So if Advent is our season of waiting and expectation, what are we really waiting for in these last few days before Christmas? I think in today’s gospel we find out: We are waiting for someone to speak to us, with words about what is next — and not just generally, but next for us. We sometimes think those words are impossible. The great theologian Dietrich Bonhoeffer said Advent waiting is like miners who are trapped in a coal mine, waiting for any noise off in the distance as a sign that someone, anyone, is coming to rescue them. Maybe especially we feel that way this year, we have all…
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Please don’t take offense at what I’m going to say, because I mean it as a compliment — but most of us here in our parish would describe ourselves as practical, down-to-earth people. We’re serious and realistic about life, and we are hard workers once we set ourselves on a path. So when we hear advice that we’re supposed to follow our dreams, we think, well sure, that sounds very appealing, it’s certainly something we should tell young people, but for the rest of us, it seems very unlikely that we’d face that kind of a moment in life when a dream would change something. Because most of us, when…
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Advent is supposed to be about waiting, but I think that turns out to be a terrible word to describe what it is we’re supposed to feel like as Christmas approaches. Think about what could possibly be more discouraging and pointless than a waiting room, the uncomfortable silence that we have to somehow drown out with TV or some phone time, the frustration about why whatever it is is taking so long, killing time reviewing in our mind the other more important things we have to do. To us, that’s waiting. But today with just a few days left before Christmas let’s redefine just for a minute what waiting looks…
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Maybe it’s because I had a big birthday this past week, but I have been thinking a lot about the future. And I have to say that in a lot of ways, I found that except as a source of worry and anxiety I don’t think much about the future at all. Even if you haven’t been ragged on all week about age, as I have, maybe you feel the same way. We have a tendency to see the future in two ways. One is to hate the future, to regard the way the world is going as pretty much hostile and out of control, at best drifting, and probably…
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I suspect that if you haven’t already, you will end up seeing at some point this coming week, whether you want to or not, at least some of that Christmas favorite on television, It’s a Wonderful Life. You don’t need me to tell you the plot, about how the small-town banker who is about to lose his business sees a vision of how the world would have turned out if he had never lived. Of course, what he finds in this vision of an entirely different future is that without him, not only did his wife end up not marrying him, but his entire family was different, his friends less…
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Angels are big business, these days. Barnes & Noble has a whole angel section. More importantly, it’s a big week coming up for angels generally, the message of the angels to the shepherds that will make us smile, as it should, when we hear it on Tuesday night, and of course today’s angel appearing to Mary. Yet despite all these books and gorgeous paintings and Christmas cards, we live pretty angel-free lives, and this last Sunday of Advent is a time to think about why. Angels are in fact a perfect sign of what this week asks us to remember. Because there is a thread that runs through today, and…