What follows is cast as a homily for December 1, 2002, the First Sunday of Advent, Year B.

This homily, and similar efforts to follow, is an exploration of how the rites we do, as well as the scriptures we read, are integral in preaching. This effort should be considered, month by month, a work in progress that invites your comments (gabeandtheresa@gmail.com. In some congregations, these texts might make useful discussions for those involved in preparing the liturgy (the committee or board or whatever entity or individual takes that responsibility).

Gabe Huck

What does it mean to name this day the beginning of something called Advent? What does it mean that we call all the days until Christmas by this “Advent” name? Will this time called Advent matter to the way I think, work, speak, spend time these four weeks? Is Advent only a name we Catholics have for the way gift-giving and card-writing and various kinds of parties happen in the weeks before December 25?

It is hard to live by more than one calendar, though most of us have to try because we have a calendar of work and a calendar of school, or a calendar of extended family and a calendar of church and community involvements. And each household can have multiple calendars running at the same time: work schedules, vacations, school examinations, medical needs, finances coming in and going out, entertainment, just plain survival. On top of all that, here comes the church saying: Excuse me, but it’s Advent. Sure, we know it is the Christmas shopping season in some parts of life, and it is post-Thanksgiving recovery in other parts of life, and it is for some the stresses and joys of the extended family coming and going, and schools each have their break schedules to deal with, and what are our gift and our social obligations for the coming holidays? But excuse me, it is Advent.

So what? Am I supposed to walk differently? Get up at a different time? Eat different foods? Make decisions about my time or money different from the way I did last week? Am I supposed to hum different tunes, watch different shows on TV, volunteer for more things than I have time for? Am I supposed to be more kind to my spouse, children, co-workers, and boss? Am I supposed to do something really radical and just ignore all the Christmas windows, Christmas shows, Christmas pressure, Christmas parties — until Christmas actually gets here? Am I supposed to get one of those wreaths with four candles and try to remember to light it every night? Or one of those calendars that count down to Christmas?

These seasons of ours weren’t invented by scholars or committees then imposed on all the churches. They came from the ways Christians devised to deal with living in and loving the world, with living from their scriptures and knowing that these were not just some lovely stories about what happened a long time ago but were always, every time, about today. The seasons came from people’s own need for times that are more gentle and times that are more raucous, from coping with cold and heat, from food in abundance and food in scarcity. They came from the way it seemed right to open the Bible to some various stories every year at the same time. They came too from the flow of life in the community, especially the initiation of new members.

In time, the seasons took hold. It was good to do some things each year at the same time: to sing the same songs but only for these weeks each year, or to read these certain scriptures but only on these days, or to have the blessing of the seeds or the blessing of the harvest or of the fishing fleet, or to remember all the dead. Ways to do these things became more fixed, and the Christians of the generations that followed took them on.

How a community kept a given season, an Advent or a Lent, continued to evolve, but life changed too, and the church went to places where the rhythms of life were quite different. Some of the easily done parts of the seasons remained, but often they lost all that surrounded them and held them together and filled them with meaning, all that had once made an Advent or a Lent a whole way of life for the community during its December or during its springtime. Some Christians decided that these seasons like Advent and Lent now added nothing to being good Christians and they got rid of the seasons; other Christians tried to hold on.

We are some who held on, but where are we now? Do we call these weeks Advent because our grandparents and their grandparents and their grandparents called it Advent, even though we can’t quite figure out why or what it might mean to the twenty-first century person living in this culture?

Start with this: The ancestors who drew together certain scriptures and songs and customs and foods and ways of living in the weeks before Christmas were working with their culture and their needs, yes. How else could they work? But what they found was perhaps a way to express or confront a whole lot of big and specific things about living as a baptized person. What happened, for example, when they began to juxtapose scriptures that seem to be about those last things like death and judgment with scriptures about the coming of the messiah? Or to juxtapose beautiful images from Isaiah with the preaching of John and the stories from Luke or Matthew about what led up to the birth of Jesus? What happened when they chose to associate these weeks with certain tunes and words, sounds and melodies that were sounds and melodies of longing, incomplete sounds, and lyrics whose images came from all over scripture and beyond?

