Prayer before Lighting Wreath:
Lord, God, we, your church, await the coming of our Savior, who enlightens our hearts and dispels the darkness of ignorance and sin. Pour forth your blessings upon us as we light the candle on this wreath. May the light reflect the splendor of Christ, who is Lord, for ever and ever. Amen
1st Reading: Baruch 5: 1-9
2nd Reading: Philippians 1: 4-6, 8-11
Gospel: Luke 3: 1-6
Homily: Drew Christiansen
See your children gathered
from the west and east
at the word of the Holy One.
Baruch 5: 5
Our opening reading this morning from Baruch re-affirms the prophetic message of the post-Exilic prophets that God will gather his people, not only the exiled people of Israel, but all the peoples of the Earth. The most famous of these visions is found in chapter 2 of Isaiah:
“All the nations shall flow to [the mountain of the Lord],
And many peoples will come and say:
“Come, let us go up to the mountain of the Lord,
. . . that he may teach us his ways, And that we may walk in his paths.”
In the Isaiah’s vision, those who come to Mt. Zion are not just the returning Israelite exiles but “many peoples.” Psalm 87 is shockingly explicit about the inclusiveness of God’s Kingdom: Among those who know me I count Rahab and Babylon. Babylon the city of Israel’s exile, degradation and dispersion. The lament we know as Psalm 137, “By the waters of Babylon, we sat and wept/ On the aspens of the land, we hung up our harps,” ends with a note of uttermost hostility: “Happy the man who shall seize and smash your little ones against the rock.” Yet, in the divine dispensation, according to Ps. 87, Babylon belongs to God’s family and calls Jerusalem mother. Behold, Philistia and Tyre, with Ethiopia—This one was born there, they say.
The boldness of Psalm 87’s rendering of the theme of universal salvation is exceptional. Philistia, that is Palestine, belongs to God’s family, so does Tyre, that is, southern Lebanon. To this day, Israel holds them as enemies. And Ethiopia represents the peoples of Africa and the far ends of the earth. (Today’s Israel is uncertain about Ethiopians, sometimes giving them refuge and sometimes deporting them.) All nations are God’s children. In reminding the Israelites of God’s love for all peoples, the Psalmist anticipates our Advent theme: Discerning voices from the periphery.
The post-Exilic prophets attempted to give the Israelites a sense of the universality of God’s love that would overcome the hostilities and resentments of their tribal history. Israel, as Jewish theologians will tell you even today, was to be the school where others would come to know God with the intimacy Israel had known in the desert. Unfortunately, today the Middle East is still a center of rivalry, enmity, and combat between peoples and nations. The most obvious of these rivalries is manifest in the dispossession and persecution of the Palestinian people.
In his recent writing, Massimo Faggioli has reminded readers that Pope Francis’ sense of mission to the peripheries has taken him to Iraq and Abu Dhabi. In the case of Iraq, he wanted to let the Iraqi people know that after 20 years of war they were not forgotten and also to affirm hard-pressed Shia Muslims of his solidarity with them. In Abu Dhabi, he joined in a program of tolerance to alleviate the tensions between Christians and Muslims.
From Lampedeusa to Lesbos, to the U.S.-Mexican border, Francis has been an advocate for migrants and refugees. Thanks to his devotion to people on the periphery, Faggioli writes, “Rome is much closer to becoming a truly “holy city” that brings the Bishop of Rome closer to the immigrants and refugees, to prison inmates, and the marginalized.”
Writing of Pope Francis’ synodal way, Faggioli writes, the pope hopes to give the Church “a self-understanding more aware of the non-European and non-American Catholic churches and the richness and complexity of the one human family.” Few Catholics know that besides the dominant Latin church we know…there are 24 Catholic churches. The Second Vatican Council affirmed that these communities that we used to call “rites,” singling out their distinctive liturgical traditions, are churches in the full sense. Francis goes farther, however, teaching in Evangelii Gaudium that the beauty of the church lies in its diversity. The Gospel, he teaches, takes a unique form in every culture, giving rise to distinctive forms of Christianity. This teaching has profound implications for Christian identity in the 21st century.
In particular, it means we must become more accepting of diversity among Christians around the world. We must also anticipate more diversity still as long subject peoples, like Native Americans, enculturate the Gospel to their own culture and adapt their forms of piety to their own traditions. In 1999. I participated in the First Congress of Catholic Patriarchs of the Middle East. Each morning Mass was celebrated by a patriarch or bishop of a different tradition. There were different languages, different vestments, different rituals. Most were sung or chanted, not recited. I confess that what finally got to me as a westerner was the different sense of time. Each day the liturgies seemed to get longer, and by the end of the week I fled the featured Mass to the Latin Mass the Latin Patriarch celebrated early in the morning with the nuns. Though he celebrated in Latin, the Mass was in western time. It took only a half hour or a little more to be celebrated.
