4th Sunday Advent C - Homily 2

Homily 2 - 2009

Well, it seems that the world’s leaders couldn’t really rise to the occasion. They had to compromise – and save face. They see the promise of a sustainable world, a more just world, a co-operative world – no longer a world of winners and losers, but a world where everyone can share fairly the world’s limited resources, and walk more softly on the earth … But, apparently, the price was too much for them – the loss of ever-increasing short-term profits, the slowing down of pointless consumerism, the surrender of a certain amount of national sovereignty. The call, and the possibility, were there to live more as brothers and sisters, respecting each other than as selfish competitors and as heedless exploiters – but they couldn’t quite rise to the occasion.

For many of them, especially the leaders of the world’s democracies, they chose the way they did because they knew that not to do so would run the risk of their losing the support of their constituents, of the people like you and me, who vote for them. We are all implicated. We object to the prospect of living with less, even if it means that the ones who will suffer will be the world’s poor and powerless. Present pleasure for the powerful few rules out the beckoning promise of enough for everyone.  

Community attitudes, cultural attitudes, are contagious. We learn our desires from each other.  

But, that contagion is not inevitable, not irreversible. If we can grow in self-awareness, we put ourselves in a better position to choose deliberately and from a more enlightened standpoint. We can, in that way, contribute to changing community attitudes. We can look at our own lives, become aware of our behaviours and our choices, critique them, and change accordingly. We can lessen our destructive footprint on our fragile world. What might it entail? 

We will do nothing without hope. Where does hope come from? Hope is not optimism. Hope does not come necessarily from our reading of world events and trends. Hope can come from God. It can come from the promises of God. 

But it needs to be nourished – hope is drawn, ultimately, from the heart of God. We learn our desires from the hope in God’s heart, and from the promises that God makes (that flow from God’s hope for our world). God hopes … God hopes in me. God hopes in you. God hopes in our world. 

The wonderful thing about Mary, at least as put by Luke on the lips of Elizabeth, is: Blessed is she who believed that the promises made her by the Lord would be fulfilled. Mary is blessed because she believed God’s promise, because she shared God’s hope, because she knew God’s heart – (and she had learnt God’s heart because she had listened – prayerfully). 

Mary was a true daughter of her Israelite heritage – not unlike Micah whom we heard in tonight’s First Reading. Against the backdrop of threatened invasion, of rampant injustice and incompetent leadership, Micah waited in hope for a leader who would stand and feed his flock with the power of the Lord. He himself will be peace. 

But, the source of his hope was his sense of God – of God who had promised. Mary was little different – blessed because she believed that the promises made her by the Lord would be fulfilled. 

It’s the invitation of Advent. We need to learn the heart of God, to feel the hope of God, to be people of hope in a world of people who need hope – who need to hear the promise and share the vision of our God who sent Jesus to the world because God loves the world and still hopes.