people, close to them. In Jesus, God was once more pitching God’s tent with humanity. Only now God’s tent was not made of fabric or animal skins; God’s “tent” was one of human flesh, all our possible human experiences.

John uses another remarkable word in today’s Gospel reading to point to God’s closeness with us, the closeness God wants us to enjoy among ourselves and with all created things. At the end of today’s Gospel reading, John says, “It is God the only-begotten Son, who is close to the Father’s heart, who has made [God] known.”

More literally, the Son dwells not so much “close to the Father’s heart” but “at the breast” or bosom of God. Those of us who have ever nursed a baby will say that there are not too many more intimate acts we perform with our body than a mother feeding an infant at the breast. What a beautiful image of maternal closeness John’s Gospel gives us of the relationship of the Son to the Father!

God desires this same closeness for us, the same relationship between God and us. In Fratelli Tutti, Pope Francis invites us to special “closeness marked by gratitude, solidarity, and reciprocity,” a closeness that values the poor and their faith by which they are closest to God, to the Lord who made himself poor, who humbled himself, taking on our human likeness. Pope Francis urges us to a particular “closeness to the underprivileged [in] the promotion of the common good.”

Sisters and brothers in the Christ born to us this day: This is how we live and experience the closeness God intended for us from “the beginning”; the closeness that unites God to the reason we and all created things exist; the closeness by which God willed to be born, to live, to die, and to rise from death in our human flesh; the closeness with which the Son dwells at the very bosom of the Father; the closeness that is ours to enjoy and by which we flourish and are saved.

Homily for Sunday, 24 December 2023– The Nativity of the Lord, Mass during the Night

Readings of the day: Isaiah 9:1-6; Psalm 96:1-2, 2-3, 11-12, 13; Titus 2:11-14; Luke 2:10-14

Once again, sisters and brothers, a blessed and Merry Christmas to all of us, our families, friends, and loved ones!

In our Opening Prayer for this celebration of the Nativity of our Lord, we praised God who has “made this most sacred night radiant with the splendor of the true light.”

God has made “this night,” not some other night far from our experience, “radiant with the splendor of the true light.” Yes, it is right for us to say, God made a night over two thousand years ago over Bethlehem especially “radiant with the splendor of the true light.” That was the night when Jesus was born of the blessed Virgin Mary, “wrapped… in swaddling clothes and laid… in a manger.” That night was greeted by an angel, sent with a message of “the true light” to “shepherds living in the fields.”

“The true light” would reach from Bethlehem to the ends of the earth! Shepherds were about as marginal as could be in Jesus’ time. They lived outside the cities and villages. Experts on Luke’s Gospel often speak of shepherds as people with a somewhat poor reputation. They did not regularly participate in social and religious ritual. They probably smelled a little off, like their sheep. But Luke’s Gospel says that they are the first to hear the message of our Saviour’s birth. And then that one angel sent to tell the shepherds of Jesus’ birth joins “a multitude of the heavenly host.”

The light, the sound of joyous song spreads from there: “Glory to God in the highest heaven, and on earth peace among those whom he favours”! And it all starts with the message of one angel to a group of shepherds. Those shepherds have nothing to lose, so they set out “with haste and [find] Mary and Joseph, and the child lying in the manger.”

Already within our Gospel account of Jesus’ birth, the focus of the action has shifted, from an angel’s encounter with shepherds in their fields to those shepherds, heeding the invitation by the angel, encountering the Saviour of the world in a manger in Bethlehem. And this, sisters and brothers, the manger scene—we might say Act One, Scene Two of the Nativity event, if Act One, Scene One is the shepherds’ fields—is not the last scene of the birth of our Lord on earth, robed in our human flesh.

