What A Mess: Homily for Thursday, December 5, 2024

What a mess. Do we create a mess, or allow God to clean up our mess? Do we seek to allow God to teach us to love, to forgive your sins, to accept his promise. That is what Advent is about. Readings for Today. Listen to our other podcasts.

What a Mess

What a mess. What a mess that we are living in. In just about any category we might imagine, things are a mess. There’s conflict in the Middle East, now in two locations with different countries.

There is the action yesterday for a few hours of martial law in South Korea. There is the conflict in Ukraine, and there are those conflicts that we don’t even pay much attention to that are occurring throughout Africa and other places in the world. We can look at Haiti and say, “What a mess.” And then we can look economically and quite frankly, that is a mess.

Because we still haven’t really figured out as human beings how to guarantee that everybody gets something to eat. Not because we do not produce enough food, but because we do not want to share. What a mess are attitudes to those on the margins. We simply don’t want to see them, we don’t want to acknowledge them, and worse yet, we demonize them.

This season of Advent is, in many ways, a season where we try to clean up the mess. Because I can also say, all those external worldwide events are messy, but there are times in my own life where I’ve made a mess of my life. I’d love to say that I’m that perfect. I know that will come. I know that will come as a shock to my brothers who live with me. But I know I am not perfect.

I know I need to return to God again and again and again, and ask for His mercy, for His forgiveness. Now, when things are messy, the temptation is to cling to our own efforts in how to fix it. But Brother Augustine, over these past few nights of the Advent mission, reminds us that that’s not the way it works.

I think that when Jesus says, “Not everyone who says, ‘Lord, Lord,'” he could be referring to those people who see faith as a type of checklist. “I’ve been good. I’ve tried to avoid sin. I’ve gone to confession. I’ve tried to be good to those in need. As a Dominican friar, I go to morning prayer and evening prayer and night prayer. I have Mass.

If I do all those things, then yes, God owes it to me,” as Brother Augustine said. But the season of Advent is constantly about reminding us that the only way the mess is going to be cleaned up is if we turn the world on its head. We don’t seek our own control and strength.

As tempting as that is, it’s hard to turn our lives over to God. It’s hard for us to trust in the Lord. At least I know it is for me. I’d much rather be able to do things myself. And even though I assigned many a group project, as a student, I hated them. I wanted to have control over what was going to be done. I didn’t want to have to rely on others. I used to say to students in class, “Now you’re the one that nobody wants in their group, because you don’t do any work.”

So, what is it that we’re called to do? We’re called to avoid the temptation to trust in a strong city. To think that if we just get our civil and political life right, everything will be fine. Because the strong city is not going to last forever. We’re called in our life, again as Brother Augustine reminded us, to see everything we do out of this covenantal relationship with God.

That we’re all in. We have to be all in, because God is already all in. And we have to acknowledge in our lives that Christianity is not easy. Living out of this covenantal relationship for us is not easy. You see, Jesus tells us we have to love our enemies, pray for our persecutors. He tells us that the way we treat anybody else is in fact the way we treat Him.

And that’s very condemning for myself, because I get irritated when people need something. I don’t see other people as an invitation to grow in God’s grace. If they don’t do what I want, or they present a problem I don’t want to deal with, I get mad at them, frustrated. Now, I don’t always show that, but that’s what I’m feeling inside.

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