Join us today as we celebrate Holy Communion for the second Sunday of Advent 12/5/21. To follow along at home, click here and print the Holy Communion Program. Video and text of today’s homily below.
If you would like to have prayers offered for you, a loved one, a friend, for someone who is suffering, ill or who has departed, please email Archdeacon Mitch at mitch@heritageartsinc.com and we will pray for you. And if you’d like to assist in the beautification, improvement and maintenance of St. Barachiel Chapel, please click here to make a donation.
Homily for the Second Sunday of Advent – Sunday 12/5/21
Readings: Bar 5:1-9, Ps 126:1-2, 2-3, 4-5, 6, Phil 1:4-6, 8-11, Lk 3:1-6
Brothers and sisters, the poorest nations with the lowest standards of living, the most violence, and the least stable infrastructure are the ones where Christianity is growing fastest. I believe that’s because those are the places where people are best able to hear and understand God’s word – where people most sincerely and urgently beg for relief from suffering.
In those places, where electricity may be intermittent, water unreliable, food supplies insecure, and the rule of law absent, today’s readings make perfect sense. When you have to walk to get water and carry it by hand on a dirt road, taking a roundabout way to avoid warlords or bandits, washouts or collapsed bridges, you long for your paths to be made straight. When you rely on your legs to carry heavy loads up and down real hills, you dream of a day when valleys will be filled and mountains brought low. After a long day’s work doing manual labor, the thought of a steep and winding walk home fills you with dread.
But here in the United States, where Christianity is in decline, these ancient words seem far removed, strange, and not applicable to us. What’s a long, twisting road to us? We have cars, buses and subways. What difference does a tall hill make? For most of us, the worst thing we have to fear along the road is getting stuck in traffic. When we hear of paths being straightened, valleys being filled, and mountains being brought low, we think of apocalypse, earthquakes, and landslides.
I urge you my friends to see today’s Gospel reading by a different light. Consider the people of your city or county who aren’t doing as well as perhaps you are. What can you do to help the children who have to walk the long way to and from school to avoid drug dealers and gangs? What of the ones who have to spend many hours hopping a half-dozen different bus lines to get home from work, or who have to walk home at night in bad neighborhoods when second shift is over?
And even though we may be in better circumstances than those who must literally walk crooked roads and steep paths, let us not forget that we need God to fill up our valleys of depression and addiction and close our political divides; we have mountains of pride, anger, greed and waste that cry out to be brought low; we have crooked paths of corruption, lies and red tape that beg to be made straight; we have friends and neighbors who need help struggling up hills of recovery from sicknesses of all kinds.
Let us offer our prayers, and do our parts, to prepare the way of the Lord and make straight his paths.