Ministry has more rewards and blessings than I can count and
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; 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 single moms and
dads with groceries to buy, rent to pay, and a backlog of bills, who get
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 get them through. Conviction is the right word: They may not have
felt 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 one of our Cathedral Kitchen guests said to me not long
ago. He was homeless, down on his luck, pockets 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 prophet Zephaniah’s words, “The Lord is in your midst.” Doesn’t that
sound a little like “the Lord stays with me, he never leaves me?” And
don’t those same words echo St. Paul to the Philippians: “Have no
anxiety; the Lord is near.” And there are similarities – not just in
words but, more importantly, in the situations that prompted those words
because when Zephaniah and St. Paul spoke them, the Lord could not have
seemed near at all!
A
little context. Zephaniah prophesied to the people of Israel at a low
point in their history, a turbulent time of foreign takeover, and a time
of infidelity and idolatry when most of the people worshiped the false
gods of the foreign occupiers and only a remnant remained faithful to
the Covenant with God. It was against that background that Zephaniah
told the people who were faithful not to fear but to “rejoice with all
your hearts.”
How
could this be? How could he assure the people 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 community 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 worth asking: how is it that people like St. Paul,
and the Israelites to whom Zephanih prophesied, and my homeless friend,
and those parishioners I mentioned earlier – how is it that they could
remain convinced that God was with them when everything must have told
them that God had forgotten them?
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 or even to have disappeared, that can actually be when God is
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 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, war, and terrorism take
their daily toll on innocent people and untold numbers of children; in
our sadly divided nation awaiting leadership that some find hopeful and
promising and others find frightening and foreboding; and in our own
personal lives which can be so messy and 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
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
most unlikely of places: in the face of a tiny child. Hemingway gets
credit for saying that “the world breaks everyone and afterward many are
strong at the broken places.” It’s true, my friends. May the presence of
Jesus in the bread that is broken for us – and which we are about to
receive - bring healing to all our broken places, strength to our steps,
and hope to our hearts!
Father Michael G. Ryan
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