The following is a sermon preached by Fr. Chris Tessone at St. Joseph's on the 2nd Sunday of Advent 2009. The texts are Baruch 5:1-9, Philippians 1:3-11, and Luke 3:1-6.
I grew up in a part of Illinois called “Little Egypt” that is famous for growing one thing very well: corn. Our region in Southern Illinois got the name in the 1830s, when there were several years of bad harvests in a row in other parts of the state. People traveled to Southern Illinois to buy corn, just as Joseph’s family traveled to Egypt in the Hebrew Bible during the years of famine in Canaan. Growing up, there was corn everywhere—corn out back behind the church I went to as a child, corn along the interstates leading up to Chicago and St. Louis when we traveled, even fields of corn next to the Wal-Mart we shopped at. I think you’re getting the theme—if there’s corn there, I feel at home!
When I first went away to high school, I worried about how much I would miss home. School was hours away in the suburbs of Chicago, far away from my friends and family. I wasn’t sure whether I would feel comfortable in a big city. But as we drove through the city limits into Aurora, I saw a sign that read “population 140,000,” and then…fields of corn leading up to the school. Despite being hundreds of miles away from Little Egypt, right away this new place did feel a little like home.
Although the homecoming Baruch writes about involves far more pomp and circumstance, the home God welcomes the people of Israel back to is no less foreign to them than Aurora, Illinois was to me nearly fifteen years ago. Baruch, who was the prophet Jeremiah’s secretary, is writing during the exile of the Israelites to Babylon. From where they sit in exile, the land God promises to them is not just someplace where the work is a little easier, someplace warmer and a little sunnier. It is the home every one of God’s children dreams about. It’s a universal hope. It’s the “salvation of God” proclaimed by John the Baptist in today’s Gospel.
The problem for us is that this promised land has no concrete existence. It seems to us, just as it must have seemed to the Israelites hearing Baruch’s vision, that in the world we live in, there is no place where, in the prophet’s words, “the woods and every fragrant tree have shaded” us, where the very mountains and hills are made flat so we have level ground to walk on. This fantastical destination may seem to have no concrete existence in our experience—so how can we have faith that when we arrive at our destination, it will indeed be home?
The lectionary forces us to confront these questions now because we are in Advent again, at the symbolic beginning of our journey to the Kingdom we celebrate on Christ the King Sunday. We need to ask ourselves about the path that connects the life we lead right now, on the Second Sunday of Advent in 2009, to the universal homecoming that Baruch describes in today’s reading.
In the Epistle reading, Paul gives us an answer. The concrete path to the universal home of all of humanity is the local Church. He writes to the Philippians that the bonds of love and fellowship he has with them give him confidence that God will bring the work of the Gospel to completion in them and their community. He points to concrete practices of care for neighbor—in both good times and in bad—as a path to knowledge of God and blamelessness before God. This is the charge we receive from Paul and all the early Mothers and Fathers of the Church—incarnate the universal Church precisely where you are by practicing the Christian faith as you’ve received it. As St. Luke tells us in Acts, we do this through teaching and fellowship, in the breaking of bread, and in prayers.
What this means is that the Catholic Church we confess each Sunday in the Nicene Creed springs up out of local dioceses—out of gatherings of Christians around the world, advancing the work of the Gospel and loving their neighbors whether they are friends or enemies. The universal Church appears out of thin air in the church buildings of those dioceses—and in hospitals, prisons, and schools—first and foremost because God makes the Body and Blood of Jesus Christ present in them in the Eucharist, but also because that Body and Blood make other miracles happen. The Eucharist and the proclamation of the Gospel lead us to feed and clothe each other. They help us pray for each other when we are sick and wounded. They teach us to rejoice with one another when we are happy, as we do countless times each year in celebrating marriages, anniversaries, and births, and they make us console one another when we hit life’s low points.
Every such encounter with the living God in these concrete little places lights the path to the home we are all looking for. In doing these practices, we take away each other’s doubt about what lies at the end of the road. Just as importantly, if we do the work of the Gospel here in our own time and place, when someone else stumbles across the way of Jesus Christ, they can see what lies at the end of the road more clearly, too. That is why the Church is not merely a collection of sinners looking for their own individual salvation—the Church helps us receive the saving power of Jesus Christ because in the Church we strive to minister God’s grace to one another in everything we do. Two heads are better than one, as the saying goes, but many hearts working together are absolutely crucial for the Church to do its mission in the world.
So the Church year is beginning again, and in our readings at the Eucharist and in the Daily Office we are meditating on what the coming Messiah promises. But while it may be tempting to meditate too long on just where the path we’re taking may lead, today’s Gospel reading reminds us of the urgency of our journey. “Every valley shall be filled, and every mountain and hill shall be made low,”…but not after all of us have passed on from the earth, or in ten years, or even just after Christmas. Now. The vision of a new world that connects Isaiah to Baruch to John the Baptist is an urgent one. It’s the vision of a world that is coming to life right this very moment. We are empowered by the Holy Spirit to see that new world and to journey home to the new life we’ll find there…and the first step begins here, now, in this Church of Jesus Christ.
Thanks be to God.