Here is what seems yet true: In the soul of this assembly, this congregation, this parish, as in the spirit of congregations all over this city and world, is something that is not complete and longs to be complete. In the soul of this assembly is something that will stay awake, will keep watch, if that is the exhortation we give to one another, because we know — we know — that things are terribly out of joint in the world where we spend our days, terribly out of joint despite all the good people doing good deeds. In the soul of this assembly is something that needs to cry out, but mostly does not, in the name of justice against injustice. Injustice big and injustice little. Like the way the tax system benefits the very rich and penalizes everybody else. The way the land and water that belong to us all and to God are dealt out to those who will exploit it for their own wealth. The way the prison population of our country has grown to be largest in the world, overall and as a percentage of the population. The way that schools get their money by bake sales and military contractors by taxes and the way teachers get no respect but the sports and entertainment figures are made into idols.

Each of us and all together can make a long list of what the soul of this community needs to cry out about, but does not, what the soul of this community longs for. And that is getting close to what Advent is. The poet e.e. cummings said it concisely if curiously:

King Christ this world is all aleak;
and lifepreservers there are none*

That could be Advent in two lines.

King Christ this world is all aleak;
and life preservers there are none

Isaiah said: “[W]e have all withered like leaves, / and our guilt carries us away like the wind. / There is none who calls upon your name, / who rouses himself to cling to you; / For you have hidden your face from us” (Isaiah 64:5–6).

You have hidden your face, O God. And so we will have an Advent here and that means that we shall follow you, God, into your hiding place. We shall dwell in the dark with you. We shall stay awake, count the stars. In the beautiful, embracing dark of December we shall consider these things that have dried up our lives like leaves of last summer’s trees. And we’ll sing, moan some, ponder a few lovely texts of scripture, and really not worry much about Christmas. It will come — to this assembly, to our households — in its own good time.

One of our church’s most ancient poems for this season is the Conditor alme siderum, “Creator of the stars of night.” One of the verses reads:

As this old world comes on toward night,
you come, but not in glory bright;
as groom to bride, as bride to groom,
the wedding chamber, Mary’s womb.

Advent is not a silver lining season. That’s not how images of light and dark are used by us this season. Advent is a dark womb season in a wedding season. Advent takes the darkness and loves it, knows it is good. In the darkness, seeking God’s hidden face, we know the harshness of the world — not so much to us perhaps, but to so many, many, many. And day by day we see how easily we are distracted from this harshness of the world to our brothers and sisters, and we get busy with the odds and ends that, we know it well, will dump us on Christmas’s doorstep and we’ll never know where Advent went. It isn’t easy to submit to Advent and realize that it is we who “mourn in lonely exile here,” we who need to be ransomed. Us? We’re number one. Secure. Rich. In charge, more or less of our lives, more or less of the world. So we’re not lonely. We’re not in exile.

The scriptures through these weeks will be like promises — promises that only exiles and needy can hear. We won’t hear except by slipping quietly into Advent today — and together. We have to practice the art of listening for promises, listening like those who depend on God and God’s promises. We need Advent because most of us don’t do well at all at depending on God’s promises. We depend on the economy, the job, the routine, the family maybe, and for it all we depend — it has never been more clear — on the poor of the world and on the weapons we wield. But where else can we be secure? Oh, that is the question Advent is truly all about.

* from “Jehovah buried, Satan dead” in E.E. Cummings Complete Poems 1913–1962, ©1972 Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, Inc.

Originally written for Celebration, the worship and preaching resource of the National Catholic Reporter (visit their Web site at www.celebrationpublications.org).

Originally written for Celebration, the worship and preaching resource of the National Catholic Reporter (visit their Web site at www.celebrationpublications.org).

What follows is a homily for Sunday, December 14, 2003. This is the Third Sunday of Advent, Year C. It might be adapted to any of the first three Sundays of Advent. The focus of the homily is the juxtaposition of Advent itself, the scriptures of this particular Sunday, and the fortieth anniversary of the Constitution on the Sacred Liturgy, the first document of Vatican II. Like other homilies in this series, it attempts to explore what mystagogical preaching might sound like. The homily of December 2002 would also be useful this year as an example of opening up the meaning of Advent within the assembly.

