First Sunday in Advent ~ Our Tainted Offering

We all know that Lent is a penitential season, a time when Christians get in touch with their sins. But Advent has a penitential dimension, too. It is the season in which we prepare for the coming of the Savior, and we don't need a Savior unless we're deeply convinced there is something to be saved from.
 
The prophet Isaiah affirms this with a whole series of images describing our sinful condition. For example, he offers this wonderful and terrible line: “All our good deeds are like polluted rags; we have all withered like leaves, and our guilt carries us away like the wind.”
 
When we have become deeply aware of our sin, we know that we can cling to nothing in ourselves, that everything we offer is, to some degree, tainted and impure. We can’t show our cultural, professional, and personal accomplishments to God as though they are enough to save us.
 
But the moment we realize that fact, we move into the Advent spirit, desperately craving a Savior. We become ready for another of Isaiah’s images: “Yet, O Lord, you are our father; we are the clay and you are the potter: we are all the work of your hands.”
 
Today, let us prepare ourselves for the potter to come.

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​First Monday in Advent 
​The Unsatisfied Longing

I’ve always sensed that the Advent attitudes of waiting, expecting, hoping, and anticipating somehow speak to the deepest desires of our heart. That is probably because our whole existence here below is characterized precisely by these attitudes.
 
The world is filled with wonderful things and experiences—deep joys and satisfactions. But we all know that nothing here finally satisfies us.
 
No matter how much we know, we want to know more; no matter how much we love, we want greater love; no matter how much beauty we attain, we sense that there is a perfect beauty that we haven’t seen.
 
“O come O come, Emmanuel, and ransom captive Israel.” That great Advent hymn catches our ache. As we move into this season of anticipation, allow that ache to develop, preparing you for the satisfaction that will arrive only in Christ.

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First Friday in Advent
Active Waiting

As we’ve already seen, Advent is a time of waiting. But does this mean that we do nothing? That we sit like lumps? No. In fact, there is something very “active” about waiting.
 
Do you recall how lively and attentive you are when you are eagerly waiting for someone to arrive? When you watch for every car that comes by when you are waiting at the airport? Every sense strains to take in what is happening. Your mind is alive with expectation; your spirit is jumping.
 
This is what waiting means in the spiritual sense; this is the mood of Advent. We’re invited to actively wait, attuned to the coming Christ, looking for him in the Liturgy, the Scriptures, in prayer, and in all those around us who bear his image.

First Tuesday in Advent 
​I’m Waiting, I’m Waiting

Advent is the liturgical season of vigilance or, to put it more mundanely, of waiting. During the four weeks prior to Christmas, we light the candles of our Advent wreaths and put ourselves in the spiritual space of the Israelite people who, through many long centuries, waited for the coming of the Messiah.
 
In the wonderful avant-garde German movie “Run Lola Run,” a young woman finds herself in a terrible bind: she needs to gather an enormous amount of money in a ridiculously short period of time. Throughout the movie she runs and runs, desperately trying through her own frantic efforts to make things right, but nothing works. Finally, at the moment when she finds herself at the absolute limit of her powers, she slows to a trot, looks up to heaven and says, "Ich warte, ich warte" (“I'm waiting, I'm waiting”).
 
Though she does not explicitly address God, and though there has been no hint throughout the movie that Lola is the least bit religious, this is undoubtedly a prayer. And in the immediate wake of her edgy request a rather improbable solution to her problem presents itself.
 
Lola's prayer has always reminded me of Simone Weil, that wonderful and mysterious twentieth-century French mystic whose entire spirituality is predicated upon the power of waiting, or, in her language, of expectation. In prayer, Weil taught, we open our souls, expecting God to act even when the content of that expectation remains unclear.
 
In their curious vigilance and hoping against hope, both Lola and Simone are beautiful Advent figures. “I’m waiting, I’m waiting,” they both exclaim. And so are we.

First Wednesday in Advent
The Days are Coming

The earliest Christian text we possess is 1 Thessalonians, written sometime in the early fifties of the first century. Paul tells this little church, which he had founded, to be ready for the coming of the Savior: “Now may God himself, our Father, and our Lord Jesus direct our way to you, and may the Lord make you increase and abound in love for one another and for all, just as we have for you, so as to strengthen your hearts, to be blameless in holiness before our God and Father at the coming of our Lord Jesus with all his holy ones” (1 Th 3:11-13).
 
