Second Sunday of Advent
When I was a child in the 1960s and 1970s, growing up in a family, school, and church environment that was wonderfully saturated with Roman Catholic beliefs and cultural traditions, my favorite liturgical season of the church year was – and, in fact, still is – this beautiful season of Advent.
In terms of its liturgical meaning, Advent (from the Latin word adventus which means “arrival” or “coming”) is a season of the church year that begins on the fourth Sunday before Christmas each year and celebrates both the coming (or birth) of Jesus as a child in Bethlehem over 2000 years ago and the expectation that we Christians have that Christ will come again at the end of all time. To this I would add a third meaning for this liturgical season, one that we especially emphasized in my own family of seven siblings: the coming of Jesus into our hearts each Christmas season.
As a typically large Midwestern, Irish/German Catholic family with 8 children, we celebrated Advent by attending Mass each Sunday (and also several times during the week at Catholic school) and also by opening a new “window” each evening on our family Advent Calendar. Another important spiritual practice for us as a family was the custom of picking Advent Angels out of a hat on the First Sunday of Advent. We did this in secret with the goal that we would be especially kind to our Advent Angel throughout the Advent season and then announce who our Advent Angel was when we exchanged presents with them on Christmas Eve.
For me, then and now, Advent is a particularly special season of the church year that calls me to anticipate, to celebrate, and to examine critically how I live my life as a follower of Christ in the Catholic tradition.
In the readings for this Second Sunday of Advent we hear about the end times in ways that strike me as particularly timely given my own location as a citizen in today’s United States: as we live through a global pandemic that killed so many people; as we awaken to an ever-deepening awareness of the white racism that is revealed in the daily and ongoing violence visited upon Black and Brown bodies in our country; in the deep political divides that we Americans experience and, indeed, foment; and, for me here in California, a fire season that has begun early this year and already destroyed so many lives and so much property. When the Second Letter of Peter speaks about the heavens being “dissolved in flames and the elements melted in fire,” I need only look outside my windows to see yet another day of acrid smoke that makes breathing for each one of us a chore and, for some, a life-threatening experience.
And yet, and yet...
The readings for this Sunday also call us to maintain hope: the hope that Jesus has brought to the world as a Good Shepherd who, in the words of the prophet Isaiah, lovingly feeds his flock and gathers the lambs into his arms. This is the Sunday when we celebrate the wild preacher John the Baptist whose voice cried out in the wilderness and called upon Israel – and calls upon us – to “prepare the way of the Lord.”
When I think about my own identity as a queer Catholic cis man, I marvel at the ways in which I can both love both my religious identity and honor myself as a queer person.
While I celebrate the fact that I was raised in a Christian tradition that values so profoundly the Incarnation of the Divine into time and space and makes this real through the gift of the Sacraments, I also mourn the reality that too many clerical authorities (and others) in my church have served as agents of hate and oppression for women, queer folk, and countless others over the course of many centuries.
While I marvel at the ability of my Catholic tradition to encompass such a rich diversity of human beings from so many cultures, I also believe that we have never yet lived into the call of the Second Vatican Council to renew our church by entering into dialogue with “the world” and listening ever more carefully to the Gospel call to justice and equity for all people.
And, while I occupy a decidedly liminal space of being a Catholic who is both an “insider” and “outsider” within the tradition, I try to live out my own vocation as a follower of Jesus who is dedicated to working for a world of equality for everyone, regardless of race, ethnicity, religious belief, gender identity, sexual orientation, age, socio-economic status, age – and so many more aspects of our unique identities as children of God, aspects that bring such rich color to the beautiful rainbow that the Divine has created in all of creation.
This Second Sunday of Advent may frighten us with messages of terror but those messages are overshadowed by the overwhelming messages of comfort that remind us of the loving faithfulness of our God. In the words of this Sunday’s Responsorial Psalm, let us join together, as members of one human family, and ask our Divine Companion, the God-Who-Is-Always-With-Us, to show us their kindness and to grant us the gift of their everlasting salvation.
Come, Lord Jesus, Come!
