NOTE: Throughout the Advent season, we’ll post a reflection on the readings for the upcoming Sunday in Advent just a few days before so individuals and groups can reflect in anticipation or incorporate it into their meetings, homilies, etc. The reflection will be available on our homepage through the weekend and then archived on our Advent 2023 webpage.
The reflection below is written by Jamie T. Phelps, OP, from the 2008 Advent reflection booklet, “Be Watchful and Alert – Seek God’s Spirit in Our World.”
by Jamie T. Phelps, OP
2 Samuel 7:1-5, 8B-12, 14A, 16 | Romans 16:25-27 | Luke 1:26-38
Nothing is impossible for God. (Luke 1:37)
As the season of Advent draws to an end, the Church reminds us once again of God’s universal call to salvation. The juxtaposition of the stories of God’s revelations to King David and Mary in today’s readings reminds us that God’s self-gift is offered to the rich and the poor, to men and women alike.
Examining the angelic dialogue with Mary is instructive. The angel’s greeting initiates God’s invitation to Mary’s new life. What follows is even more startling! Mary is invited to become the mother of the Child of God. Mary is frightened and disturbed by the invitation. How can this be? The angel tells her this extraordinary birth is not dependent upon her action alone. She need only say yes to God’s invitation. “The Holy Spirit will come upon you, and the power of the Most High will overshadow you. … Nothing is impossible for God.” (Luke 1:35) Mary acquiesces: “Behold I am the handmaid of God. May it be done to me according to your word.” (Luke 1:37)
Nothing is impossible for God and those who trust in God’s power. Too often, we are overwhelmed by the challenge to overcome the patterns of global poverty, gender and racial domination, and cultural imperialism that divide the human community and deny that all men and women are made in the image and likeness of God. We often deny the existence of social sin because we feel powerless to overcome the human divisions that contradict God’s call to communion. Conformed to patterns of relationships to which we have become accustomed (“the way it’s always been”), we doubt that we or the world can or should change, even when the church mediates God’s invitation to social change.
Oh Emmanuel, come! Come to help us overcome our doubt. Come and help us overcome our denial of the persistence of the structural sins that privilege some groups and oppress others. Come to help us recognize that we are each call to participate collectively in transforming the patterns of relationship that divide the human community. Come, help us to respond to God’s call to live in right relationship and full communion with God, with all human beings, and with creation because of God. Come to remind us that nothing is impossible for God. Come to help us say “yes” to your word power working in and through us, empowering us to do infinitely more than we can ask or imagine! (Ephesians 3:20)
We wonder about the nature of God as human lives are destroyed in violence and earth polluted right now as we read this cry.
We ask “where is God ?”. We need to look closely at the partnership needed for relief of all that is affected. Should we ask, “ where is my compassion?”, and “where is the resulting justice that compassion brings?”. In these things we find our actions interlocked with God and relief from suffering and violence begins with this partnership. May we turn our empathy into compassion.
In the gospels, Jesus often says to one he healed, “Your faith has saved you.” We believe that religious faith is a gift from God, and without God we “can do nothing.” Hence, we can assent to God’s invitation to transform a far from perfect (suffering) world according to our aim to do justice, love the rest of creation (our family/neighbors in a cosmic sense), and advance humbly with the Ultimate Mystery who loves and pardons us and sustains our lives–onward to the Omega point, the fulfillment of the Divine Intention. Humanity being transformed in holy evolution, people of faith, hope and love will do things “greater” than those done by Jesus in
his day. The loving must be tangible, not simply caring. Action, not just thoughts and feelings.
This is so important and yet so difficult to put into our daily thinking. Much easier to think about individual justice and injustice. If there had been more social justice in their day,. Mary and Joseph would not have been in a stable
Rev. Edward J. Schleter
True, Father Ed. As true in that time as when John Donne wrote, “No man is an island.” Today we have social service agencies and homeless shelters, but they are chronically underfunded, their too few employees underpaid and often lacking in public acknowledgment. Our American society needs to be acculturated to esteem public service more, to care more for the “least” of people and the material world, our natural home, rather than extracting and exploiting its resources, polluting its habitats and ignoring its rapid deterioration and death.
Short-sightedness. thinking mainly of me and mine rather than the broader common good and future generations, remains a stumbling block, but the longer view, the more compassionate vision (which is a widespread gift of God learned from Jesus and many other great souls) is growing stronger in the long history of the human race. I hope in the divinely powered evolution of human wisdom and cooperation in mending, protecting and sharing support for all the others that can be felt and understood as kin.