***Please Note: This Homily was given off-the-cuff,
and the text below represents my best attempt reconstruct what was said***
Third Sunday of Advent
Most
people know that I like to prepare my homilies and have a text in front of me
when I preach. It helps keep me
from going off on tangents, which I like to do. I prepared my homily on Friday morning, and, as I stand here
now, the one I wrote doesn’t seem to work well.
Our
Mass today focuses us on joy. It’s
called Gaudete Sunday, which means
joy. We light the rose (not pink!)
candle, and I’m wearing a rose vestment to represent the fact that we’re more
than half way to our celebration of Christmas. Listen again to our first reading: “Shout for joy, O daughter Zion! Sing joyfully, O Israel!
[…] The Lord, your God…will
rejoice over you with gladness…he
will sing joyfully because of you as
one sings at festivals.” Our psalm
for today continues: “Cry out with joy
and gladness,” in the response, and the verse includes, “With joy you will draw water at the fountain
of salvation.” St.
Paul takes up the same word in our second reading from his letter to the
Philippians: “Rejoice in the Lord
always. I shall say it again: rejoice!”
And
yet, with all that has happened in the past week, we might wonder what there is
to rejoice about. This past week I
had the honor, though it was not an honor that I would have wanted, to
concelebrate the funeral of a 49-year-old man who succumbed to cancer, and who
leaves behind a widow and five children.
And then on Friday we learned about the shooting of young children in
Connecticut. Perhaps some of you
have had your own personal sorrows during this past week, and we’ve all
certainly had some in the past month or year.
So
at a time like this, how can the Church tell us to rejoice? How dare the Church tell us to
rejoice! But we do rejoice. We rejoice because we are closer to
celebrating the birth of Jesus, the light of the world. We rejoice because Christ is like the
light of that rose candle, in the midst of the darkness of the world, and in
the darkness with is so thick you can almost feel it, Jesus says to us, “Do not
be afraid. Follow me.” We rejoice because we are more than
halfway to our celebration of Christmas, and because with each passing day, we
are one day closer to Christ coming again, to bring the fullness of His
Kingdom, where there will be no more death, no more sorrow, no more tears, no
more sin.
We
rejoice even in the midst of death because of Jesus who said, “I am the
resurrection and the life. Whoever
believes in me will never die.” We rejoice because our God loves us so much that
He does not abandon us in our pain and our mourning. We rejoice because our God came among us and wept at the
death of His friend, Lazarus, just as He weeps now at the senseless
violence. We rejoice because our
God loves us so much that He gives Himself to us, to become one with us, in the
Eucharist, so that we can touch our God.
Our God loves us so much that He allows us to hear Him in His Word.
If
our joy is in this world, then it is not a time of rejoicing. But if our joy is in Jesus, than we can
rejoice. We rejoice because our
wait is almost over; our King is coming and will not delay; the day of our
salvation is at hand.