Gabe Huck

What does it mean when someone tells me over and over, “Don’t be afraid!”? These Advent Sundays in the third year of our three-year cycle of scripture readings have many variations on that simple command: Do not be afraid. At the beginning of Advent, we had Jeremiah talking about days to come when the people will at last live in safety, without fear. We had the letter to the church at Thessalonica talking about strength for our hearts, and the gospel text where Jesus talks of terror to come, people actually dying of fright. Today the prophet Zephaniah says, “Fear not, be not discouraged.” And Paul writes, “Have no anxiety.” Instead, he tells the church at Philippi , be filled with thanks, and then fear will give way to a peace that surpasses all understanding. Note well: This peace will surpass all understanding.

The exhortation “Do not be afraid!” binds together Advent and Christmas. The angel Gabriel says this to Zechariah and to Mary and to Joseph. Angels say the same to the shepherds. And thus do Advent and Christmas transcend so many of the things that would preoccupy our hearts and heads these days. “Do not be afraid. Fear not.” These words make a home for us — for who needs to hear “Do not be afraid” except those who are afraid?

Advent expects us to be afraid. The scriptures and gospels expect it. They know this life of ours, they know what humans are always doing to one another. O come, Emmanuel. Come, Lord Jesus, come quickly. These are the songs and cries of honest hearts in fearful times. We are the church, and it is our business to keep our eyes fixed on the world — and you can’t do that without being afraid. Even the condition of our sad, hobbled institutional church is frightening. So Advent brings this tension. Look, Advent says, look clear-eyed at the world, at the church. And when we do, we tremble at what is happening. Listen, Advent says, listen to God’s promise. God calls you from fear to — what? Some would say to foolishness, to believing the promise, to lives built not on fear but on the sturdy word of our God.

After what our church and our world have been like these recent years, Advent gives us room and time to stop rushing about and to ask: From what are we running? What do we fear? What do we fear about our church, what do we fear about our world, our community, our household, ourselves? Those who know their fears can then ponder the hard words of Advent and of Christmas: Do not be afraid. Baptized people live in this tension of fear and promise.

Before we leave this year 2003, we can ponder our fear and God’s promise by summoning two memories. Just days ago we marked the fortieth anniversary of a great turning point in our church. On December 4, 1963 , the bishops of the world approved the document called Sacrosanctum Concilium. This was the first work of the Second Vatican Council, and it is usually called The Constitution on the Sacred Liturgy. Some of us remember that day. The New York Times not only made the liturgy document front-page news, it printed the English translation in its entirety. The vote in the Council had been overwhelming (only four of the world’s bishops opposed the final document).

But most of us here this morning don’t remember, so the story needs to be told. When Pius XII died in 1958, the cardinals choose an old man to be pope. Angelo Roncalli was already in his late seventies. After five or so sleepy years, they thought, we can gather again and it will be clearer who should be our next long-lived pope. They were right about the five or six years, but wrong about everything else. Angelo Roncalli, now John XXIII, called a Council, the first in nearly a century. He stood up to the church bureaucracy that wanted no part in any such meeting. He called the naysayers “prophets of gloom,” and he called for the stuffy church not to be afraid, but to open its windows to the fresh breeze of the Holy Spirit. The world’s bishops assembled, unsure of what they might do. For starters, the bureaucrats — who wanted this whole Council business over with quickly — gave them a blah-blah document on the liturgy that put them all to sleep. But somehow the window was open. They rejected the document in the fall of 1962 and by December of 1963 they had, with expert help, crafted a new document whose vision would be the work of several generations to come.

By the time this Constitution on the Sacred Liturgy was finished, it called for some of the reforms that we’ve all grown up with, such as liturgy in our own languages, but beyond this, it called for a liturgy that was the work of the people themselves. It said every baptized person had the duty and had the right — both! — to do this liturgy fully, consciously, actively. It said that when people did the liturgy in this way, the whole assembled church doing its hard work, then their liturgy would, little by little, put a Christian shape to their lives. It called for all the rites of the church and the calendar of the church to be reformed according to these principles.