Paul had seen the risen Jesus, and everything else in his life fell away. Everything he had considered central—the law, his livelihood, his own tradition—now appeared to him as “rubbish.” Everything was re-arranged around this new massive reality of a crucified man having come back from the dead.
 
The Resurrection meant that God was truly the Lord of history, that all of the suffering, anxiety, and injustice of the world would be conquered and that a new, transformed life was held out to us. And so now the obligation was clear and simple: start living life in accord with the coming Christ.
 
Wait and watch for him, for a new world is undoubtedly coming. Paul almost certainly felt that this new world would fully emerge in his own lifetime, but though he was wrong about that detail, his recommendation is of permanent value.
 
As Paul tells the Thessalonians, in light of Christ, risen from the dead, the old world is marginalized, disempowered, and passing away. And therefore, those who live in accord with Christ are, in fact, on the winning side.

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Second Sunday in Advent ~ A New Beginning

Opening lines matter, especially when we’re dealing with a great writer. That’s true with the Gospel penned by a literary and theological genius whom we know simply as “Mark."
 

​Mark inaugurates his Gospel with this line: “The beginning of the gospel of Jesus Christ, the Son of God.”
 
Every word here matters, but especially the first one. It is a word fraught with significance for biblical people. Arche, in Mark’s Greek, is a translation of Bereshith, the opening word of the Bible—we translate it as, “In the beginning.” Arche means that a new creation, some new and unheard of order is emerging out of chaos. John uses the same word about twenty years later when he starts his Gospel with En arche: "In the beginning was the Word."
 
Everything Mark is about to tell in his story is about drawing new order out of chaos, about starting over, about a second chance and a new creation.
 
How and where does that new beginning commence? With the birth of a baby, in a small, forgotten outpost of the Roman Empire.

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Second Monday in Advent
Rethinking Our Lives

What will the Second Coming look like? It will involve a complete re-thinking and re-working of our lives. To find out why, let's turn to a lyrical passage from the second chapter of the book of the prophet Isaiah, a section of Scripture for which I have a special affection: “In days to come, the mountain of the Lord’s house shall be established as the highest mountain and raised above the hills” (Is 2:2)."
 
The mountain of the Lord’s house is Mount Zion, the place of the Temple. This means that in the age of the Messiah, the worship of the living God will be the center and summit of life, the good above any and all goods.
 
When we worship the true God, we become interiorly and exteriorly ordered; from adoration, right order flows. But how will this play in a society in which the vast majority of people have stopped worshipping God? How will it play in a world in which sex, pleasure, money, power, and honor are regularly worshipped?
 
Well, look at Isaiah's next line: “all nations shall stream toward it and say: ‘Come, let us climb the Lord’s mountain…that he may instruct us in his ways.’” We in our dysfunction like to set up boundaries, divisions, and separations. We like to keep our people in, and everybody else out. I don’t know how happy we’d be with all nations streaming together to one place, but this is precisely what God wants.
 
More to it, on this mountain, Isaiah tells us, we’re all going to take instruction from God. How do you think that will play in our self-asserting, self-esteem society, going its own way on its own terms? To say that Jesus is coming is to say that the Lord is coming, the Lord who teaches and governs and masters.
 
This is what the coming of Christ the Lord means. It will cause us to re-order our worship toward God, welcome all people into the Kingdom, and submit to the Lordship of Jesus.
 
Christ is coming soon, and with him this radical shift. Are you ready?

​Second Saturday in Advent
Images of Sinfulness

We all know that Lent is a penitential season, a time when Christians get in touch with their sins. But Advent, too, has a penitential dimension, and for a very good reason. Advent is the season during which we prepare ourselves for the coming of the Savior. But there is no point in having a Savior unless we are deeply convinced that there is something we need to be saved from.
 
This kind of awareness is at the core of the twelve-step process for those suffering from addictions—one is helpless, powerless, and has hit bottom.
 
The prophet Isaiah gives us a great focus for our meditation in Advent, for he offers us a whole series of images and pictures to describe our sinful condition. Remember, the Biblical authors, for the most part, were not systematic thinkers; they were poets and so they use poetic language. Take this wonderful and terrible line: “all our good deeds are like polluted rags; we have all withered like leaves, and our guilt carries us away like the wind” (Isaiah 65:5). When we have become deeply aware of our sin, we know that we can cling to nothing in ourselves, that everything we offer is, to some degree, tainted, impure. We can’t show our cultural, professional, and personal accomplishments to God as though they are enough to save us.
 
