Homily for Second Sunday of Advent - December 6, 2015

Homily for Advent 2

December 6, 2015

Our Only Hope

 

            Maybe it’s because the seventh Star Wars movie is coming out soon, but I’d like to reminisce about one of the best scenes in the first Star Wars movie. If you’ve seen the original trilogy, you know the scene: Obi-Wan Kenobi turns on the robot R2D2, and finds that there is a message inside. It’s a hologram of Princess Leia, who begs for Obi-Wan’s help. The universe is in terrible disarray, and she is desperate to overthrow the evil Empire – and Obi-Wan is the only one who can do it. She concludes by saying, “Help me, Obi-Wan Kenobi…you’re my only hope.”

            Our world is, perhaps, in even more disarray than the world of Star Wars. Just this past week we had another mass shooting, this time in California. Poverty, war, broken families…who will be our “only hope”?

            In 2008, President Obama ran his successful presidential campaign on the slogans “Hope” and “Change”. He thought that his ideas would bring hope. Some of us put our hope in money, or economic change, thinking that “only if I get a little richer, then I would be happy, then life would be better.” Some of us put our hope in public policies like climate change, gun control, or health care, saying, “Once this law is passed, then we will be safe, then the world will change for the better.”

But is that our best hope for a better life? I would like to propose that we have only one hope: our world, our nation, our family, and our own hearts need to turn to Jesus. This is the only hope we have. As good as it may be, no public policy will end the brokenness of sin; no amount of money will fix a lack of love. Only Jesus Christ can be the hope that we long for.

The Israelites, from our first reading, were in a sorry state as well. They had put their hope and trust, not in God, but in the strength of their army, in their alliances with the surrounding nations, and even in idols. But these things eventually collapsed: their army was conquered in battle, their alliances were broken, and their idols could not save them. They had been taken off into captivity and suffering.

But while in exile, their true hope began to dawn. They began to rediscover their love for God, and in turn, God began to promise through His prophets that they would return to their land and their homes. This is the hope that John the Baptist proclaims, too: that God has not forgotten His people, but that the light of salvation will begin to dawn for them. And that light, that hope…is Jesus.

All of our human attempts to make the world a better place cannot succeed if they do not have Jesus at the heart of them. We may try hard to fix the problems of our lives and our families, we may try hard to build a more just and fair society…but there’s something fundamentally wrong with us! All of us contain the brokenness of original sin, selfishness, weakness. It’s impossible to try to correct the world without first fixing the problem in our own souls! And the main problem, sin and selfishness, cannot be corrected on our own, through laws or programs or money. We can only be healed of sin by turning our lives over to Jesus Christ, by living in His grace through Confession and the Eucharist, by seeking His will through prayer and reading His word. There is no other hope for the world than this.

Pope St. John XXIII had a great insight into this. Every day, people from around the world would come to him with their crises: the bishop from Congo who would tell of his priests murdered by rebels; the world leader asking for help for his starving people; the sick who came to be blessed; the oppression in Russia during the Cold War…and the Pope would try to do what he could for each problem. But every night before he went to bed, he knelt down in his chapel, and brought everything to Jesus. He would conclude his prayer with a deep sigh and say, “Well, I did the best I could. It’s your church, Lord! I’m going to bed, good night.”

Here is a man whose hope was in the Lord! He knew that God could do what he could not do. And the truth is, the world will only begin to change when we give more and more of our lives to Jesus. I firmly believe that when one person advances in holiness and draws closer to the Lord, the entire world is improved.

With all of the problems in the world today, it might be easy to be discouraged. Our human efforts to improve them have not made as much of a difference as we had hoped. It’s time to turn to a true hope: Jesus, the light Who shines in the darkness.