First Sunday in Advent - B: Are we patient enough

Friends

Peace be with you.

Once a week or once every other week, I have to drive to Dubuque for some errand. Sometimes it’s to pick up something from Dubuque Religious or the music store. I know I could ask any of you who have to make this journey daily to do it for me but, especially in this time of coronavirus, sometimes I just want to get out and drive. The trouble is that, I forget how frustrating it is to get from point A to point B in larger towns than ours. I get so frustrated while waiting at stoplights or waiting to get onto the roundabout for the one guy who seems to have timed it just right to prevent my entrance that I’ve started turning on a stopwatch. That way, when I rack up an hour of waiting at stop lights, I can send the city of Dubuque a bill for an hour of my wages, which, if I’ve done the math right, would mean they would owe our parishes about 30 cents. What frustrates me the most is when you are at one stop light on Dodge Street, just trying to get back into the peace of small town living, and you can see the light turn green but no one moves in front of you because the first car in your line wasn’t paying attention or it takes so long for the line to be able to move that, by the time you get to the light, it’s red again.

We live in a world of instant gratification. If we want sometime at 1:00 in the morning, we can just jump online and order it. If we want to know what time Mass is in the Cathedral in Charleston, South Carolina and whether we have to wear masks or make a reservation before we go, we search for it on the internet. When we want something, we want it now. Personally, I’ve found this particularly true since March. I can get really frustrated if things don’t happen as quickly or efficiently as I want it to. I’m guessing we all can.

This is the type of frustration the Prophet Isaiah is expressing today in our first reading. He pleads, “Return for the sake of your servant! Cut open the heavens and come down. Do mighty things that our ancestors didn’t see you do. There is none who calls upon your name, who rouses himself to cling to you: for you have hidden your face from us and have delivered us up to our guilt.” Can’t you just hear the frustration the Prophet is feeling, as he and his fellow Israelites are abandoned in Babylon? You can almost hear the stages of grief that he goes through in these couple of sentences, or at least the first four of them: denial, anger, bargaining, and depression. One has to wonder what would cause a Prophet to despair, a man whose job was to tell the people that they have gone too far from God and need to turn from their sin and return to God’s love. Has the pressure just become too much for him? Have the people become so comfortable away from Israel that they’ve forgotten the one true God completely and no longer care about the land he gave them, the very symbol of their salvation as a people? The message of Isaiah is clear, “Return! Return for the sake of your servants, the tribes of your heritage.” Come back God. We miss you. The longer you are gone, the less your people miss you. Come back before they don’t care about you at all.

The answer to this plea comes in the gospel, a gospel that is translated by the skeptic and sinner as, “God is coming! Look busy!”. For the faithful, it is much more profound and comforting than that. The gospel we hear isn’t a fear-based message. It is an incredibly hopeful message about patience in waiting. Jesus is explaining to us that this world is, in some ways, an exercise in waiting for something better. We are waiting for a place in which suffering, sickness, and death have all been destroyed. We are waiting for the fullness of hope, love, and faith of which this world is merely a foretaste.

Today, we begin this season of waiting, a season that tests our patience and forces us to sit still. Now, you may say, “Father, I hate to tell you this but we’ve been in a season of waiting since March. What do you mean we’re entering into it today?” But have we? We probably didn’t have the kind of Thanksgiving or Easter or Fourth of July we’d wish we could and I know many of you are probably feeling like this pandemic is never going to end. Still, there is much that stops us from having to wait in earnest. So, as we enter into this time of Advent, we may ask ourselves: are we willing to wait? For instance, are we willing, when we are home at night and don’t have work that absolutely has to get done, to shut off our TV, computer, smartphones, and tablets so we can spend time talking to the people in our bubble? Or only use them for connecting with someone and not for social media or a game or something else that is more an escape from waiting? Are we patient enough to take time each day to read the daily Mass readings and give ourselves time to reflect on how or whether we are becoming the kind of person we know God wants us to be?

