Second Sunday of Advent (C), Conversations with Consequences Podcast, December 4, 2021

Fr. Roger J. Landry
Conversations with Consequences Podcast
Homily for the Second Sunday of Advent (C), Vigil
December 4, 2021

To listen to an audio recording of this short Sunday homily, please click below: 

The following text guided the homily: 

• This is Fr. Roger Landry and it’s a privilege for me to be with you as we enter into the consequential conversation the Risen Lord Jesus wants to have with each of us this Sunday, as we meet his forerunner, his herald, Saint John the Baptist, at the Jordan River.
• John was chosen and sent by God the Father to get his people ready to receive Jesus when at last he openly manifested himself to begin his public ministry. At the Jordan, John blared, not, “I am one crying out in the desert,” but rather, “I am the voice of one crying out in the desert.” John was the voice, the loudspeaker, the spokesperson. The “one crying out” was of course the word, Christ Jesus himself. John’s message, therefore, was God’s message, which John was screaming at the top of his powerful lungs. The message was urgent and clear: “Prepare the way of the Lord, make his paths straight.”
• In the ancient world, the roads were a mess. Every time there was a battle, the roads would be attacked and bridges destroyed, to try to stop the advance of the enemy. The weather took its toll as well, leading to all types of serious potholes and other obstacles. Any time a dignitary would be coming, they would have either to fix the roads or build new ones so that the rolling caravan accompanying him could arrive without delay and without hassle. John the Baptist is telling us that to get ready for the Lord whom we are constantly bidding to come this Advent, we, too, need to prepare a way for him. We, too, need to make straight the paths. In the ancient world, preparing such a path meant a great deal of manual work. Quoting the Prophet Isaiah, John says, “Every valley shall be filled, and every mountain and hill shall be made low, and the crooked shall be made straight, and the rough ways made smooth” (Lk 3:5). We have to call those topographical formations by their proper names. We have to make low the mountains of our pride and egocentrism. We have to fill in the valleys that come from a shallow prayer life, a minimalistic way of living our faith. We have to straighten out whatever crooked paths we’ve been walking: if we’ve been involved in some secret sins or sinful behaviors, the Lord calls us through John the Baptist to end it; if we’ve been involved in some dishonest practices, we’re called to straighten them out and do restitution; if we’ve been harboring grudges or hatred, or failing to reconcile with others, now’s the time to clear away all the debris; and if we’ve been pushing God off the side of the road, if we’ve been saying to Him that we don’t really have the time for him, now’s the time to get our priorities straight. The gift of Advent will succeed or fail on the basis of how well we convert and clear our lives of sin so that the Lord may come to us.
• There’s a reason why John the Baptist preached at the Jordan River. It was more than just a source of water where he could baptize. The Jordan River was the place that represented the border between the desert — where the Jews wandered aimlessly for 38 years after centuries of slavery in Egypt— and the Promised Land. By preaching his message there, John was inviting the Jews of his day to come out of the bondage of slavery, to leave their faults and wandering, sinful lives behind, and enter into the promised land full of God’s blessings. The Baptist preaches the same thing to us this Sunday. He points us to a new exodus — from death to life, from sin to sanctity — and states very clearly that the path from the desert into the new promised land isthrough conversion and the forgiveness of sins. 
• To convert means more than to eliminate a bad habit. The Greek word for conversion is metanoete, which means to rethink and question one’s whole way of living, judging it not according to polls and the lives of celebrities but seeing our whole life through the eyes of God and making the love of God and others the measure and the criteria of our life. To convert means resolving to live the way Jesus Christ lived and taught us to live. It ultimately means a death and resurrection in which we die to the old Adam and begin to live a new life with Christ by means of the forgiveness of sins gratuitously bestowed in the Sacraments of Baptism and Penance.
