1st Sunday of Advent: Season B

Peace be with you and welcome to our celebration of the Mass for the 1 ^st Sunday of Advent and Happy New Year! You know, if this weren’t the “Year of Weird” as I’ve started calling it, you’d have come into a much fuller Church today, with no blue tape on the pews, and found brand new Missalettes with 2021 printed on the covers, ready to pick up and use during our celebration of our first Advent Mass. At least we do have the Advent Wreath present with the first candle burning to signal the beginning of this special season and the beginning of a new liturgical year.

So, as I started meditating on Advent 2021 and got ready to write a homily for this weekend, I couldn’t help thinking about how completely different everything is from last year at this very same time. At first my mind dwelt on all of the bad; businesses closed, jobs lost, illnesses, deaths, a complete disruption of our “normal” American – gosh, I’d have to say our whole global, lifestyle. A general worldwide atmosphere of anxiety, bewilderment, or even fear. If you’d asked me a year ago, I wouldn’t have been able to tell you what “social distancing” really even meant.

Then you know what happened? As I sat there thinking about all of the negatives, I sort of got a big spiritual tap on the shoulder. As I reread all three of today’s readings a question formed in my heart, “Paul really, what is Advent supposed to be all about anyway?” Friends, just think about how you’ve spent most of your Advent Seasons in past years? Have you ever known people who’ve said they’re glad when Christmas was finally over so they could slow down and relax? Have you ever been there yourself? I know I have and, I’ll have to admit, it wasn’t my spiritual activities that consumed all my time either.

I once heard a somewhat cynical old Priest say this during his Advent Homily, “Most Catholics really only recognize two liturgical seasons, Lent and not-Lent.” Well, here we are in the “not-Lent” Season of Advent 2021. My sisters and brothers, here’s what I’m going to personally do, and I would challenge you to do the same thing during this very unusual Advent Season we find ourselves in. It’s really what all of us should have been doing during every single Advent Season past but maybe this year we’re being given an opportunity to slow down and make it a reality. I’m going to get in touch with the fact that I’m not, yet the person God wants me to be and – I need a savior.

Nothing could be more appropriate for Advent, as we prepare to celebrate birth of Christ, our Lord and Savior, then the hymn we hear over and over during this special season, “O Come, O Come Emmanuel and ransom captive Israel, that mourns in lonely exile here.” Now, if we flash back to last year’s Advent Season with our days jammed full of Christmas shopping, social events, new movie premiers, and overall holiday preparations, the song’s lyrics might have just pleasantly gone in one ear and out the other. This year however, I’m moving a little slower and for me personally, the hymn’s words resonate a little deeper in my heart. I need a savior.

St Augustine once said we’re all in the grip of the lust to self-dominate. Now, some 1600 years later, we literally live in a society that encourages us to focus almost totally on ourselves. A society that encourages the lust to self-dominate. What’s in it for me? Who are you to tell me what to do? I’m beautiful, and your words can’t bring me down. I’m OK, you’re OK. They are all little mantras 21 ^st Century Americans love to embrace, and they are all counter to the heart of Biblical teaching. It seems humanity is a big dysfunctional family that needs intervention. For this, we all need a savior. O come, O come Emmanuel.

With the first reading we heard today from the 63 ^rd Chapter of Isaiah, the Church has given us a keynote address for Advent. We heard, “Why do you let us wander, O Lord, from your ways.” As I meditate on this simple phrase I pray, O Lord let me enter into the knowledge and feeling that I have wondered from the path you want me to walk. I need the grace and discernment to recognize the path that will fulfill your plan for my creation, and I need the grace to follow that path. For this, I need a savior. Again, we heard, “Behold, you are angry, and we are sinful.” As I meditate on this simple phrase O God, I know in my heart your anger is not the anger of man, but it is a loving passion to set things right. I know O God; you burn with a loving passion to put us all in right relationship with you. For this, we need a savior. Finally, we heard, “We are the clay and you the potter. We are all the work of your hands.” With this simple phrase O God, you are perhaps asking the most difficult of all. You are asking me to surrender my will to be shaped by your hands. For this, I need a savior.

My friends, I hope you see what the biggest challenge for us all during this Advent Season is. We must, must all recognize the absolute need for a savior. Perhaps most critical in the recognition of our need for a savior is, however, we are not talking exclusively about Jesus Christ, but about God. God is eternally a Triune God, Father, Son, and Holy Spirit. Jesus of Nazareth was not some free-floating holy man. Jesus was both fully divine and fully human, but if the fully human Jesus is not God incarnate, then salvation is not from God after all. If Jesus is not the second person of the Trinitarian Godhead as attested to in the Nicene Creed, then God’s self was not directly involved in the manger at Bethlehem nor the Cross on Golgotha.

So, your homework is, do everything you can during this Advent Season to increase the feeling and need to be saved by God from a sinful world. And as you prayerfully visualize your savior, Jesus Christ, go beyond the cute little baby in the manger but also remember the bloody, battered body on the cross. That is the unimaginable demonstration of the love that saved us all. O God, I need a savior.

