A three-year-old was helping his mother unpack their nativity set. He announced each piece as he unwrapped it from the tissue paper. “Here’s the donkey!” he said. “Here’s a king,” and “Here’s a camel!”
When he finally got to a one-piece tiny infant molded to his crib, he proclaimed, “Here’s baby Jesus in his car seat!”
This Sunday we have the voices of Advent. A voice of one crying out in the desert (vox clamantis in deserto). The purpose of the voice is awareness of the Word or message of God.
The first advent voice says “Prepare the way of the Lord.”
Frank kept the strangest of Christmas lists. He called it "My Refinement List." He first made one out when he was 45 years old. He worked at it faithfully for 29 years. He was 74 and a grandfather. In all that time it had remained a secret, but now his youngest grandchild discovered his list, and looked Grandpa Frank dead in the eye, and said, "What's this?"
"A special Christmas list," answered Frank, a bit vaguely.
"Is it what you want for Christmas?" asked the boy.
"It's not that kind of a list," answered Frank.
"Is it what you're going to give other people?" the boy asked.
"Well, no, it's not that kind of a list either." Then groping for words to explain something he felt was important and wanted to pass on, Frank spoke tenderly to the boy. "A few weeks before Christmas I just write down the things I'd like God to help me get rid of, like selfishness, or being impatient with your grandmother, or wanting too many things for myself. I figure the more I get rid of things like that, the more I'll be able to rejoice in the good things God gives us all."1
The Second Advent voice is “make straight his paths.”
A voice of accountability. Not the domestication of religion, but rather a kick in the proverbial behind, like the plea “straighten me out, Lord!”
John the Baptist lived on the wild side after he had likely left the Essene Qumran community, a Jewish sect who deposited the Dead Sea Scrolls in caves surrounding the site. John was discharged from that community to pursue his vocation as a national-level prophet.
In her novel Animal Dreams, Barbara Kingsolver introduces us to two sisters - Codi and Hallie - whose mother died in childbirth and who were raised by a cold and autocratic father.
The two sisters react very differently to the emotional impoverishment of their childhood. Codi becomes a drifter, unable to find roots in work or love or relationship - suspicious of the world - scared of passion - cynical about this crapshoot called life.
But Hallie makes a different choice. Somehow she is able to embrace life and discover passion and decide in the unfinished world of which she is a part that she can and must make a difference. She ends up going to Central America as an agricultural specialist - determined to lose her life in order to find it. In a letter to her mystified sister, Hallie writes:
Codi, here's what I've decided: the least you can do is to figure out what you hope for. And the most you can do is live inside that hope. Not admire it from a distance but live under its roof ... Codi, I wish you knew how to squander yourself (for hope).2
The third advent voice word is comfort-
Comfort food by John the Baptist? Desert peoples, now and then do eat grasshoppers and other insects for protein. In fact, insects are commercially raised and sold on-line, and in markets in Mexico and parts of South America. And raw honey is rich in vitamin C.
Our First Reading from Isaiah 40 offers us Advent Comfort: “Comfort, give comfort to my people, says your God.
Speak tenderly to Jerusalem.”
It’s a consoling voice saying that the Israelite’s guilt is expiated, gone, after they had forsaken God when the Babylonian Army destroyed Jerusalem, and the people were marched off to Babylon in exile. In the course of time, the exiles married, built homes, had children and settled into the new strange land. The Prophet Jeremiah told them they would be there for 70 years. But, now they could go home.
God cares about a broken world. Isaiah was speaking to a broken nation.3
God cares about you, once you confess a sin, any sin, in the Sacrament of reconciliation, you receive God’s comfort and reclaims us as His own people. What good news of comfort and joy.
As an action item, God also speaks of blessings just outside our comfort zone and then asks us to reach out and get them.
E.g. hearing prolife voices crying out in the desert.
Elizabeth gave birth to the miracle child at an old age, John the Baptist. In Matthew 11:11, Jesus says that among those born, no one is greater than John the Baptist.”
Jesus himself was also “unexpected” and came from an unplanned pregnancy.
This past Veterans Day, a parish pro-lifer gathered twenty of us outside the Alexandria Detention Center and Federal facility praying for the rescuers detained there. The jail is sound proof, but the outside of the facility is located just 20 yards from the Capital Beltway where we prayed. The voices of prayers for life mixed-in with traffic sounds were still full of hope, the realization of Psalm 72:2, which says that good people shall be encouraged, advanced, and multiplied: “Justice shall flourish in His time, and fullness of peace forever.”
A cry to God never falls on deaf ears.
Christmas is on a Monday this year, and almost here. Josh Groban’s best all-time version of the Christmas carol, “O Holy Night,” includes the verse, “Fall on your knees; O hear the Angel voices!”
If you’re willing to fall on your knees in Adoration to Christ, we’ll hear the angel voices to live for Him and how to squander ourselves for hope.
1. Ron Lavin, Preparing the Way, Sermons.com
2. Barbara Kingsolver, Animal Dreams (Boston: G. K. Hall and Co., 1991), p. 299.
3. King Duncan, Blue Christmas, Sermons.com
