Are you ready for Christmas? Who has started buying Christmas presents? Has anyone baked any Christmas treats? Anyone watched their favorite Christmas movie yet? There are less than 3 weeks left for the big day. 19 days to focus on the key person: the miraculous pregnancy, His shocked mother expecting her first and only child, His birth that would change the entire world, His killing by the Romans because of his unwavering beliefs.
This life altering person is of course…. John the Baptist. John is an interestingly odd character, isn't he? He eats grasshoppers and wears a camel’s hair shirt and yet he is the chosen one to announce the coming of the Messiah. Yet we still have a tendency to want to skip over John, and even all of Advent? It is so much more fun to think about Christmas presents and a newborn baby and jingle bells and Home Alone. Isn’t Christmas really about the birth of Jesus as told by Matthew and Luke with Mary and Joseph, the angels, the manger, the shepherds, and the wise men? That is what Christmas is all about. So we focus on the baby Jesus.
So we have to ask ourselves, what does John the Baptist really have do with Christmas? For Mark, john the Baptist is everything. Instead of Bethlehem and choirs of angels, he begins the story of Jesus’ coming with a prophet blaring and baptizing in the wilderness of Judea. No mention of Bethlehem, no mention of angels and not even any mention of Mary and the manger. He jumps right in and starts his Gospel off with a bang…with John the Baptist.
It is so much easier to think about Angels singing than to listen to John the Baptist calling us to go into the desert and repent. But as Christians, during this advent season, that is exactly what we are called to do. I have never seen a Christmas card with John the Baptist on it.
But if I did, I think it should say, “WITHOUT ADVENT, THERE IS NO CHRISTMAS”. To prepare for Christmas we Christians must pass through the desert to get to the manger. John is calling the people 2000 years ago and each of us to go into the desert. What does the desert symbolize for us this advent? Throughout the Bible the desert represents the obstacles and hardships that stand between us and God. The desert demands an arduous journey that we must undertake to achieve what we need.
The Jewish people knew their deserts. It was through the desert that they escaped, wandered for 40 years, to their freedom. Jesus went into the desert for 40 days to prepare for his public ministry. The gospel mentions at least 10 times that Jesus goes to the desert to pray or to talk with His disciples.
Why did all the inhabitants of Jerusalem go out to John? Why did they go out to the desert, to repent and be baptized? They felt an inner calling. They went to find God. They had that hope. They believed that God could be found in the most Unlikely of places…the desert.
This past week we commemorated the 40th anniversary of the killing of 4 churchwomen in El Salvador. Any of us over, maybe 55 years old, probably remember that day. It was a tragedy that shook the world.
On Dec 2,1980, during the first week of Advent, these 4 women went missing and on Dec 4 they were found buried in a shallow grave. They, like thousands of other Salvadorans, had been killed by government death squads. Each of the women have a unique advent story for us.
Sr Maura Clarke, after her parents emigrated from Ireland, grew up in Queens NY. She joined the Maryknoll community and as a sister she served in Nicaragua on and off for 20 years before going to El Salvador. She was 49 years old. Sr Ita Ford grew up in Brooklyn NY. She joined the Maryknoll community and as a sister she worked in Chile until answering Archbishop Romero’s call to come serve in El Salvador. She was 40 years old.
For those of you who might not know, Maryknoll was founded in 1911, in the United States, to be missionaries to the World. It has 3 parts the Maryknoll Priests and Brothers, the Sisters and the lay missioners.
The 3rd churchwoman was Sr Dorothy Kazel who grew up in Cleveland. She joined the Ursuline Sisters. In 1974 she joined the Cleveland Diocese’s mission team in El Salvador. She was 41 years old.
Jean Donovan grew up in Westport CT. With a Master’s in Business Administration she had a well-paying job in Cleveland. She also answered the call to join the Cleveland Diocese’s mission team to El Salvador. Jean was engaged but wanted to work for 2 years in El Salvador before getting marring. Jean was 27 years old.
Now We ask the same question that we asked about the followers of John, Why did these women go to El Salvador. The answer is the same. They went to El Salvador because they had that feeling, that hope, to find God, to find Jesus in the most unlikely of places…in the people of El Salvador.
They each knew the danger. Just 8 months earlier their dear friend and mentor, archbishop Oscar Romero, now Saint Oscar Romero, was martyred in El Salvador while saying Mass. These women found Jesus in the marginalized and destitute. They found Jesus In the suffering and the powerless. They found Jesus in the orphans and the hopeless. These women found Jesus in the people of El Salvador. El Salvador which means “the Savior”.
So why were the churchwomen killed? Let’s first ask why was John the Baptist killed. He was killed because he condemned Herod, the Roman-appointed King of Judea, for divorcing his wife and marrying his brother’s wife. The churchwomen were killed for the same reason. The government suspected them because they stood up for the poor and orphaned and accompanied them and walked in their shoes in their struggles against THEIR government.
In Westport CT at Assumption church where Jean was baptized and made her first communion, there is a plaque dedicated to her with some of the last words she wrote to a friend 2 weeks before her death. “Several times I have decided to leave El Salvador. I almost could except for the children, the poor bruised victims of this insanity. Who would care for them? “
John the Baptist asks us not only to come out into the desert to find the Lord but to repent. Repent from what? from our sins of course. But also repent for not keeping God as the focus of our life. Repent for letting our faith become routine. Repent from habits that hurt others. Repent for believing that “I am too old to change. I am just that way”.
Why are we asked to repent? Because we know our sins block us from viewing Jesus. Our failures make it impossible to find Jesus. Repentance helps us to acknowledge our addictions, our priorities, our preoccupations. The good news is while our sins may block our access to Jesus, they do not block Jesus’ access to us. Repentance offers us hope…hope for a new way of living, living in a closer relationship with Jesus.
The Gospel of Mark is thought by scholars to be the first Gospel to be written and today we hear the first words of the first Gospel. It starts with the words “the beginning of the Gospel of Jesus Christ the Son of God”. In John the Baptist the promise of the prophet Malachi that “I will send my messenger: and the words of Isaiah “ a voice crying out to prepare the way”, are fulfilled. There is reason for great hope because a new life is being offered to us.
We just heard the very first words of the Gospel “the beginning of the Gospel of Jesus Christ the Son of God” but at the conclusion of the Gospel Mark he does not say the end of the Gospel. That is because the Gospel message, the good news, has no end. It continues in the faithful follower who hears the good news and is able to follow it. And today on this 2nd Sunday of Advent we receive and continue to carry out the Gospel message.
So I close this homily with the same question that we started with: “Are you ready for Christmas?” I guess the better question is are you ready for Advent? I guess the even more important question is what is the purpose of Advent. The great Jesuit theologian Fr Jon Sobrino, when talking about the 4 churchwomen, put it this way: "In Ita, Maura, Dorothy and Jean, God visited El Salvador.”
That Is the purpose of Advent….to find Jesus in the unexpected places…..and then to be Jesus to others. I will be praying for us on our 19 day Advent quest to find Him.
Deacon John Murph participated in the Maryknoll Pilgrimage to Central America last January and visited the site in El Salvador where the four churchwomen were killed. Learn more about immersion trips with Maryknoll at www.trips.maryknoll.us and learn more about the churchwomen at https://www.maryknollsisters.org/40thanniversary/