• This summons of John the Baptist to conversion could not be more timely for us as individuals, as a Church and as a country. There are many applications but permit me to focus on just one, since this week the Supreme Court has heard the oral arguments in the Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health case, which, God-willing, will overturn the shameful 1973 Roe v. Wade and Doe v. Bolton decisions and the 1992 Casey v. Planned Parenthood. Those judgments made abortion legal in all 50 States for basically any reason and has led to nearly 60 million deaths of totally innocent younger brothers and sisters in the womb since, as well as to so much collateral damage to mothers, fathers, grandparents, siblings, and society as a whole. Saint John Paul II taught that we need to convert from a “culture of death” — with its completely individualistic concept of freedom, fostered by powerful cultural, economic, political, legal and educational currents — to a “culture of life.” He repeated to us Moses’ words to the Jews: “I have set before you this day life and good, death and evil, … a blessing and a curse. Choose life, therefore, that you and your descendants may live.” For almost five decades, our culture has been permitting the choice of abortion, what Pope Francis has, somewhat shockingly but truthfully, called “hiring a hitman to solve a problem.” Some in our society actually celebrate this form of industrial-scale assassination of our younger brothers and sisters as a civil rights advance, even though we know that when the inalienable right to life isn’t protected and promoted, every human right is for that reason insecure and vulnerable to the decisions of the older or stronger or more politically or legally connected.
• One doesn’t have to be Christian or religious, of course, to recognize and affirm the right to life; all we need is basic biology and elementary ethics, since we know that every child conceived is neither the mother nor the father but a different, unique human being with 46 chromosomes who, barring a tragedy, if given the ability to grow, will mature in the womb, be born, and will progress through all of the stages of human life, just like you and I have. Ethically, we need to treat those who are younger in accordance with their human dignity. No one should have the right to discard any other human beings, whether pre-schoolers, those just born, or waiting to be born: they’re all equally human and equally deserving of our protection, welcome and love. But as Christians we have far greater motivation to get involved. Jesus told us, “Whatever you do to the least of my brothers and sisters, you do to me,” and, “Whoever receives a little child in my name, receives me.” The abortion regime is, therefore, like giving Herod the permission to attack Jesus and the Holy Innocents, since every abortion is, by Jesus’ own words, like taking his life in utero. Every abortion is giving those in white coats a chance to rip another human being apart, doing things even worse than what the Roman soldiers did to Jesus on Good Friday. When we, converted, begin to look at life through the eyes of God and make the love of God and others the real measure and the criteria of life, we begin to see just how sick abortion is.
• But as Christians we also know there’s hope. That just as God brought the greatest good of all time (the Resurrection) from the worst evil of all time (the Crucifixion), so he can likewise bring the good of a culture of life even from the ghastly evil of the culture of death. He offers that hope because forgiveness of sins is possible: forgiveness for mothers who have chosen abortion, many out of fear; fathers of unborn children who have abandoned the mothers and pressured them toward abortion; family members and friends who have recommended or paid for abortion; the doctors and nurses involved in the grisly business; politicians who have supported abortion; judges who have invented a right to abortion; those in the media and education who have promoted abortion; and everyone else whose individual choices have led to the death of the innocent and the fostering of a culture of death. There’s hope. John points out Jesus as the Lamb of God who takes away the sins of the world, and one of those sins that Jesus has come to take away is the sin of abortion.
• That is why this message of the conversion from the Baptist each Advent is such “Good News,” because it’s an expression of God’s love giving us a second chance, or a third chance, or a seventy times seventh chance. We’re sinners, yes, but God comes to save us from those sins, and Jesus tells us that heaven rejoices more for one repentant sinner than for 99 who never needed to repent. After 49 years of a culture that cries out to heaven for justice, we could bring God great joy through repentance, reparation, coming to receive his mercy and bringing others to it. That’s why all of us need to pray not just for our Supreme Court justices, that they will have the wisdom and the courage to overturn the perversion of law that 49 years ago made abortion legal through the United States, but for all of us in the country, that together we build a culture in which every child is protected in law, welcomed in life, and loved until the end.
• As we prepare for the awesome privilege to receive Jesus in Holy Communion this Sunday, let us not just ask him to strengthen us for that mission of the conversion of our culture, our fellow family members, friends, neighbors, and parishioners, but to help us, through lovingly receiving him under the most humble appearances of bread and wine, come to recognize and love him in the least of his brethren among us, the littlest boys and girls in the womb, whose silent screams call us to conversion together with John the Baptist.

The Gospel on which today’s homily was based was: 

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