As Isaiah says, we are like withered leaves. God’s grace is the life-force and when we are divorced from it, our lives wither up. We become like the field of dry bones in Ezekiel or the Prodigal Son wandering in a land of famine. Here is where the law of the gift comes into play: when you are lifeless, make of your life a gift, and you will come back to life.
 
Can you identify with any, some, or all of these images? If so, that means you are moving into the Advent spirit, awaiting a Savior. As our most famous Advent song says, “O come, O come, Emmanuel and ransom captive Israel, that mourns in lonely exile here until the Son of God appear.”
 
When we are aware that we are waiting for the Son of God, then we are ready for the hope of one last image: “Yet, O Lord, you are our father; we are the clay and you are the potter: we are all the work of your hands.”
 
Your life is not about you. You are being shaped by a higher power for his purposes. You are waiting for the potter to do his work.

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Third Monday in Advent
Joseph's Wait

Joseph, the Old Testament wearer of the multi-colored coat, saw in a dream that he would be a powerful man and that his brothers would one day bow down to him in homage. But the realization of that dream came only after a long and terrible wait. He was sold into slavery by those very brothers, falsely accused of sexual misconduct, humiliated, and finally sent to prison for seven years.
 
Imagine what it must have been like to endure years in an ancient prison—the discomfort, the total lack of privacy, the terrible food in small amounts, sleeplessness, torture, and above all, hopelessness.
 
This is what Joseph had to wait through before his dream came true in a most unexpected way. We've seen already this Advent how waiting is an "active" discipline in the Christian life, but it can also be a difficult one.

Third Wednesday in Advent
Waiting in Prayer

What practically can we do during the season of waiting and vigil keeping? What are some practices that might incarnate for us the spirituality described here?
 
I strongly recommend the classically Catholic discipline of Eucharistic adoration. To spend a half-hour or an hour in the presence of the Lord is not to accomplish or achieve very much—it is not really "getting" anywhere—but it is a particularly rich form of spiritual waiting.
 
As you keep vigil before the Blessed Sacrament, bring to Christ some problem or dilemma that you have been fretting over, and then say, "Lord, I'm waiting for you to solve this, to show me the way out, the way forward. I've been running, planning, worrying, but now I'm going to let you work." Then, throughout Advent, watch attentively for signs.
 
Also, when you pray before the Eucharist, allow your desire for the things of God to intensify; allow your heart and soul to expand. Pray, "Lord, make me ready to receive the gifts you want to give," or even, "Lord Jesus, surprise me."

Third Tuesday in Advent
Ask for Joy

In his letter to the Philippians, a people with whom Paul felt a special closeness, he says, “Rejoice in the Lord always! I say it again, rejoice!” (Philippians 4:4). Notice first of all that this is a command: Do it. Rejoice. Joy comes when we actively do it. It is not a matter of sitting around waiting for some emotional state to come over you.
 
But what makes this possible? To rejoice, we must first put away selfishness and learn to love. When we find ourselves joyless or listless, often the best thing we can do is some concrete act of love.
 
What do I mean by that? Look to the Gospel of Luke: “Let the man with two coats give to him who has none. The man who has food should do the same” (Luke 3:11). It’s pretty clear and pretty basic: Give your life away to those in need.
 
Next Paul says, “Dismiss all anxiety from your minds. The Lord himself is near” (Philippians 4:5). One of the obstacles to joy is that we convince ourselves we are finally in charge of our lives. It is up to us to know everything, to control everything. And what does all of this frenzy produce? Usually more anxiety and less joy.
 
That's why Paul tells his beloved Philippians that the key to joy is turning your life over to God, trusting in him, having confidence that he will lead you.
 
This is the way of all of the saints. Listen again to Paul: “Present your needs to God in every form of prayer and in petitions full of gratitude” (Philippians 4:6). God delights in caring for us, and he wants us to ask for joy. Again and again in the New Testament we are urged to do exactly this. As a sign of our dependence upon God and a token of confidence, we are invited to ask and ask and ask.