Homily for the Second Sunday in Advent

SECOND SUNDAY IN ADVENT HOMILY Repent, the kingdom of heaven is at hand. When I was thinking about what I would talk about in my homily, what came to me was: my Dad, and Looney Tunes. You remember Looney Tunes: Bugs Bunny, Road Runner, Sylvester the Cat and Tweetie Bird. Invariably on those cartoons the bad guy would step off of a cliff and make that long fall to the valley below (whistling)—and then there’d be that little puff of smoke at the end. And my Dad? Well, he was the king of the bad "one-liners." I remember my brother and I watching cartoons and one of those falls happening, and my Dad saying: “you know, it’s not the fall that kills ‘em, it’s that sudden stop at the bottom.” Sounds right doesn’t it? But, “upon further review” as they say, we realize that it’s not. You see, he de-emphasized a crucial part of the process: the journey. The journey—the fall--is what took the character from safety to destruction; from life to apparent death. All too often in today’s world, people want to de-emphasize the journey. We have expressions like: “cut to the chase,” and “just give me the bottom line.” We have instant coffee; minute rice; drive-through windows at fast food places; microwave meals—the list goes on and on. We have turned into a nation of corner-cutters and short-cut takers. “I want what I want...and I want it NOW.” Remember the old expression: you have to take time to stop and smell the flowers? Well, today, I don’t think we take the time to realize there are even flowers there, much less smell them—that’s how big of a hurry we’re in to get from point A to point B with as little effort as possible. Unfortunately, the same is often true in our faith-lives. Many people want Christmas without Advent, Easter without Lent, happiness without sacrifice, peace without justice, heaven without conversion of heart. "I have a personal relationship with God, that’s all that matters, so let me live my life the way I want to—after all, it’s MY life. I’ll decide what’s good and bad, what’s right and wrong, to ME.” Under those circumstances, we are either de-emphasizing the journey, or we’re eliminating it all-together—neither of which is satisfactory to God. John the Baptist warned the people against this in the Gospel today when he said: “Repent, for the kingdom of heaven is at hand.” He told them that how they lived their lives was very important to their salvation. John’s references to the unquenchable fire, the ax, and the winnowing fan, all point to the separating of people that would accompany the coming of God’s reign. John hoped that the message he preached would shake up the lives of his audience so much that they would repent. His preaching in the desert, the clothes that he wore, and the food that he ate all called attention to the seriousness and urgency of his message. He didn’t say: Repent, the kingdom of heaven is coming at some point in the future a long time from now; he said the kingdom of heaven is at hand. Therefore, his listeners needed to reform their lives right away, and not just give lip-service to such a reform, or to merely follow the crowd and claim to be reforming because everyone else was doing it, like the Pharisees and Sadducees in today’s Gospel. John told them: “produce good fruit as evidence of your repentance.” They had to do something, to change the way they lived their lives; in other words, they had to “walk the walk,” not just “talk the talk.” By the same token, we today cannot simply claim “I’m saved” and get to heaven. Everything John told the people 2000 years ago applies to us today. And John’s words are later echoed by Jesus. Did Jesus say: just accept me as your personal savior and you’re in? No, he said: pick up your cross and follow me; deny your father and mother and even your very self... and follow me; sell all that you have and give the money to the poor, and then you can follow me. Jesus emphasized the journey—the journey he took first, and asks us to take by following in his footsteps. We must try to live our lives each and every day according to God’s will. But, because we are human, we will fall from time to time. In the cartoons, the fall always ends with that puff of smoke at the bottom. Once Wylie Coyote starts falling, he can’t stop. But WE can—and we must. We can call “time-out” if you will, right in the middle of our fall from grace, and not only stop our descent, but reverse our direction, and head back toward life—back toward God and our everlasting salvation. How? By repenting. We have the Sacrament of Reconciliation at our disposal. Our fall doesn’t have to have that sudden, final stop at the bottom—the one that could end with eternal separation from God. With the sacraments—especially Reconciliation and Eucharist—we can complete the journey we first began at Baptism. Repent, the kingdom of heaven is at hand. In this room, there is a former atheist. In this room, there is a man who was away from the Church for thirty years. In this room there are countless others of us who were, or are, falling from that cliff. We need to realize that, whenever this happens, we can turn our descent away from God into an ascent toward God and his everlasting kingdom. But it takes a journey. During our journey, when these falls occur, we have the Sacrament of Reconciliation to purify our souls, to help us get back on track. And we must not dwell on our failings in the past. The past is not what’s important...it’s the present, and the future. When we go to Reconciliation (Confession for us old folks) and our sins are forgiven by God working through the priest, they are forgotten. We shouldn’t remain fixated on them, or even think about them again. God has forgiven them and forgotten them; what’s important is the way we live our lives from the moment we walk out of that confessional. What’s important is that we, as the priest says as he’s giving ashes on Ash Wednesday, “turn away from sin and be faithful to the Gospel.” That was John’s message in the desert—Repent, the kingdom of heaven is at hand. The hardships we face with this conversion of heart may be many, but the rewards are... everlasting. And so today, we pray that this Advent we fix our eyes on God, so that our journey doesn’t end with a puff of smoke at the bottom of some cliff; but with a make-shift cradle, in an animal-filled stable, gazing adoringly upon our Savior, Jesus Christ.