Homily for the First Sunday of Advent 2021

Homily preached by Fr Nicholas King SJ

We live in a strange world, where we have at times a desperate need for signposts. Covid, climate change, the political games that our leaders play. And your football team lost yesterday. Advent offers a few signposts, to find our way through whatever are the horrors that afflict us.

Message of the readings: the world can seem impossibly awful & yet in the awfulness we are given a timely reminder that God is at work.

1 st Reading: Jeremiah talking to the people of Israel, exiled to Babylon, Jerusalem ravaged, God’s Temple destroyed, the monarchy butchered (so they thought that God had abandoned all his promises); against this background, and unusually for Jeremiah, a message of hope: “the days are coming, says the Lord, and I shall raise up the good thing which I promised”. Then he offers a farming metaphor: “I shall raise up a branch of righteousness for David”; so Israel’s history has not come to an end, even though, as he puts it, their sinful behaviour had polluted the land. In just the same way, we may be said to have polluted our planet with our sinful behaviour; but still there is hope: “in those days Judah shall be saved, and Jerusalem shall be established in safety”. God, you see, is at work in even the most unsatisfactory situation (Then the reading ends with ‘Jerusalem will be called “The Lord is my righteousness”’ And that is the clue, of course: what matters is that we should be able to find out where God is in the story, and what difference that makes.

Psalm: “way” or “path” (x 6): a lament, so things are awful, but God is at work: “all the paths of the Lord are love and truth; the Lord guides them on the way”. Still true today (Synod). The point of all this is that God has not ceased to guide his church, and all is going to be well.

1 Thess: (earliest NT doc); things have been going wrong up there in Thessalonica: N - “overflowing” love: “new progress”, follow Jesus’ commands Paul can hardly write a sentence w. out mentioning his beloved Jesus; a good model for us, however bad things may be. We cannot go astray if Jesus is at the centre of everything.

Gospel: the reading is resolutely facing the end-time, and a world that is falling apart: “signs in sun, moon, stars, on the land a confusion of nations… People dying from fear”. The vision is a grim one, and many people today, facing Brexit and its consequences, and Covid and its consequences, and the damage that we have done to our planet whose consequences cannot yet be seen properly. BUT in the end, he says, they will K that God is at work: “they shall see the SoM coming in a cloud w. great glory”. And how are we to react? “When these things happen, stand erect, lift up yr heads, bcs liberation is near at hand”; all this is rather to our surprise, given what it all looks like. But we must beware running away: so he warns us against hangovers, drunkenness, worldly cares, all those deceptively attractive refuges in which we seek to avoid reality.

So what are we to do? Simple; as the gospel suggests: “Stay Awake!”

The fact is that God is at work: and no matter how awful things may look to you today, that is all that counts.

Enjoy this wonderful season of Advent!