2nd Sunday of Advent, B December 10, 2023
Fr. Alexander Albert St. John the Evangelist, Jeanerette
If you were running from a fire about to burn your house down, would you stop to make the bed first? It kind of sounds like St. Peter is saying we should in the 2nd reading. Listen again: “the day of the Lord will come like a thief, and then the heavens will pass away with a mighty roar and the elements will be dissolved by fire… Since everything is to be dissolved in this way, what sort of persons ought you to be, conducting yourselves in holiness and devotion.” In other words, everything will burn, so be good! Why? If everything is going to burn – including our bodies – why bother taking care of it at all?
Because the way things burn matters. Consider fireworks. Think about the first time you watched a large scale fireworks display and the childlike wonder you experienced. Now, if you just burn the ingredients for fireworks individually, it’s very different than when you put them together. With care and precision, you can take the exact same ingredients and create incredible spectacles: shapes and patterns and lights of all kinds. Though those ingredients still end up as dust and ashes, the light they create is quite different and the wonder and memories last much longer.
There’s a similar principle at work in all the commands and exhortations in today’s readings. We’re told to “prepare the way of the Lord,” to “make straight his paths” by filling in the valleys and making low the mountains. Maybe you think Isaiah and John the Baptist are being dramatic in talking about filling valleys and mountains, but are they? Think about the construction of interstates. Think about the millions of roads human beings have built over thousands of years and all the dirt and stone we’ve moved in order to make them. I can get to New Orleans in under two hours, but that’s only because we quite literally filled in valleys and swamps to make a road go straight there.
But if all those roads and bridges end up destroyed by fire, why did we bother? Because, until then, all that effort will make possible millions of human connections and memories in everything from relationships to economics to holy pilgrimages. Even though the stuff we use and even our own bodies will be dissolved by fire, we will exist forever and everything that affects us matters for eternity. We will even receive back our bodies, a new heaven, and a new earth. Ultimately, the way that we experience that new reality does depend on how we act in the world we have now. Striving for justice in our communities, building infrastructure that supports a humane way of life, working for peace – these and more matter because they affect human beings.
Next week we will turn towards an explicit focus on the birth of Jesus at Christmas, but for now we should take to heart this reminder of where everything is headed. Rather than taking the promised destruction by fire as a reason to consider everything meaningless, it should instead spur us to so arrange things that, when that fire comes, it will burn as brightly and beautifully as possible. This is what it means to be baptized by the Holy Spirit who we so often describe as a holy fire.
The Holy Spirit does not dismiss everything in our lives that isn’t explicitly holy. There are those things that, like fire itself, do not burn: love, grace, virtue, spiritual merit. Other things, though, the Holy Spirit can transform the same way that fire transforms wood into heat and light. Sin, selfishness, and death are simply destroyed by this fire, but there are many things in our lives – homes, jobs, projects, even our recreation – things that, if we arrange them in the right way, are transformed in a way that helps save our souls and provide wonder, light, and glory for all who can see it. That arranging takes work.
I talked about interstates and bridges in a literal way, but of course the prophets were being metaphorical. Jesus doesn’t need I-49 to be finished in order to return (we might have to wait forever if that were the case!), but we do need to straighten out our life and habits if we are to welcome him into our hearts. We began this season with a reminder about the purpose of our freedom and a challenge to daily forgive those we resent. I urge you take up that challenge if you haven’t already, but I must also remind you of the ever-present need to do exactly what John the Baptist commands: repent of your sins!
So, what are the valleys in your life? What are the sins of omission that keep you from becoming the saint you’re called to be? Refusal to forgive those who’ve hurt you? Stinginess towards friends, family, employees, the Church, or those in need? Perhaps, instead of filling the gaps in your life with prayer, study, or authentic leisure, you make them deeper with yet more distraction, mindless pleasure, and selfishness.
And what are the mountains in your life that bar the way of the Lord? Where do you to put up barriers that say to God “you’re not allowed to touch this part of my life?” What habits and addictions do you have that rob you of the freedom to go when and where the Lord asks you to go? Where is pride causing you to try to lift mountains, to try to control things that you can’t or shouldn’t control?
Whether the way is prepared or not, that great fire is coming. Are you detached enough from the things of this life that you’re ready to watch it burn yet also diligent enough to arrange them so that they glorify God in the way they burn? Peter tells us that the Lord is patient, that he’s giving us time to get our lives to a place where we aren’t afraid of the answer to those questions, but eventually that time does run out.
So do not take this time for granted! Humility and patience means we can’t fix everything all at once, but neither should we dawdle about, presuming that everything is fine. No, we must “be eager to be found without spot or blemish before him, at peace.” And when a fire is coming that we cannot avoid, how do we find such peace? By preparing things to burn well instead of vainly trying to keep them from the fire, by letting that fire purify us from the sins that form the mountains and valleys which block us from embracing Christ, by detaching our hearts from what does not last, and, most of all, by clinging more firmly to that which fire can never destroy: the very flame of love Himself.