In a few minutes, in the midst of the Our Father, I will pray, “Deliver us, Lord, we pray, from every evil, graciously grant peace in our days, that, by the help of your mercy, we may be always free from sin and safe from all distress, as we await the blessed hope and the coming of our Saviour, Jesus Christ.” How will our Advent waiting look more like waiting and less like filling the time with busy-ness so that we are filled with the blessed hope of the coming of our Savior at Christmas?

Christ the King - A The Shepherds and sheep are selfish so God’s taking the wheel.

Friends

Peace be with you.

A few of years ago, the country singer Carrie Underwood made a song famous with the title, “Jesus Take the Wheel”. It tells a simple story of a woman who narrowly avoids a car crash while her child is in the back seat. When her car goes into a skid on black ice she cries out “Jesus take the wheel”. After she finds herself safely on the side of the road, the woman stops to pray, attributing the miraculous save to divine intervention by a God who hasn’t given up on her even though she had given up on him amidst a difficult year.

I’m to a point in 2020 that, when something goes wrong, I mutter in frustration, “Great. That’s exactly what needed to happen.” No one is around when I say it and it generally means I’m just done. When I got home last night with my arms full of things from the store and my office and a plastic box fell on the ground that I was carrying into the rectory, I looked at it and said this phrase, as though I was chastising gladware for its insolence. I was late for a Zoom conference call with my friends and this was the last thing that needed to happen. In the midst of the call, I started whining about some of my frustrations and one of my friends said, “Hey, you’re doing a better job than my childhood priest. When our CCD teacher threatened to beat us and that he knew how to do it so it wouldn’t leave marks, when my mom complained to our priest about him, he told her that he was a good giver to the parish and he’d hate to upset him.” Jesus, take the wheel of this church with some, thankfully few, bad shepherds.

Our first reading is from the 34th chapter of the Book of the Prophet Ezekial. It’s not often that we can pretty clearly see the sources of where Jesus is getting his material, like where he learned the parables he shares. But, it appears this passage, and in particular the last sentence, “As for you, my sheep, says the Lord GOD, I will judge between one sheep and another, between rams and goats”, played an important role in the gospel for tonight.

There are two parts to this chapter and this verse is the division between them. Thankfully, the two parts are easy to summarize. First, God is going to take over being the shepherd because the ones he appointed have been shepherding themselves instead of shepherding the sheep. Even though there isn’t a lot of clarity as to what they have been doing, I think Jesus fills it in rather nicely. Instead of making sure the sheep had their basic needs met in terms of food, water, clothing, shelter, health, and companionship, the shepherds have been looking after themselves. They’re comfortable so what do they care about the sheep? So, God is going to take the shepherd’s crook and take over. But, there’s more context if we just read on. It says that the sheep have been scattered and the stronger sheep have done this, essentially, by picking on the weaker sheep. That’s why, by the way, in the passage we read, God gathers the lost, the strayed, and the sick but threatens to destroy the strong. From an agricultural perspective, this makes sense. You slaughter the strong sheep for the most and best meat not the sickly. But, from a theological point of view, it makes sense too. When there are lost people, especially formerly faithful who are lost, and we are comfortable being fed on the bread of life, we need to ask ourselves if we are the strong sheep ignoring the lost.

I’ve been inspired by those of you who bring communion to friends, neighbors, and family members who don’t feel comfortable coming to church during this pandemic. You are feeding the hungry and providing the shelter of Christ to those who feel exposed. Thank you for that. And, if anyone is wanting to get involved in this ministry, talk to me or Deacon Loras or Father Dave and we’ll be glad to commission you to do this. Whatever else we can do to reach out safely to those who are lost and strayed, especially if we’re the reason why, please don’t miss an opportunity to do so.

In the end, God has to take over because the people are picking on each other and the shepherds are doing nothing to stop it. The shepherds are valuing comfort and avoiding conflict instead of helping those who really need it. I know I can give into this same temptation, not wanting to upset people or intervene if I’m aware of a conflict between people. Maybe we all should be willing to give up our comfort and upset someone and let Jesus take the wheel.