By the time the bishops of the world said their “yes” to this, good Pope John was dead. He had died in June of 1963. Shortly before his death he wrote to a friend: “By God’s grace, I haven’t behaved badly: so, not a day more. If the Lord wants me to remain a little longer, well and good, otherwise — we’re off.” Perhaps only a person with such lightness of heart could have borne the turmoil and the disdain of those who took their power in the church so seriously. Pope John was one who knew there was much to fear, and he looked those fears in the face because he believed God’s promise.

So it was that two months before he died, John XXIII had done a final beautiful deed for us, and that is the other fortieth anniversary we have celebrated this year of 2003. In April, he wrote a letter to the whole world, an encyclical called Pacem in Terris, Peace on Earth. In a way, these two deeds, the liturgy constitution and John’s last encyclical, set the path for our generations of Catholics.

Pacem in Terris did many things. It was 1963, the heart of the cold war, the age of nuclear standoff, the world dominated by two superpowers who played out their rivalry in various wars around the world. Catholics in the United States had come more and more to equate their religion with their anti-communist patriotism. John XXIII looked hard at the conflicts, at the injustices that thrived at the heart of one system and those that thrived at the heart of the other, at the injustices suffered by the poor of the world while the rich grew richer and the armaments of the powers grew more and more fearsome. This is the Advent wonder of John XXIII. He saw all there was to fear and he knew how real and awful it was. But he did not keep silent, and when he spoke, he did not speak as a prophet of gloom. He said: Face up to what is unjust in your systems of power, in your economies, in your treatment of the world’s poor. He said that it will be immensely difficult to change — change ourselves, change our economies, change our relations — but we have to do it.

That is the Advent word of promise, God’s promise and our own. Here, for example, is what John XXIII wrote forty years ago about the relations of sovereign nations:

There has been a great increase in the circulation of goods, of ideas and of persons from one country to another, so that relations have become closer between individuals, families, and the intermediate associations belonging to different political communities, and between the public authorities of those communities. At the same time the interdependence of national economies has grown deeper, one becoming progressively more closely related to the other, so that they become, as it were, integral parts of the one world economy. Likewise the social progress, order, security, and peace of each country are necessarily connected with the social progress, order, security, and peace of all other countries (#130).

He calls for a worldwide public authority that seeks the universal common good in concrete form. He says that such an authority must be set up by common accord and not imposed by force, and that the purpose of this world authority must be “to create, on a world basis, an environment in which the public authorities of each political community, its citizens and intermediate associates can carry out their tasks, fulfill their duties and exercise their rights with greater security” (#137). He praises the United Nations as the bare beginning of this.

We are forty years down the path. Forty Advents away from John XXIII and these two documents. This Advent summons us Catholics to face up to the fears we have and should have, to the promises we are baptized into. The documents of 1963 put direction on our age. The Constitution on the Sacred Liturgy said we had to get this Sunday eucharistic deed into our hearts and souls, our muscles and our bones. We had to come together here and together work hard that God’s word might be heard and pondered by the church, by us; work hard that the needs and troubles of the world might here be clearly seen and loudly voiced in homily and intercession; work hard that our hearts be shaped by our giving of thanks to God for all, doing so in Jesus who grappled to the death with the powers of greed and destruction and who is each Sunday our paschal meal.

Doing this Sunday by Sunday, what kind of a people shall we be? A fearless people? Hardly. Perhaps a people with the wisdom to fear what is indeed fearful. We should fear the gap that separates the way we few live from the way the many of the world live. We should fear a nation, our own, that has rejected Pacem in Terris for Pax Americana, and a politics that sees fear as a way of control and manipulation. Doing what we do here Sunday by Sunday, doing it seriously, will ready us to hear: “Do not be afraid.” That is what John XXIII heard. There is much to fear; know that. But, knowing that, believe what God is doing with us.

What follows is a homily for Sunday, December 14, 2003. This is the Third Sunday of Advent, Year C. It might be adapted to any of the first three Sundays of Advent. The focus of the homily is the juxtaposition of Advent itself, the scriptures of this particular Sunday, and the fortieth anniversary of the Constitution on the Sacred Liturgy, the first document of Vatican II. Like other homilies in this series, it attempts to explore what mystagogical preaching might sound like. The homily of December 2002 would also be useful this year as an example of opening up the meaning of Advent within the assembly.

