Rite of Entry 16 December 2007

Homily for Advent III 16 December 2007 Sitting at the front of our church today we have a group of people who have been attending our weekly course of instruction in the Catholic Faith with the aspiration of joining the Church and becoming fully one with us and with Our Lord next Easter. Shortly they will be coming forward to make the first public act that signifies their commitment to this process of discernment and growth, in the Rite of Entry, when they will be formally accepted as catechumens or as candidates, if they are already baptised. You are a great sign of hope for us all and a proof that the Church is constantly renewing herself with new blood, and we welcome you. This Gospel today is very appropriate for you, because of the question that Jesus puts three times in slightly different forms- “What did you go out into the wilderness to see?” Now, the wilderness, the desert in other words, is often used in the Bible to mean a place where you go to grow and to learn, to be purified and to become holy, often as a preparation for some special task or vocation. You too have gone out into the wilderness, you have left the cares and commitments of your busy lives each week to come to St Saviour’s and to find out about our Catholic Faith and how to align yourselves more completely with Our Lord by entering the Church which he founded. And so, you can answer that question that Our Lord teases the crowd with in this passage- “What did you go out to see?” And also you can answer the question John the Baptist sends his messengers to ask Jesus- “Are you the one who is to come or have we got to wait for someone else?” You came week by week, not just for the company, although we get to know each other and support each other and sometimes become friends; not just for the intellectual stimulation of finding out about our religion, although the joy of studying and thinking is there and we certainly have to use our minds to appreciate our faith; not ultimately for any other reason but to follow Jesus, to sense his presence in our midst, to prepare to meet him more fully in the sacramental life that awaits you, and to deepen your awareness of Our Lord Jesus, so that it can develop into friendship and into love. “What did you go out to see?” Why, on these cold and dark nights, have you set out after your day’s work, left your cosy fireside, roused yourself from that armchair and switched off the TV and made your weary way to the presbytery? You dear good people, you have done this to follow Jesus, in the knowledge that the Holy Spirit has given you, that the best and surest way of following him is in his Church. God will reward you! Having realised who Jesus is, we face immediately the other question- what does he want of me? what does he want me to do? Our Faith must be translated into action! Love that is only words is not much good, is it! Jesus, in the echo of the passage from Isaiah we heard as our first reading, gives us the programme as he describes the miracles he is doing that prove he is the Messiah and that he is ushering in the Messianic Age, the reign of justice, peace and concord, the start of that ideal world that we all long for. He tells the messengers to go back to John the Baptist and tell him “the blind see again, and the lame walk, lepers are cleansed, and the deaf hear, and the dead are raised to life”. Now we are all attempting in the Christian life to make our lives more and more like Our Lord’s- the Holy Father, speaking on the recent Feast of the Immaculate Conception, says “we will be judged on our similarity to Jesus.” So can we be like Jesus, can we do what Jesus did? Well, you may be saying, how can I do any of that? I can’t cure the sick or raise the dead. I certainly have no such powers! But let us just think for a moment about what we might try to do- we can’t change the word single-handed, we can’t bring about a revolution, but we can do something every day to change our corner of the world, we can start in our own backyard. We may know people who have been blinded, dazzled by what Pope Benedict called last week “messages that offer false models of happiness” and “the dead-end roads of consumerism” – can we show them the reality of God’s love and where true contentment lies? We may know people who are lame, lame ducks, whose lives have got into a mess for all sorts of reasons- can we lend them a hand, offer them some practical help and advice? And the lepers, the outcasts of society, the people other people steer clear of, can we approach them and let them see that there do exist people whose minds are not clouded with prejudice and offer them a neighbourly greeting? And as for the deaf- Fr Chris recently spoke of “the lullaby of materialism”, that drowns out all other voices and deafens us. Can we counter that with a broadcast of our own, with a message of the unselfishness that is at the heart of the Christian life? If we can do these things, witnessing to our Catholic Faith day by day to those around us, in our street and workplace, by our kindness and openness, what the Pope calls being “united in the task of building a more just, supportive and peaceful world”, then indeed we shall see the dead raised to life, we shall see people given new life, new hope, new confidence, a new dignity as sons and daughters of our heavenly Father. May our love for Our Lord Jesus Christ cause us to grow more and more like him, whom the Pope has called “the standard God gave humanity to live by” and may the example of our lives help those around us to answer that question “What did you go out to see?” Amen.