Saturday, December 4, 2010  Fr. Pat Grile

 

Second Sunday of Advent

 

 

A sneaky thought occurred to me as I was looking at the gospel earlier, that if I would have walked in here tonight wearing clothing made of camel’s hair and a leather belt around my waist, drinking wild honey and locust, I bet I could have cleared this church in real quick order, right?  You probably would have said, “Whoa, we are out of here.”

 

And yet what is it about this man, John the Baptist that people are coming from all over the region to hear him.  To hear somebody call them a brood of vipers?  That is not a very nice term.  We could translate it into modern day language but I won’t use that because you know what he’s talking about.  He’s is talking about their ancestry, you are descendants of snakes, brood of vipers.  So John the Baptist is going after the good people.  The Pharisees and Sadduces, those who come to church and come to the temple, pay their tithes and taxes and do all the things that the law asks of them.  Viola, I’m looking at them tonight and you’re looking at me.

 

We are good people, right?  Did anybody commit mass murder today?  Did anybody go out and rob a bank today?  Did you drive somebody off the road today?  No, we don’t do those kinds of things.  We’re good people. 

 

So what’s John the Baptist doing coming saying to you and me tonight, repent, turn away from your sins, and give some evidence that you mean to reform.  So if we’re not doing terrible things what would it be maybe that you and I need to look in our lives to see what we need to change.

 

Now you can get a pretty good idea, and it happens with me too.  Look at the things you find hard to accept in other people.   Why do they drive so fast?  Where did he get his drivers’ license?  Why doesn’t she clean up her room you say to a teenage daughter?  Why don’t you call if you’re going to be late, as your spouse comes home late from work?  Why didn’t you tell me that you wouldn’t be able to make it?  How come this?  Why not that?  Notice all the things that we seem to find difficult in other people.  You want to know where they come from?  It’s called a mirror.  Go and stand in front of a mirror and you and I will probably be very humbled to find out that the things we have the most difficulty with in other people, their mistakes, their faults, their failings, their shortcomings, are staring us right in the face.

 

We had a great vision in the first reading tonight.  Wouldn’t that be great?  No more war, no poverty, no hunger, no super-rich, no super-poor.  All the animals get along together, even babies and snakes lying down together.  Everybody in the parish supporting each other, great to be with each other no matter how old or young, how long we’ve been here, the color of our skin.  Everybody in the whole wide world, “Whoa, we’re all human beings and we love one another.”  Wouldn’t that be great?  What an image!

 

So there’s the dream that God is calling you and me to try to achieve.  How are we going to bring it into fruition?  Where is the evidence of our change of heart?  Go stand in front of a mirror tonight when you get back home, or cheat on the way home.  Look in the rearview mirror or the side mirror and look at yourself and say, “Okay, John the Baptist, what inside me do I need to change?”  Again nobody is a mass murderer, nobody is doing terrible things, but the little spitefulness, the arrogance, the gossip, the judgements, the lack of forgiveness, the lack of patience and tolerance, the manipulation, the controlling, the anger, the resentment.  Those are the things that I am sure that many of us in our lives could say, “I need to root that out a little bit.”  If you and I could change just one little thing in ourselves that makes the world a little bit easier to be in.  Look around.  Six to seven hundred of us here in this church, what a difference that would be in our world community.  We could put so much more peace and joy everywhere we would go yet tonight and tomorrow, throughout this week.  There would be no action that would be too small or insignificant that you and I could not do that would make our world a better place.

 

So see the good that you and I could do and say, “Lord, one area, one little tiny part of my life this week I will turn around, flip over and I will see the good that I want to do rather than the negative.”  We will put so much light and hope and joy wherever we will go.  And our world, our parish, our schools, our workplace, wherever we journey will be better because God asked you and me to be there.  Give some evidence that we need to reform.  We’ll change the whole world one little tiny piece and  God will multiply it.