Today, here and now, we are experiencing another scene of the birth of our Lord into our world, sisters and brothers. “The splendor of the true light” that was first made known by an angel to shepherds, and then made manifest to the shepherds in their encounter with the Christ Child in a manger alongside Mary and Joseph, continues to grow in our present time. “The splendor of the true light,” the sound of joyous song, the encounter with the world’s peace and salvation in our human flesh continues to grow brighter, clearer, and closer in and through us.

How is this so? Is it not a little presumptuous to put ourselves in the Nativity story, so to speak, as if we should imagine ourselves as somehow important enough to be among the first to encounter God in our human flesh! But remember who was first to encounter the Christ Child, after Mary and Joseph: Shepherds were first. But, then, we might ask, was Jesus’ birth not a one-and-done event in history? This event could not still be happening; that is absurd!

In a way this is true: Jesus was born once for all into our world as a human being, there, done, over two thousand years ago in Bethlehem. And some (maybe many) of us may not feel very comfortable—we may feel unworthy—to imagine ourselves “on scene” with the first people to encounter the newborn Son of God.

Some (if not many) of us here tonight may not exactly be comfortable or feel worthy to be here. Some (if not many) of us may not have been to church for a long time. Some (if not many) of us may be conscious of some serious wrong, or have been wronged seriously by somebody else, or may be experiencing broken relationships, divisions within our households and our friendships.

If you are one of these people, I want you to know you are welcome here. Your presence here to celebrate this night of Jesus’ birth, “this most sacred night [made] radiant with the splendor of the true light,” has nothing to do with worthiness: Yours, mine, that of anybody celebrating this Christmas night anywhere in the world. It has nothing to do with whether this is your first time in a church in a long time, a short time, or ever. It had nothing to do with worthiness—of the shepherds, or even of Mary and Joseph—the night Jesus was born. Besides, the shepherds were first on scene at Jesus’ birth, after Mary and Joseph. Let us remember this.

From the shepherds the joyous song, “the splendor of the true light” could only grow. And it continues to grow in and through us. If this were not true, there would be no point in us gathering here to celebrate Christmas. God wants to grow the light in and through us.

This has been God’s desire from the very first moment of creation, when God spoke over the darkness, the primordial chaos and nothingness: “Let there be light.” And, from then on, the light has only grown. Sure, there have been and continue to be moments in our world, its history, our own lives when the light that is God’s presence in our world, in us, has been obscured. There have been moments when people have—when we have—tried to extinguish the light. That is what sin is and does. But our sin is no match for God, who this night takes on our human nature; who this night comes to dwell as one like us in all but sin; who this night invited shepherds through an angel to be the first after Mary and Joseph at the newborn Jesus’ bedside.

If we reflect on when God has intervened in our world, when God has reignited the light of God’s presence in our world, this tends to be when the light has become dimmest to our eyes, when we are most deeply mired in the darkness of sin. The word of God speaks to that this night. When the people of Israel in Old Testament times were at their most sinful, when they had nearly forgotten God in favour of the false gods of militarily and politically powerful nations around Israel, and when Israel had forgotten its responsibility of justice especially toward the most marginalized among themselves, God’s prophet Isaiah spoke to them. Isaiah said to Israel, in the depths of darkness and sin, “The people who have walked in darkness have seen a great light.”

And that light would only grow brighter. The joyous song would only resound more clearly: “Glory to God in the highest heaven, and on earth peace among those whom he favours”! The people of Israel and then the people of the whole world would see, would encounter, would experience the mercy of “a child… born for us, a son given to us… Wonderful Counsellor, Mighty God, Everlasting Father, Prince of Peace.” That child would be “born for us” into a world, once again, “in deep darkness.” Israel of Jesus’ time was ruled by the Romans, just the latest in a succession of brutal foreign powers to rule the Holy Land.

We can point out many instances of “deep darkness” in our world still today: Wars, poverty, homelessness, other injustices, broken relationships. Yet, once again, God enters our world: Sure, not as God did just over two thousand years ago, as a baby in the womb of the Virgin Mary, born and laid in a manger in Bethlehem. Sure, God may not be entering the world in our own time through the words of a prophet like Isaiah or through the mighty acts of creation that set this universe in motion at the beginning of time: “Let there be light.”

