We Settle for a Lesser Problem
1st Sunday of Advent
My first months in a parish after ordination came toward the conclusion of the 2020 election cycle. When you are in seminary preparing for ordination to the priesthood, you start to imagine the kinds of conversations you will have with people in a parish about problems in life: the sins, the sufferings, the sicknesses. My expectation was to start life in a parish and immediately confront a certain set of moral and spiritual issues: sexual sin, various forms of addiction, and the burden of hard suffering caused by illness or financial instability.
Those problems are out there—no doubt—but in my first months of hearing confessions and talking to people about the hardness of life, the reality that caused the most harm and incited the most evil was probably politics. The anger and anxiety caused by the national election cycle blended perfectly with the anger and anxiety caused by the politics of the Church, and the consequence was a lot of broken relationships. Families were divided. There were spouses unable to speak to one another, children who wouldn’t talk to their parents, parents confused and closed off to their children.
The anger and anxiety caused by politics also damaged plenty of relationships with God. People wanted to talk all the time about doubting God, not trusting God, questioning whether God really exists or if he has a plan. I remember talking to one person, an elderly person, about their wholehearted fear for the state of the world and the crippling impact that fear was taking on their spiritual life. At one point, I asked:
“When you were younger, in the 1960s, with the world falling apart and a war in Vietnam and the Kennedy brothers and Martin Luther King Jr. being assassinated and the Church experiencing those first years of confusion from the Second Vatican Council and the fear of nuclear bombs, how did you get through those hard years? Those were hard years. Harder than anything happening now, I think.”
“Faith,” they said.
“Can’t you rely on faith now?” I asked.
“I don’t know if I can,” came the response.
From where does the anger and anxiety caused by politics come? I guess you could go and ask that question to sociologists or psychologists or statisticians working for public policy institutes and get different answers. Let me give you an answer of my own: the anger and anxiety comes from wanting, waiting, and watching.
We want the world to look a certain way, to be a certain way. We each possess values that inform our sense of what the good life looks like, and we deeply desire our nation, our Church, our culture, to embrace those same values. The confusion that comes from ambiguity in values, from dissension and division over what matters the most in life, it breaks us down on the inside and makes us yearn for a better life—a better world, a better Church, a better culture. We worry about our families, about the future.
The consequence of our wanting is an awful lot of waiting. We get the experience of standing on the sidelines hoping and praying for the right person to come along and fix whatever is broken—the right kind of president, the right kind of pope, the right kind of bishop or senator or governor. The reality of national and Church politics renders us passive bystanders to history and the passivity wears us down—we get frustrated, we go stir crazy, we lose hope. We are hardwired for action and control and yet there is seemingly nothing we can do but wait. Sometimes we can vote, sometimes we might write a letter or join a protest rally somewhere. Hopefully, we’re praying. But on average what we do is wait.
From the wanting and the waiting comes an awful lot of watching. The amount of news to which people pay attention today is staggering and cannot possibly be healthy for anyone. The ticker runs constantly across the bottom of the television screen with flash updates of whatever is happening wherever, your phone is getting alerts, your inbox is flooded with stories and commentary from the 37 different news sites to which you’ve subscribed over the years. We hang on every news story, every interview given by a pope or president or candidate, dissecting smaller events and public remarks of whatever kind for their greater meaning or significance. We strain the limits of our ability to pay attention, get broken down by nervousness, and lose control over our ability to receive and respond to the news of the day. We just start getting angry, and the anger masks our fear.
Here is my question: what would life look like for us if most of our wanting, waiting, and watching concerned not the politics of Church or state but our actual Messiah?
The Gospel we are given today surprises me. Here we are celebrating the first week of Advent, supposedly preparing our hearts and minds for the birth of Christ, and we are given a Gospel that asks us to take seriously the fact that we are going to die. “You do not know when the time will come,” we are told. The lord of the house will return to you on an unknown day and at an unknown hour. So, you must watch, remain vigilant, use your time well. The reality of death haunts the beginning of the Advent season.
Why?
Because the reality of Christ is the divine solution to a human problem. The cold fact of human existence is that death comes for each of us. Yet in Christ we receive the promise of eternal life. The birth of a savior, a messiah, is the warrant for our hope that the reality of death will not maintain its hold on us. In Christ we receive the promise of eternal life.
And yet is the reality of death the problem that most commands our attention? What do we want for our lives? For whom do we wait? For whom are we watching?
I spent some time today trying to imagine the experience of living as an Israelite in the centuries before Christ. You know the hardness of life: the reality of death, the constant threat of violence, political and social instability, scarce resources, poverty, the rise and collapse of empires, so much sickness and illness that cannot be cured. But you also know the goodness of God’s promises: your people have been chosen for a special purpose by the one true God; you have been promised a messiah; you have experienced moments of fulfillment in your history—deliverance slavery, freedom from captivity, the freedom to worship and self-rule—but you still await the revelation of God’s plan for the world.
If you lived in those centuries, confronting the hardness of life, holding onto a promise, what would you want? For whom would you be waiting and watching? The story of Israel is the story of so many people settling for less than the messiah who would come. Sometimes a golden calf or pagan god, sometimes a king or false prophet, sometimes the hope for lasting change by way of politics and violence and revolution and religious fanaticism.
The sad fact is that the people of Israel—many of them at least, across the centuries—forgot the real enemy. The experience of oppression or political instability or famine or war or plague led many Israelites to believe that the enemy to the good life was an emperor in Rome or Assyria or Babylon or Egypt, or the lack of land to call their own, or the absence of food, or the inability to cure disease. But the real enemy to the good life is death: the reality that each human life will end and that without the gift of something (or someone) who is eternal, the end of our years on this earth means the end of our existence.
The tragedy of human life, it seems to me, is settling for a lesser problem. We get consumed by the anger and anxiety that comes from politics because we have forgotten that the real enemy to human life is death. What we ought to want the most is eternal life, which is to say that what we ought to want the most is relationship with God. And our waiting and our watching ought to be for the Messiah who is the promise of eternal life, who has conquered death, who makes relationship with God possible.
The savior we need, we already have. He is given to us on Christmas morning. These weeks of Advent are given to us so that we might prepare for his coming—his coming into the life of the world, and his coming to us personally on a day and at an hour that is not known to us.
Watch, and be vigilant. You do not know when the time will come.
Homily preached on Sunday, December 3rd at the Basilica of the National Shrine of the Assumption of the Blessed Virgin Mary