3
Advent C December 16, 2012
Zeph
3:14-20 Canticle 9
Phil.4:4-9 Luke 3:7-18
There are events that happen that alter our lives; there are events that
alter a formerly planned sermon. And the
terrible shootings in Newtown, CT have a way of altering our lives even from
across the country. The immediate
communication in our lives makes us linked with people and draws from us our
emotional and intellectual and spiritual participation in this faraway, but
close event.
Today is the Third Sunday of Advent, Rose Sunday, Refreshment Sunday and
also called gaudete, the Latin for the command, “Rejoice!” The Epistle lesson begins with this: “Rejoice
in the Lord always; again I will say, Rejoice.”
The event in Newtown forces us to juxtapose the liturgical command “rejoice”
with the downright horrifying and we may not feel like heeding any command to
rejoice today.
How can we rejoice today in the freshness of this assaulting event? This event reveals to us the power of
evil. Evil has a parasitical power; it
feeds off the normalcy of goodness. It
steals the energy of what is good and lovely and kind; it deprives goodness its place of normalcy. Peace is deprived of
peaceful effects as terror robs the calming energy of peace. Evil creates ripple effects from one actual
event and snowballs into our lives far away from the impact of the actual event
and gets magnified into a lie that creates fear for us. If it happened there; it will happen here too
with us. And that is wildfire lie of
evil; it can spread seemingly endless collateral fear and make us alter our
lives to prepare for what will not actually happen. And we ask ourselves how can we resist the
aftershock of an event that was a unique occurrence?
The prophet Zephaniah wrote, “Rejoice and exalt in the Lord…you shall
fear disaster no more.” How can you
write that you reality denying prophet?
The writing of the book of Zephaniah may have accumulated from the time
of King Josiah until late in the post-monarchic period in Israel’s history,
that is around four hundred years and they were some of the worst years for
Israel. The prophetic words are poetry; they
may be a liturgy. Like a mother rocking
a very sick baby and who does not know when the baby will be alright, the mom
lullabies “There, there my sweet baby, all is going to be well.” We accept mother’s words of comfort in hard
times even though she cannot guarantee a particular outcome. I believe that this is how the words of the
prophets often ministered to a suffering and oppressed people. “There, there, things will be well, things
will be better, things will be glorious and wonderful. Believe in the good, the better and the
wonderful. Do not give up believing in
the normalcy of the wonderful, even when the actual circumstances seem to
contradict it.”
Today we receive the command, Rejoice and we receive it even when we don’t
feel like it. Do we resist obeying the
command or do we let it work its corrective purpose?
What would I mean by the corrective purpose of the command to rejoice? In a Dickensian sense, all times in some ways
are the “best of times and the worst of times.”
The question involves who is experiencing the fuller impact of the worst
of times at any given time. Best and worst
of times are distributed in a random and unequal manner over the population at
any given time. Yes, we’re all in this
life together but simply by saying we’re all together does not immediately result
in sharing evenly the impact of events of the best and worst of times.
But the evil of the worst of times has a macabre power as we have seen
in this horrifying school shooting. This
evil event in our day of immediate communication has the ability to suck the
oxygen from our attending to the everyday goodness of life. An evil event can demand our attention; it
exaggerates its place of importance in our lives even though we are thousands
of miles away. It can make us think that
an actual event can reproduce itself in our environment and it cajoles us to
respond in fear, anxiety and pessimism.
Crimes that occur because of mental affliction cause us even more
distress because we are tempted to minimize mental illnesses as being somehow
less valid than physical illnesses, even when we know that brain chemistry is a
physical phenomenon. We are tempted to
look for failure of nurturing in the immediate environment of the one who
committed the crime; or we look for the general enemy and we find it in some
sense to be the collective “us” with such permissive freedoms in our society.
The macabre power of evil requires the corrective purpose of the liturgy
of “rejoice.” Rejoice in the Lord always
and again I say rejoice! The command to
rejoice is a creative command. God said
let there be light and there was light.
Let there be joy and there was joy.
Why? Because joy is normal and
natural. To see a smiling baby tells us
that joy is the natural state of life; for joy to be taken away is a situation
of deprivation, but deprivation cannot define what is normal about life. That is why we need the corrective purpose of
the command to “rejoice.” This command
is a reminder of what is normal even while we mourn a devastating event of
life.
On this day when we are commanded to rejoice,
we are also commanded to repent. Repent is
a command to educate ourselves in a way that means we are always taking
remedial action. It means that we learn
to perform better today than we did yesterday.
Today is a day of these two commands, Rejoice and Repent. We obey the command to rejoice so that we do
not let evil establish itself in the place of what is normal. We obey the command to rejoice because in the
sum total of things that happen to us in this life we believe that most of them
are good and beneficial and so we rejoice to count our blessings. We work to limit the boundaries and the
duration of the effect of the act of evil.
So in our prayer we submit to the command to rejoice as part of the
corrective purpose of joy in the re-establishing the goodness of creation.
But there is also from John the Baptist the command to repent. And we need to heed this command too, in our
personal lives, our parish lives and in our society? Do we have too much virtual violence in our
society that desensitizes minds to actual pain?
Life is not a video game that can be restarted after all of the targeted
people are killed. Do we have too much
freedom of accessibility to weapons of war which allows persons a choice of
action that should not even be offered? And can we turn back the clock on our culture
of virtual violence and our culture of the freedom of the second amendment for
profit for those who will sell almost any weapon that can be sold? Because certain weapons have a potential
market, should all weapons be sold? We live
in a society that has made peace with ticketing and fining us for driving
without a seat belt. We live in a society where we can be ticketed for using
our mobile phones while driving and be required to wear motorcycle helmets;
surely we can find some collective legislative wisdom regarding the probability
of events of violence and the general accessibility of certain kinds of
weapons. And without getting emotional,
we can let the people of actuarial science guide in probability and prevention. We let insurance companies do this with their
rates all of the time.
I do not have easy answers except to say life is precious and worth the
efforts of repentance in all manner of personal and social behavior that will
promote quality and duration of life.
Rejoice and repent, the two can co-exist for us as we endeavor to
celebrate the primacy of goodness, hope, love, health, life and kindness and as
we work to resist and prevent everything that challenges the primacy of
goodness, life, health, safety and love.
And may we find a way forward in repentance; insights on how we can be
better and some action to make it so.
Let us Rejoice and Repent, in the name of the Father, the Son and the
Holy Spirit. Amen.
No comments:
Post a Comment