But now God ignites the light anew, on “this most sacred night radiant with the splendor of the true light.” And God entrusts us, no matter how unworthy we might think we are, with this light. Our Gospels say in another instance that we “are the light of the world.” Each of us, and the Church communally, is “another Christ,” another focus point of God’s light and joyous song in our world.

Christ continues to make his dwelling in our human flesh, the human presence of everybody who celebrates his Nativity throughout the world on this night. Here we welcome and we celebrate the rekindling of the light, God’s entrusting us with the light so that, by our words and deeds of kindness, of justice, of mercy, of peace, of joy, each of us may be a first point of encounter with the light of the Lord. Each of us may become ever more “radiant with the splendor of the true light.” And that true light, that song of true joy, that closeness of encounter with Jesus Christ, the Saviour of the world, will only grow brighter and clearer in and through us.

Homily for Sunday, 24 December 2023– Fourth Sunday of Advent, Year B

Readings of the day: 2 Samuel 7:1-5, 8b-12, 14a, 16; Psalm 89:2-3, 4-5, 27, 29; Romans 16:25-27; Luke 1:26-38

I do not wish to dampen our mood too much. But traveling around this City of Edmonton—walking around the neighbourhood where I live, seeing the poverty and the homelessness; seeing the encampments of homeless people whenever I drive through downtown—quickly makes me sad these days. How do we respond to the many complex social problems that lead to more people without adequate shelter, more people with mental and physical health challenges, addictions; more people living in tents where their safety and sometimes the safety of the public is at risk?

Sisters and brothers, there are no easy answers to these questions. But I often wonder: If I; if we were able to contribute to enough social services and to the building of enough affordable housing for everybody who needs shelter in this city—or even just one person each—would we?

Today, on this Fourth Sunday of Advent, which happens to fall this year on the day before Christmas, we hear the noble idea of King David in the Second Book of Samuel: He wants to build God a house! Now, if King David lived in our time and place, I might want to ask him if I were in the place of, say, his prophet Nathan: It is wonderful that you want to build a house for God. But are all the poor, the marginalized in your kingdom sheltered, fed, cared for?

Old Testament tradition presents David as a good king (with some very significant flaws). So it is probable—and the Bible points to this in places—that David did care for, feed, and shelter the poor, as well as look after the spiritual needs of his people. If any king in ancient Israel were close to worthy to build a house for God, having done his best to care for his human subjects, it was David.

In 2 Samuel the prophet Nathan seems to agree with this. He approves David’s plan: “Go, do all you have in mind, for the LORD is with you.” But then, that night, we hear, God appears to Nathan and vetoes the king’s plan. David is not to build God a house. Instead, God will “make for [David] a great name,” an everlasting reign. God will do this by coming to dwell in our homes and our hearts.

Until the reign of David’s son and successor, King Solomon, who built the first temple—God’s first stationary house, we can say—in Jerusalem, God’s earthly dwelling was a tent, the Ark of the Covenant. And the Ark of the Covenant and the tabernacle at its centre were mobile. The Ark of the Covenant traveled where the tribes of ancient Israel traveled. God was always with God’s people.

Now, there are advantages to building God a stationary house, a temple, over having God dwell under a tent that traveled around with the tribes of Israel. The temple that David planned to build (and Solomon had built) would be imposing and ornate. It would call to mind God’s greatness, God’s sovereignty over the people and leaders of Israel.

On a much smaller scale but still beautiful, this chapel here at St. Joseph’s College serves the same purpose. The lovely stained-glass windows draw our attention upward toward heaven. They tell the story our Scriptures tell, from God’s creation of our universe through the ascension and reign of Christ the King in heaven, but in glorious bursts of colour, sunlight filtering through them. The Blessed Sacrament chapel invites us, right at this chapel’s entrance, to stop a while, pray, adore Jesus present in the tabernacle (and sometimes in the monstrance on the altar, especially every Friday evening when classes are in session). The altar centres our attention during Mass, calling to us with the Lord’s own invitation, “Come and eat.”