Walking the synodal path will tax us in ways we little expect. I would hope that after sharing Pope Francis’ vision of the Church, I would be more patient of a long liturgy in a very strange tongue.
Faggioli conceives of another demand in the pope’s appreciation for the global diversity of Christianity, namely, we must accept a diminished convergence between American values and interests and those of the universal church.
Of course, since the time of John XXIII and the Second Vatican Council, there have been many disparities between American interests and modern Catholic political values. But during the Cold War and post-Cold War periods, there was also much collaboration in the promotion of human rights, for example, in the liberation of Eastern Europe and on curbing the nuclear arms race. Since the invasion of Iraq and the War on Terror in 2003, however, there have been more obvious and growing divisions.
Faggioli believes, moreover, the U.S. Catholic Right has aggravated the divides and tensions not only between the Vatican and the U.S. but also within the American church by promoting its own version of social teaching that promotes American interests over against Francis’ love of the peripheries.
All of us as American Catholics will have to adjust ourselves for membership in the church of the peripheries, where the influence and dominance of the United States will be problematic, and where solidarity with the Earth’s poor, afflicted and stateless will mean sacrificing some of our privilege and enduring disagreements with our fellow citizens. “The ‘marginal Jew’ Jesus Christ and his relationship with the social and geographical peripheries of his time,” observes Faggioli, “have become more paradigmatic than before for the Roman papacy.” We can add, not just for the papacy but for the entire church.
I would like to suggest one group that especially needs our support because they are uniquely on the periphery, at the very edge of organized political life, I mean stateless people. They are refugees, most of them, but refugees in a very special way. They have no state of their own. The Rohingya are the most egregious example. Myanmar, where they have lived for hundreds of years, does not accept them. Bangladesh, where many now dwell, even though they are Muslims like the Bangladeshis, does not want them.
Think of the Kurds, spread in a band across four countries: Syria, Turkey, Iraq and Iran. While they have a semi-autonomous region in northern Iraq, in Turkey they are persecuted. In Syria, they are subject to Turkish attack and remain as a bulwark against ISIS for the U.S. and others. Even in Iraq they are subject to Turkish attack and raids by ISIS. Without a state of their own, the Kurds are without the forces and resources to uphold their rights, except in limited ways in a limited space in northern Iraq.
Then there are the Palestinians. In 1993, with the Oslo Accords it appeared the nationhood they had dreamed of and the UN had promised with the 1948 Partition Plan would finally be realized. But it wasn’t to be. The Final Status talks, scheduled for 1996, were delayed. Camp David II in 2000 failed to bring agreement on key issues, and the Clinton Administration’s last-minute initiative at Taba the same year failed to bring the two sides together. Since that time, we all have been witnesses to the depredations the Palestinians have suffered, most recent the expulsions from the East Jerusalem neighborhoods of Sheikh Jirrah and Silwan, the biblical Siloam.
The Israeli colonization of the West Bank, the remaining 22 per cent of the land intended for the Palestinians, continues unimpeded. It proceeds for ultra-nationalist motives: to occupy all of biblical Palestine, what the Likud calls Judea and Samaria. Settlers also occupy the high ground, the Judean hills that are part of the West Bank, for environmental reasons.
The aquifers on which both people rely for water are found there. I can offer you numerous stories about the inequitable distribution of water. Let me relate just one.
In 2000, for the Great Jubilee, the French Government built an aqueduct to carry water from newly opened West Bank wells to the city of Hebron. When the water failed to flow in the expected volume, the Palestinian authorities sent inspectors to determine the source of the trouble. There they found Israeli water rustlers diverting the water into tank trucks. When the inspectors returned with Palestinian police, the Israeli army was there to deny them access and tell them the well was off-limits in the future.
This is what it is to be a stateless people, without a government to enforce and uphold your most fundamental rights, without the resources to defend against the greed and the power of your hostile neighbors.
So, as we walk the synodal way with people on the peripheries, I suggest we pay particular attention to stateless people, particularly those stateless people who are reduced to a marginal life by decades of U.S. policy. Let us witness with Pope Francis on their behalf, and as a faith community let us work for reparation, let us repair the injustice done in our names. Amen.
Spiritual Communion:
Anima Christe prayer from the beginning of Ignatius’ spiritual exercises
Soul of Christ, sanctify me.
Body of Christ, save me.
Blood of Christ, inebriate me.
Water from the side of Christ, wash me.
Passion of Christ, strengthen me.
O Good Jesus, hear me.
Within your wounds hide me.
Permit me not to be separated from you.
From the wicked foe, defend me.
At the hour of my death, call me
and bid me come to you
That with your saints I may praise you
For ever and ever. Amen.
Meditation: Jerusalem, by Marylu Hill
A light will shine to all parts of the earth. Many nations shall come to you from afar; and the inhabits of all the limits of the earth. They are drawn to you by the name of the Lord, bearing in their hands their gifts for the king. Every nation shall give joyful praise to you; they shall call you the chosen one through all the ages, forever.