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Paul T. Keil, 18-19 July 2026 16 th Sunday in Ordinary Time: Season A Peace be with you and welcome to our celebration of the Mass for the 16 th Sunday in Ordinary Time. OK, some of you may remember I’ve said before, in Matthew’s Gospel, Chapters 5, 6, and 7 comprise the whole Sermon on the Mount, but did you know Chapter 13, where we are today, is often called the Sermon of the Parables. In this single chapter Matthew strings together seven separate parables from Jesus. Today we just heard numbers two, three, and four. Last weekend we heard the first one with the Parable of the Sower and what happens to the seeds scattered in different places. Next weekend you’ll hear the final three parables from Chapter 13 so, be sure to come back. So, what is Jesus saying in these readings. Last week we heard the parable about seeds as an allegory for Jesus’s words falling on a path and being eaten by birds, falling on rocky ground and withering with no roots, falling into thorns and being choked by life’s anxieties, and falling on fertile soil to bear fruit. Today we have Jesus giving us another parable about planting seeds and again, just like last week, Jesus’ disciples ask him to explain the parable. And since He stops to explain both parables about planting, he just might be trying to emphasize something important here for his disciples, and for us. One thing is clear in these parables however, God’s Kingdom will always coexist in this physical world with forces opposing it, like the wheat and the weeds growing together. Now many religious people struggle with this condition. Some see it as predestination. A weed in the wheat field or a seed in the rocks must represent people predestined to go to hell. That’s what it literally says, right? Still others ask in frustration; this is God we’re talking about, why does God’s Kingdom have to struggle with opposing forces at all? Why doesn’t God just get rid of the evil? Well, our old friend, St Thomas Aquinas wrote quite a bit about good and evil coexisting in our fallen world. He said sometimes the two are so tightly interwoven that you couldn’t have certain types of good without certain types of evil. For example, he said simply, “there would be no virtue of the martyr without the cruelty of the tyrant.” Friends, God delights in our freedom, our intelligence, and our cooperation when we freely make the decision to accept God’s love. Without free will we cannot choose to love. Jesus’ explanation of the wheat and weed parable certainly helps when he says; “The harvest is the end of the age, and the harvesters are angels” and in the next verse he says; “The Son of Man will send his angels.” There is a very important take-away here every single Christian should remember. Eternal judgment belongs to God alone, not to anyone else – period. This is a consistent message Jesus gives us in all four Gospels but unfortunately, there are those who sometimes forget this simple divine fact about humanity’s relationship with the unlimited creator of the universe. We may perceive an individual as being bad or even intrinsically evil but judgment for their immortal souls belongs exclusively to God. I always like an old adage that goes like this, “if I ever get to heaven, I may be surprised by who I see there, and they may be even more surprised to see me.” I’ll admit, over the years for a long time, as I’ve meditated on this parable about weeds and wheat or last week’s parable about seeds, especially the ones falling into thorns choked by worldly anxiety, there was something always bothering me. You see, if we’re not careful both parables can make life, heaven, and hell sound kind of random or worse yet, they can make God’s love sound like it is exclusively reserved for preselected people. I know now however, there is nothing further from the truth. If you’ve lived life for a while and think back to times when you were say maybe,,, struggling in school, or first dating, or trying to make ends meet while raising a family, or competing for promotions at work, or trying to buy that first house, you realize there may have been times when your life wasn’t very spiritually fruitful. In fact, I now realize there were times in my own past when thoughts of God, salvation, or prayer were nowhere in my daily routine. I even wonder; was there a period in my life when I was one of those weeds or a seed in the thorns? Thankfully, with reflection on the whole of Scripture, guidance from the Church, and maybe some help from the Holy Spirit I realize now these parables are not “either / or” propositions. God doesn’t intentionally create some people as weeds and some people as wheat nor does God throw souls into the wind to randomly fall in the thorns, or on stony ground, or in fertile soil. If you’re not careful, you can come to those conclusions, however. You can read the Bible too narrowly and pick out verses here and there that help support your personal image of what you want God to be. Those tend to be the same people who like to do God’s judgment work for him. Here’s the thing; some of us here today may have actually spent some time as those ugly weeds but at some point, with God’s help, we decided to change and now we’re wheat growing in that good old fertile soil. My sisters and brothers, sin must never be viewed as a permanent state. Like we heard from the Book of Wisdom today, “you gave your children good ground for hope that you would permit repentance for their sins.” This is the greatest gift of our Christian faith; God loves us all so much, even great sinners, God is always ready to forgive. So, here’s a challenge and homework for us all today. Most of us know people out there from all age groups, but especially some of our youth, who may be temporarily living life like the weeds in our parable today or maybe tangled in those thorns of life’s tribulations. First and foremost, we must be confident, sin is not a permanent state of life, second, we don’t judge, third, pray for them no matter how nasty they may seem. And finally, if we’re really, really brave, we offer them a hand to pull them up and out of the weeds, rocks, or thorns into God’s fertile soil.