But there are possible disadvantages to building a stationary house for God. King David surely knew this; King Solomon and his successors would know this all too well. There is an ever-present temptation to immobilize, to limit God to our imaginations, our boxes, our houses that we build for God. So, in our comfortable enclosures, God can only fill with grace and blessing those who are somehow worthy of that divine grace and blessing. That bread and wine only becomes the real sacramental presence of Jesus Christ—body, blood, soul, and divinity—at that specific point in the Eucharistic prayer when the priest prays the words of institution…

If we begin to think in these ways, we have begun to forget God’s warning to King David through the prophet Nathan: It is not up to us to build God a house, stationary and static. No, God will make of us, sisters and brothers, a house. We are God’s dwelling when we emerge from this place, having partaken of the Eucharist, and we bring God’s grace and blessing out to the world by how we act with kindness, with love, with peace, with joy, especially toward those on the margins. Let us heed God’s reminder to King David at his most noble: “Are you the one to build me a house to live in”?

God wants to make of us a house, a living, moving Ark of the Covenant in which he will dwell. And the realization in history of God coming to dwell with us as one of us in all things but sin begins with the message of the angel Gabriel to a humble virgin, Mary of Nazareth. Mary is the first and most perfect model of the living, moving Ark of the Covenant, the earthly dwelling of God that God wants us all to be.

Now imagine us going out to our world, encountering somebody in special need of hearing the words Gabriel spoke to Mary: “Hail, full of grace; the Lord is with you.” And let us speak those words to at least one person today, tomorrow, this week in which we celebrate the Nativity of our Lord: “Hail, full of grace”; “May God bless you.” Our greeting can be as simple as that! And then let us enact that grace and blessing, that real presence of God that dwells in each of us, especially as we leave this Eucharistic celebration, as we celebrate Christmas tonight and tomorrow: Be kind; be at peace; forgive and be reconciled with somebody who needs forgiveness and reconciliation through us; try to remind ourselves to see and experience God’s presence primarily in somebody who lives on the margins, somebody outside the fixed houses, the places of worship we build for ourselves and for God.

If we are wondering or, in our Gospel’s words today to describe Mary upon hearing Gabriel’s greeting, if we are “perplexed” at why I am insisting on this, in a way this is good. Mary is “much perplexed,” Luke says, “by [Gabriel’s] words.” She says “to the angel, ‘How can this be, since I am a virgin’”? Who am I to bear the Son of God in human flesh into this world? Who am I (and who are we) to be the focus of God’s blessing into the world right now, God’s living, moving Ark of the Covenant here and now?

I am sure that St. Paul, as he traveled and wrote his letters—the magnificent conclusion to his Letter to the Romans we have heard today—felt the same perplexity that Mary did. “Who am I,” St. Paul asks in a few places in his letters, “to be the messenger of peace and salvation, the apostle to the Gentiles? Who am I but a persecutor and a murderer (at first) of the disciples of Jesus”?

Who is St. Paul to be an ark, a living and moving home to bear God, to write about this new promise (covenant) of salvation in Christ to the ends of the world?! He is as worthy of that mission as Mary was, as we are. That is, not worthy at all, because this mission to be God’s living, moving home in this world does not depend on our worthiness. It did not depend on how noble King David was, or how perfect and humble Mary was (except that God made her exceptionally humble and sinless), or how fit Paul was to be an apostle.

God calls us, invites us, now with less than a full day to go before Christmas: “Who are you ‘to build me a house to live in’? I will make of you (of each of us, of our Church as a communion of faith) a living, moving house of grace, of blessing, of peace, of reconciliation, of joy, of welcome and shelter to those on the margins. And I will send you (all of us) to the ends of the earth to be home to my presence, my salvation that first entered the world in human flesh just over two thousand years ago through the Virgin Mary in Bethlehem.”