What does it mean when someone tells me over and over, “Don’t be afraid!”? These Advent Sundays in the third year of our three-year cycle of scripture readings have many variations on that simple command: Do not be afraid. At the beginning of Advent, we had Jeremiah talking about days to come when the people will at last live in safety, without fear. We had the letter to the church at Thessalonica talking about strength for our hearts, and the gospel text where Jesus talks of terror to come, people actually dying of fright. Today the prophet Zephaniah says, “Fear not, be not discouraged.” And Paul writes, “Have no anxiety.” Instead, he tells the church at Philippi , be filled with thanks, and then fear will give way to a peace that surpasses all understanding. Note well: This peace will surpass all understanding.

The exhortation “Do not be afraid!” binds together Advent and Christmas. The angel Gabriel says this to Zechariah and to Mary and to Joseph. Angels say the same to the shepherds. And thus do Advent and Christmas transcend so many of the things that would preoccupy our hearts and heads these days. “Do not be afraid. Fear not.” These words make a home for us — for who needs to hear “Do not be afraid” except those who are afraid?

Advent expects us to be afraid. The scriptures and gospels expect it. They know this life of ours, they know what humans are always doing to one another. O come, Emmanuel. Come, Lord Jesus, come quickly. These are the songs and cries of honest hearts in fearful times. We are the church, and it is our business to keep our eyes fixed on the world — and you can’t do that without being afraid. Even the condition of our sad, hobbled institutional church is frightening. So Advent brings this tension. Look, Advent says, look clear-eyed at the world, at the church. And when we do, we tremble at what is happening. Listen, Advent says, listen to God’s promise. God calls you from fear to — what? Some would say to foolishness, to believing the promise, to lives built not on fear but on the sturdy word of our God.

After what our church and our world have been like these recent years, Advent gives us room and time to stop rushing about and to ask: From what are we running? What do we fear? What do we fear about our church, what do we fear about our world, our community, our household, ourselves? Those who know their fears can then ponder the hard words of Advent and of Christmas: Do not be afraid. Baptized people live in this tension of fear and promise.

Before we leave this year 2003, we can ponder our fear and God’s promise by summoning two memories. Just days ago we marked the fortieth anniversary of a great turning point in our church. On December 4, 1963 , the bishops of the world approved the document called Sacrosanctum Concilium. This was the first work of the Second Vatican Council, and it is usually called The Constitution on the Sacred Liturgy. Some of us remember that day. The New York Times not only made the liturgy document front-page news, it printed the English translation in its entirety. The vote in the Council had been overwhelming (only four of the world’s bishops opposed the final document).

But most of us here this morning don’t remember, so the story needs to be told. When Pius XII died in 1958, the cardinals choose an old man to be pope. Angelo Roncalli was already in his late seventies. After five or so sleepy years, they thought, we can gather again and it will be clearer who should be our next long-lived pope. They were right about the five or six years, but wrong about everything else. Angelo Roncalli, now John XXIII, called a Council, the first in nearly a century. He stood up to the church bureaucracy that wanted no part in any such meeting. He called the naysayers “prophets of gloom,” and he called for the stuffy church not to be afraid, but to open its windows to the fresh breeze of the Holy Spirit. The world’s bishops assembled, unsure of what they might do. For starters, the bureaucrats — who wanted this whole Council business over with quickly — gave them a blah-blah document on the liturgy that put them all to sleep. But somehow the window was open. They rejected the document in the fall of 1962 and by December of 1963 they had, with expert help, crafted a new document whose vision would be the work of several generations to come.

By the time this Constitution on the Sacred Liturgy was finished, it called for some of the reforms that we’ve all grown up with, such as liturgy in our own languages, but beyond this, it called for a liturgy that was the work of the people themselves. It said every baptized person had the duty and had the right — both! — to do this liturgy fully, consciously, actively. It said that when people did the liturgy in this way, the whole assembled church doing its hard work, then their liturgy would, little by little, put a Christian shape to their lives. It called for all the rites of the church and the calendar of the church to be reformed according to these principles.

