Ministry has more than its share of rewards and
blessings and, for me, nearly every one of them has a human face. For
reasons I will share with you in a moment, today’s scriptures bring to
my mind the faces of parishioners who have held onto their faith when,
humanly speaking, they had every reason not to. I see their faces
in my mind’s eye: the faces of parents who have lived through the
nightmare of losing a child from illness or an accident; the faces of
people in their prime of life with everything going for them, who one
day were mapping out their future and the next were diagnosed with a
debilitating or terminal illness; the faces of parents with small
children, a sizeable mortgage, and a backlog of bills who both got laid
off at work.
So many faces, so much heartbreak! And yet, in
the midst of their pain, I saw those people hold onto the conviction
that God was with them and would see them through it. Conviction is the
right word: I’m quite sure they didn’t feel this, but deep down in that
mysterious place where faith lives, they knew it. So many times over the
years, I have found myself moved beyond words by the faith of people who
came to me for ministry but who really ministered to me because of their
amazing faith.
I think of what a homeless fellow told me not
long ago. He didn’t have a clue where he was going to sleep that night
and I’m sure his pockets were empty, yet he told me, “I don’t worry,
Pastor. The Lord stays with me. He never leaves me.” You see what I mean
by my being on the receiving end of ministry…!
The words of that homeless fellow came back to
me as I reflected on the first two scriptures for this third Sunday of
Advent. I heard them in the prophecy from Zephaniah in the first
reading: Don’t Zephanaiah’s words, “The Lord is in your midst,” sound
like “the Lord stays with me, he never leaves me?” And don’t those words
of my homeless friend also sound a little like St. Paul’s words to the
Philippians: “Have no anxiety; the Lord is near.” And, you know, there
are similarities – not just in words but, more importantly, in the
situations that prompted the words because when Zephaniah and St. Paul
spoke them, neither had any reason, humanly speaking, to believe that
the Lord was anywhere near them.
Zephaniah prophesied to the people of Israel
when they were in the midst of some gravely troubling times. They had
suffered appalling losses to foreign powers and had been brought low and
humiliated time and again by ruthless forces of occupation that made a
mockery of their faith and ridiculed their religion. It was
against that background that Zephaniah told the people not to fear but
to “rejoice with all your hearts because the Lord has taken away all
judgments against you….”
How could this be? How could he tell the people
over and over again that the Lord was in their midst when there was so
much evidence to the contrary? And how could St. Paul, in today’s second
reading, write to his friends at Philippi telling them to “rejoice in
the Lord always”, and to “have no anxiety about anything because the
Lord is at hand?” Those words may not sound all that remarkable – they
may sound like the conventional clichés of a polite letter - but when
you remember that St. Paul wrote them from Rome while he was in prison
awaiting trial, they take on a whole new meaning!
And so the question is one worth asking: how is
it that people like St. Paul, and the Prophet Zephaniah, and the
Israelites of old, and my homeless friend, and those other people I
mentioned earlier – how is it that they could remain convinced that God
was with them when everything must have told them that he wasn’t? How is
it that they could rejoice in the Lord when many would only have
despaired?
And we know the answer. The answer is faith:
belief that God’s goodness and faithfulness are more powerful and more
enduring than even the most devastating of human losses or tragedies;
belief that when God seems to be distant to the point of non-existent,
that can be when God is actually the nearest.
My friends in Christ, we know all this. Many of
you know this far better than I do. Many of you are living witnesses to
the power of faith and to God’s faithfulness, come what may. On
this Advent Sunday, in the midst of a world with problems both agonizing
and seemingly unsolvable, a world where glimpses of light are all too
quickly eclipsed by darkness, a world where poverty is rampant, and
violence and terrorism go unchecked; and in the midst of our own
personal lives which can be so messy and are never very far removed from
pain of one sort or another – the pain of personal inadequacy, the pain
of strained or broken relationships, the pain of sickness or incurable
disease, the pain of death itself – in the midst of this vastly
imperfect world of ours and of these vastly imperfect lives of ours,
there is still room for hope. Great hope, because God’s love has always
been more powerful than even the greatest of natural and human evils and
it always will be.
That’s what Advent is about and it’s what we
are preparing to celebrate at Christmas – light in the midst of
darkness, hope for the world in the face of a tiny child. Hemingway once
wrote that “life breaks all of us, but some people grow at the broken
places.” May the presence of Jesus in the bread that is broken for
us bring healing to all our broken places and hope to our hearts!
Father Michael G. Ryan
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