Homily for Sunday, 10 December 2023– Second Sunday of Advent, Year B

Readings of the day: Isaiah 40:1-5,, 9-11; Psalm 85:9-10, 11-12, 13-14; 2 Peter 3:8-14; Mark 1:1-8

We find ourselves at the beginning, sisters and brothers: “The beginning,” Mark’s Gospel proclaims by its very first words, “of the good news of Jesus Christ, the Son of God.”

Mark wastes no time in revealing to us who Jesus is, “the Son of God,” and that his coming to live as one of us, in our human flesh—his advent—is “good news.” Spoiler alert! Mark does not even give us a nice, long account of Jesus’ infancy and childhood, to help us ease into the story, this “good news” he proclaims. Mark begins with the powerful preaching of John the Baptist, “the voice of one crying out in the wilderness.” By this point Jesus is already an adult. Jesus, the one John announces as “more powerful” than he is, has probably already attracted followers. He has caused some “good [and necessary] trouble” in the minds and consciences of many already, the minds and consciences of the comfortable and powerful of this world.

So much for starting at the beginning of the story! And today we are not even at the beginning of Advent. We are a full week into the shortest possible Advent this year—three weeks and a day between the first Sunday of Advent, a week ago, and Christmas Day. And I do not know about any of us, but as of now I have yet to do much at all to prepare for Christmas. Gift shopping? Not started. Visiting family and friends I may not have seen for a while? Okay, I have done some visiting. Taking time to be with, or at least to pray for, people in need—the sick, the poor, those who find this time of year to be a struggle for many reasons? Okay, but I could do better. Tidying my physical spaces—my room, my office—let alone doing a little Christmas decorating?! Yikes! I think, if Jesus were to step into my room now, let alone the spiritual room that is my heart, my conscience, he might sound a little like my mother did when I was a kid: “Did a tornado hit here, or what”?!

(By the way, I will offer this little advertisement for those of us who want to do some spiritual—heart, mind, conscience—tidying soon: St. Joseph’s College’s Advent penance service is this Friday at 7:00 pm).

So, in a way it is okay if we are a little behind on our Advent-Christmas preparations, if our spiritual let alone physical spaces look chaotic to say the least. Advent offers us a new beginning. God meets us where we are in our present; in fact God sends messengers ahead of himself and his Christ—John the Baptist, the saints, holy people we know and meet in our own lives—to draw us closer to him and to eternal life. That is the “good news”!

Yet Advent is a bit of a strange time of year. We are at a beginning of the Church’s liturgical year, of the story of our world’s first encounter with God in the human person of Jesus. But we are, at the same time, well into this story, after many encounters in history and in our own lives already with God’s “good news of Jesus Christ, the Son of God.”

Last Sunday, the first Sunday, the very beginning of Advent, our readings at Mass gave the sense more of an end, or a story very much in progress, than a beginning. We began this time of Advent by hearing from near the end of the Gospel of Mark: Jesus, just before his passion and death, urging his disciples to “keep awake,” ready for the events of Jesus’ passion and death that would happen right after that point, but more importantly for an unknown “Last Day” when Jesus will return in glory. St. Paul’s first letter to the Corinthians also oriented us toward that final “day of our Lord Jesus Christ,” exhorting the Corinthian Christian faithful to remain “blameless” until that day by the Lord’s strength and grace. The Psalm reinforced our plea for divine strength. And, a week ago, we heard Isaiah making final plans for the return of the people of Israel from a long exile in Babylon. That exile, it seems, had made the people of Israel stubborn; only a small “remnant” would return to their land to rebuild the nation and its temple in Jerusalem that had been the centre of the Jewish faith. So Isaiah pleads for divine intervention to break through Israel’s sin and hardness of heart: “O [LORD] that you would tear open the heavens and come down”!