By the time the bishops of the world said their “yes” to this, good Pope John was dead. He had died in June of 1963. Shortly before his death he wrote to a friend: “By God’s grace, I haven’t behaved badly: so, not a day more. If the Lord wants me to remain a little longer, well and good, otherwise — we’re off.” Perhaps only a person with such lightness of heart could have borne the turmoil and the disdain of those who took their power in the church so seriously. Pope John was one who knew there was much to fear, and he looked those fears in the face because he believed God’s promise.

So it was that two months before he died, John XXIII had done a final beautiful deed for us, and that is the other fortieth anniversary we have celebrated this year of 2003. In April, he wrote a letter to the whole world, an encyclical called Pacem in Terris, Peace on Earth. In a way, these two deeds, the liturgy constitution and John’s last encyclical, set the path for our generations of Catholics.

Pacem in Terris did many things. It was 1963, the heart of the cold war, the age of nuclear standoff, the world dominated by two superpowers who played out their rivalry in various wars around the world. Catholics in the United States had come more and more to equate their religion with their anti-communist patriotism. John XXIII looked hard at the conflicts, at the injustices that thrived at the heart of one system and those that thrived at the heart of the other, at the injustices suffered by the poor of the world while the rich grew richer and the armaments of the powers grew more and more fearsome. This is the Advent wonder of John XXIII. He saw all there was to fear and he knew how real and awful it was. But he did not keep silent, and when he spoke, he did not speak as a prophet of gloom. He said: Face up to what is unjust in your systems of power, in your economies, in your treatment of the world’s poor. He said that it will be immensely difficult to change — change ourselves, change our economies, change our relations — but we have to do it.

That is the Advent word of promise, God’s promise and our own. Here, for example, is what John XXIII wrote forty years ago about the relations of sovereign nations:

There has been a great increase in the circulation of goods, of ideas and of persons from one country to another, so that relations have become closer between individuals, families, and the intermediate associations belonging to different political communities, and between the public authorities of those communities. At the same time the interdependence of national economies has grown deeper, one becoming progressively more closely related to the other, so that they become, as it were, integral parts of the one world economy. Likewise the social progress, order, security, and peace of each country are necessarily connected with the social progress, order, security, and peace of all other countries (#130).

He calls for a worldwide public authority that seeks the universal common good in concrete form. He says that such an authority must be set up by common accord and not imposed by force, and that the purpose of this world authority must be “to create, on a world basis, an environment in which the public authorities of each political community, its citizens and intermediate associates can carry out their tasks, fulfill their duties and exercise their rights with greater security” (#137). He praises the United Nations as the bare beginning of this.

We are forty years down the path. Forty Advents away from John XXIII and these two documents. This Advent summons us Catholics to face up to the fears we have and should have, to the promises we are baptized into. The documents of 1963 put direction on our age. The Constitution on the Sacred Liturgy said we had to get this Sunday eucharistic deed into our hearts and souls, our muscles and our bones. We had to come together here and together work hard that God’s word might be heard and pondered by the church, by us; work hard that the needs and troubles of the world might here be clearly seen and loudly voiced in homily and intercession; work hard that our hearts be shaped by our giving of thanks to God for all, doing so in Jesus who grappled to the death with the powers of greed and destruction and who is each Sunday our paschal meal.

Doing this Sunday by Sunday, what kind of a people shall we be? A fearless people? Hardly. Perhaps a people with the wisdom to fear what is indeed fearful. We should fear the gap that separates the way we few live from the way the many of the world live. We should fear a nation, our own, that has rejected Pacem in Terris for Pax Americana, and a politics that sees fear as a way of control and manipulation. Doing what we do here Sunday by Sunday, doing it seriously, will ready us to hear: “Do not be afraid.” That is what John XXIII heard. There is much to fear; know that. But, knowing that, believe what God is doing with us.

Copyright © Gabe Huck. Used by permission.

Originally written for Celebration, the worship and preaching resource of the National Catholic Reporter (visit their Web site at www.celebrationpublications.org).