Third Sunday of Advent, December 15, 2024

2024 Dec 15 SUN: THIRD SUNDAY OF ADVENT
Zep 3: 14-18a/ Is 12: 2-3. 4. 5-6 (6)/ Phil 4: 4-7/ Lk 3: 10-18

Very quickly, I want to let you know that we have a number of people who are coming forward and seeking to enter the Catholic Christian way of life, and therefore we are planning to reform our team for what we properly call the Order of Christian initiation of adults, the OCIA.

You'll remember it used to be called the RCIA for the Rite of Christian Initiation of Adults, but now we're told that Order is the proper word rather than Rite.

So we'll be making plans to come together after the first of the year, so you have time to consider whether you might want to participate in the process of bringing people into the Catholic Christian faith.

Obviously, today the theme is joy, and we hear this very clearly from St. Paul. We also hear it from the prophet Zephaniah.

He wrote a very brief book of about three chapters. It is surprising that he ends up talking about joy, because Zephaniah is also the source of a hymn which we don't sing very much anymore.

In Latin it's called the Dies Irae, English is Day of Wrath, and it emphasizes God's anger. So it's surprising that this same prophet should talk to us about our cause for joy for the coming of a Savior.

And in the Gospel we find cause for joy as well. We may think of John the Baptist as a severe sort of person, but it says at the end of today's Gospel passage that he preached good news to the people.

Well obviously we need to consider joy. Some of you may know that I have made a study on my own of what has been called emotional intelligence.

The idea behind that is that we seek to understand our own feeling states. To recognize that, for instance, anger can be channeled into steady work to undo injustice, for instance.

When we understand and are at peace with our own feelings, we can look at other people and develop what we might call fellow feeling or empathy with the people in our life, understanding ourselves as feeling people who are necessarily pushed around by the circumstances of life.

And we remember at all times if we can be pushed around we are limited creatures of God and we always remember our relationship with God, our Creator. In recent times we've been given a sort of vocabulary for understanding feelings.

There have been a couple of animated films that have come out in recent years. The first one, Inside Out, came out in 2015.

And then there was a sequel just this last summer: Inside Out 2. And the feelings in one person are characters in the film.

And in both, there is the character called Joy, and Joy is understood to be kind of a coordinator among all the feelings. We can think about this and realize that, for any one of us, to have joy is to have a sense of the whole of life, the entirety of life.

And we might ask ourselves where is joy when we are feeling sad? -- For instance, when we lose someone close to us.

One thing that sadness can do for us is demonstrate to us how important that person was, what a gift he or she was to us. And ultimately it informs a sense of joy, which joy is about the whole picture of life, the whole variety of life.

So as we come together on this day of Advent called Rejoice Sunday, Gaudete Sunday, we seek to understand that we can be joyful as we look ahead to our God, specifically Jesus, the Son of God, bringing all things to completion and perfection. We've said in recent weeks that we know of people who just think of that occurrence as "the end of the world."

We all have limited imaginations and the notion of the end of the world particularly limits our imaginations because, when all is brought to perfection, that is really the beginning. We step onto the threshold of eternal life itself and an unending joy.

So we give thanks that this season of Advent is preparing us to step onto the threshold of eternity, to find our complete vocation in praise of God who created us to praise him without end.

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I left out a lot from Saturday evening.  I left out John the Baptist almost entirely, and he is described as bringing "good news" to people.  The fact that he tells people, essentially, to do what is expected of you, is a response against elaborate sacrifices for supposedly getting God's attention.