Today, this second Sunday of Advent, our readings start back at beginnings: Mark speaks of “the beginning of the good news of Jesus Christ, the Son of God.” The second letter of Peter gives us a sense of being closer to a beginning than an end. The people for whom 2 Peter is written have become impatient. The first Christians of that community had suffered persecution. Many had already died. 2 Peter reminds them that, in God’s time, this is only the beginning: “The Lord is not slow about his promise… but is patient with you, not wanting any to perish, but all to come to repentance.”

Peter’s message is very similar to that of John the Baptist in today’s Gospel. For John the Baptist, there is urgency to repentance to prepare for the coming of Jesus, the “one after” John. Yet, 2 Peter says, there is also urgency to know God’s mercy and peace, God’s meeting us in the sometimes-chaotic events of this world and our lives, even as we strive to repent, to tidy our spiritual spaces, our minds and consciences.

Our God has never been one to wait until we have everything in order—our hearts, our minds, our consciences—before coming to be with us in our present time. The second letter of Peter offers us a very typical (for a biblical text) vision of the end of time. It will be chaos: “The heavens will be set ablaze and dissolved, and the elements will melt with fire.” But 2 Peter invites us not to worry about this chaos. Instead, lead “lives of holiness and godliness,” practice conversion and repentance here and now; “strive to be found by [the Lord] at peace.”

Jesus promised to return at the end of time. I think we can be almost certain that the end of time, when Jesus will re-enter this world, will be chaotic. We do not know what the world will look like when Jesus returns on the Last Day. But we can remain at peace if we think back to the beginning, the first time Jesus entered our world. God took our human flesh in a world that was chaotic then. Jesus was born of the Virgin Mary into a poor, chaotic, smelly stable with barn animals, at a time when the Romans ruled Jesus’ homeland by force.

God does not wait for us to have everything in order before entering into our present in a way that changes our existence profoundly and irreversibly. Well before Jesus’ time, the prophet Isaiah was calling to a people still in exile in Babylon, preparing to return to, well, chaos and ruin—a ruined temple—in Jerusalem. And Isaiah says, “Comfort, O comfort my people, says your God. Speak tenderly to Jerusalem, and cry to her that she has served her term, that her penalty is paid.”

Isaiah’s cry to Jerusalem is something like, “Yes, what you see, what is left of your homeland is chaos, ruin. But God is not waiting. God brings comfort, peace, justice, salvation now.” As the Psalmist says, here and now, “justice and peace” are about to “kiss each other.” This is a new beginning for the people of Israel!

God does not wait for us to have everything in order. God enters and changes our existence when God wills it. That is what we celebrate this Advent season, sisters and brothers! God has already entered this world, amid its chaos—our not having everything quite in order—many times. Ultimately, God entered our world in the human person of Jesus Christ, into a poor, chaotic, smelly scene, a nation ruled by foreign force.

Finally, Jesus promises us that he will enter our world again on the Last Day. All we can do to be ready for the Last Day, Jesus’ return in glory, is the same thing we can do be ready for this day, for the next day, the day after that, and so on: Remember how God has intervened in our world in the past. Remember that God did not wait until we had everything in order to bring peace, justice, order, comfort, mercy. May we be at peace, knowing and reflecting on this. Our time of Advent takes us back to those beginnings even as we anticipate with hope the Last Day, Jesus’ return in glory.

Today, in the midst of Advent, we remember the beginning of God’s comfort to Israel, still in exile, through the prophet Isaiah. We remember the preaching of John the Baptist, a message of repentance and hope. We pray with the Psalmist for a time when “justice and peace will kiss each other.” We remember 2 Peter’s exhortation to remain at peace. These have been our new beginnings in history, God entering our story when we most need God, with peace, justice, order, comfort, mercy. This is the “good news” our Scriptures proclaim today, “the good news of Jesus Christ, the Son of God.”