God Isn’t Fixing This

Homily preached by the Rev. James La Macchia
Trinity Parish of Newton Centre
December 13, 2015

The Third Sunday of Advent – Advent 3C

Zephaniah 3: 14-20
Canticle 9
Philippians 4: 4-7
Luke 3: 7-18

My Friends:

Here we are on “Gaudete” or “Rejoicing” Sunday.  We have reached the halfway point in Advent, which we mark by lighting the pink candle on our Advent wreath this morning.  It signals that we now have less than two weeks to prepare our hearts and our world for welcoming our Lord Jesus Christ, who came into our history as a vulnerable and innocent child, at Christmas.  And so, Saint Paul’s admonition in today’s reading from his Letter to the Philippians:  “The Lord is near.  Do not worry about anything….” came to me as a thunderclap—especially in the wake of the foreign and domestic terror attacks of the past month.  “Really,” I thought to myself, “do not worry about anything?”  And then, seeming to add insult to an incandescent injury, Saint Paul goes on to say, “…but in everything by prayer and supplication with thanksgiving let your requests be made known to God.  And the peace of God, which surpasses all understanding, will guide your hearts and minds in Christ Jesus.”  Clearly, I groused, Saint Paul’s words have nothing to do with the backdrop to this Christmas of 2015 and our violent and distracted world.  I wonder just how many of us are “rejoicing”—let alone “praying”—with just eleven so-called shopping-days until Christmas and, more ominously, in the overshadowing presence of such sheer evil—foreign and domestic—in our midst.

Icon Holy Innocents

And, if we widen the lens of our vision just a little, we must somehow reckon as well with the sad irony that children are suffering and dying all over our world:  8,000 die every day from illnesses caused by lack of access to clean water; 20 percent of American children live in poverty; and at least 250,000 civilians—many of them children—have been killed to date in Syria’s on-going civil war, with almost one-half of that country’s population having been driven by the fighting to foreign refugee camps or to the dangerous and unwelcoming shores of southeastern Europe.  We need not look any further than our news outlets to see that Bethlehem’s “Holy Innocents” are still being slaughtered in their thousands by the “King Herods” of our world!  For so many of us, rejoicing may not even be on our agenda this Advent.