Second Sunday of Advent
Sunday, December 7, 2025
St. James Cathedral (5:30pm Vigil & 10:00am)
Christ Our Hope (7:00pm)

Watch this homily! (begins at 41:25)

My friends, those words of the Baptist, “Prepare the way of the Lord!” is what Advent is all about. And the words that follow are challenging. John the Baptist spoke them to those who came out to the desert to see him, to be baptized by him. And John challenged them to repent. And he reserves his harshest words for the religious leaders who came to see him.
 
“You brood of vipers,” he calls them! Not the language that invites a lot of dialogue. But what John has seen in them he must confront. He tells them that their pious prayer and ritual is not enough. He tells them that their religious heritage is not enough. He tells them that their life of faith must produce good fruit or God will simply discard them like useless chaff thrown into the fire.
 
Harsh words – words that are not just directed to religious folks long ago and far away. The Church gives us these scriptures on the Second Sunday of Advent to get our attention; to challenge us to look at our own lives and ask if our life of faith is producing good fruit.
 
Last Sunday we reflected on how Advent calls us for active waiting for the Lord’s coming. That coming will happen to each of us at the end of our lives, and to all of creation when the Lord returns in glory. We can prepare the way for that coming by repenting – that is, by examining where we may have gone off on the wrong path, and by making a commitment to get back on the right path. 
 
If you are like me, our instinct is to say, to get back on the right path, how can I pray better; or keep my thoughts pure; or treat members of my family with greater kindness? And while all those are laudable actions that could make us better people, like the religious leaders John challenges, we risk missing the real fruit that our lives must produce.
 
What is this fruit that is evidence of a life of faith, a life of active waiting for the Lord to come? The answer has been the same for more than three thousand years, but we sometimes wander off the path and focus on things that can distract us.  
 
That is not to say that purity and having a good prayer life and treating our family and friends with the dignity and respect they deserve are not good things – they are. Making a commitment to do these things better is certainly a way to prepare for the Lord’s coming.  But they are not enough – they are not the good fruit that the Baptist is calling for.
 
Such commitments were exactly what these religious leaders made in their lives. And John called them a brood of vipers. Why?
 
Because they missed the most important fruit they must produce. This fruit was rooted in their founding as a people, who had a special relationship with God. They of all people should know that. To be children of Abraham was to set them aside from the rest of the peoples of the earth in their worship of the one true God.
 
That worship, that relationship, required a care for the vulnerable: the poor, the widow, the orphan and the stranger. The care for these categories of people was crucial for Israel remaining in right relationship with God.
 
They had once been vulnerable, poor, enslaved, and strangers in a foreign land. And God had reached out to them and freed them and entered into relationship, into covenant with them. In order to remember who they were, where they came from and whose they were, they had to put care for the most vulnerable among them at the center of their life with God.
 
When they were not faithful to this call; when they began to turn inward, to care more about themselves than about others, they lost their way and went down a path that was not the way of the Lord.
 
The great Prophet Isaiah was one who called on Israel, and especially Israel’s leaders, to turn back to the right path: to trust God and not alliances with those who did not share Israel’s values. Isaiah warned that such alliances would end in disaster for God’s people.
 
In today’s first reading, in the midst of terrible leadership, Isaiah has a vision of the ideal leader coming forth from the line of David. His language of a bud blossoming from the lifeless stump of Jesse is an image of hope amidst a promise that seems to have been lost. 
 
This one will be close to the Lord, and God’s spirit of wisdom and understanding and strength will rest upon him. Justice and faithfulness will be with him. He will put Israel and the leaders of Israel back on the right path. And at the heart of this repentance, this turning back to the right path will be “judging the poor with justice and deciding aright for the land’s afflicted.”
 
In October of this year, Pope Leo issued his first Apostolic Exhortation, Dilexe te, On the Love for the Poor. In it he states clearly “Love for the Lord…is one with love for the poor.” He goes on to say, “This is not a matter of mere human kindness but a revelation: contact with those who are lowly and powerless is a fundamental way of encountering the Lord of history. In the poor, he continues to speak to us.” (#5).
 
The Pope’s call to us in 2025 is the same call that Isaiah made 2800 years ago. It is the same call that John the Baptist made 2000 years ago. It is the call that was enfleshed in the life, death and resurrection of Jesus.
 
The fruit of our conversion, the evidence of our repentance, the proof of our rootedness in Jesus, is how we treat the poor. We cannot be in right relationship with God if our only focus is on pious rituals, personal purity and treating our family and friends with the love and care they deserve. Those are all good things, necessary things – but they are not enough.
 
We must “treat the poor with justice and decide aright for the land’s afflicted.” As a community of faith, as a Church, we strive to do that, to produce this fruit through direct service to those in need and through advocating on their behalf.
 
In this day and time in our country producing this kind of fruit is more important than ever. The call of the Baptist echoes down the centuries and calls us to challenge policies that target and scapegoat people who are poor, who are non-white, who are immigrants and refugees. Such policies are antithetical to the Gospel.
 
As we make our way into this second week of Advent, may the Eucharist we share nourish our life of faith and enable us to bear the fruit that will truly prepare us for the coming of the Lord.

Father Gary F. Lazzeroni