You know, this season of Advent is a season of waiting. It’s a season of waiting, but not a passive waiting but a more active type of waiting. It’s a time to wait, but yet to yearn. Let your hearts yearn for the Lord because it’s in the act of waiting that we hope, hope for something much greater in our lives, us as humans, are people of hope. Unlike animals, we can see, we can think of the future and then fearing it, we can change our actions. We are hopeful people and we need direction in our lives. There’s many things in our lives that we can hope for. We can hope for little ambitions in our life to succeed in life, to do better in our jobs, to get better grades. There’s things that we hope for in that way. Others, we have hope for our children. We live for that. And our children may learn from our own mistakes and suffering that they may live better lives than us. We also have hope for the world that maybe during our lives, our energy into the government and to technology and to other things like that that we can do better for the next generation. There is things that we hope for that we move forward towards. One of the reasons why we read the Old Testament and especially in today’s first reading, is that it points to us what we should hope for. In the first reading today is from the Book of the Prophet Baruch. And in this time, the Israelites have just been, they’ve been exiled from their home country and the Babylonian exile. And that is the lamb that they said that they’ve been promised by God. But here, Baruch, the prophet tells them, ‘Take off your robes of mourning and misery, put on the splendor of the glory from God, forever wrapped in the cloak of justice for God.’ He goes on and talks about the glory of God. He predicts that when he shows his people, the people of God, to not lose hope even in their times of suffering. It shows us that we should continue to have that hope. Advent is a preparing for the coming of the Christ, but there’s three parts to that. There’s a very first advent. The people back 2000 years ago were waiting for the coming of the Messiah the Christ. And so there was that Advent of waiting, yearning for the Lord to come save the people. There is for all of us, the second coming of Christ, the advent of the coming of Christ, the second coming, but then also there is the third Advent and that happens to us each and every day. The advent, the coming of Christ into your lives today, into your lives today. How do you have how do you prepare for the coming of Christ into your life today? Really, it’s a it’s a time to yearn. What do you yearn for? Because the fact is, is that when you let your hearts yearn, it expands, it has a deeper desire for what’s not there. It grows in that hope and that’s why this Advent is not a passive waiting, but a very much active waiting, a waiting for a waiting for, particularly for Christ.
In our second reading today from St. Paul, he calls us and he gives us this great line that ‘he is confident of this, that the one who began the good work, in you will continue to complete it until the day of Christ Jesus.’ In this writing of St. Paul. He’s actually imprisoned at this moment, but yet he still has the hope, even in his suffering. He writes this letter to the community, but he calls on to say that I am confident that God, who has began the great work and each one of you as Christians will continue to complete it until the day of Christ Jesus. This here should give each one of us hope, even us who might lack faith. Maybe you have children or family members away from the Church, this should give you hope because no matter what, the very fact that we’ve been grafted on to Christ by our very baptism, God does not leave us astray, but continues to come after us. He continues to come after us and then in our Gospel reading today, John the Baptist continues to preach the baptism, repentance, forgiveness of our sins. This Advent season also is a time of penance, and you might ask why is it that we look at our sin? Shouldn’t we just look at kind of the hope? But, you know, it’s in looking in our very sins that we have hope. It’s in looking at our faults, our sins that we realize we can’t do this on our own. It’s in looking in our very sins that we realized on our own we have fallen into sin. But then it leaves us open to now to the grace of God to come into our lives. When we confess our sins, we let go of it and when we’re more free of our sins, what else is there but more of an openness, a more of a hunger, more of our yearning for God’s love, God’s grace into our own lives? How do we make straight the way instead of Christ into our lives is really acknowledging our sins because it does open your heart out to do it?
John, the Baptist and Mary, during this Advent season, both give us the model of seeking and discerning Christ in our lives. There might not be where you might think it is, but is more subtle than that. Where is your hope in your life? Where do you find your hope? Do you find it in the grand things in our lives? Maybe in money, maybe in the tangible things that you can see, maybe insecurity? But here in the Gospels is telling us is not as clear as you might think that God comes slowly into our lives. It’s in yearning, it’s in the hungering for the Lord that we become more sensitive to Him in our lives. So continuing on this Advent season, will you let yourself hunger for the Lord? Will you let yourself yearn for Him? And as you come before the Lord today, where Christ is truly present before you, the Eucharist, let us continue to ask Him for the strength and the courage to open our hearts, to lay down our sins to him so as to be open to His grace in our lives. Amen.”