Esker Church, for Third Sunday of Advent, 'Gaudete !' Sunday, -'Rejoice !'

Soul Food for Hungry Adult Communities: Dec.15th 2013: 3rd Sunday of Advent, Year A.

Malachy 3:1 “I will send my messenger, who will prepare the way before me. Then suddenly the Lord you are seeking will come to his temple; the messenger of the covenant, whom you desire, will come,” says the LORD Almighty. (quoted in today’s Gospel, Matthew 11:2-11.

A Reflection:

A DISCOURAGED WORLD MEETS THE LIGHT!

Newgrange Dawn

The days are short and getting shorter, the nights are long and getting longer. At least for the moment. But come the end of this week and we will have reached the turn of the year, the longest night of the year, the shortest day of the year, on Saturday 21^st December. Our Irish ancestors, over 5000 years ago, watched for this, too, and the burial mound at Newgrange testifies to this,- they watched for the rising of the sun on this morning of December 21^st, when the light flooded into the darkest and deepest chamber. A bit like our hearts and our societies at times, when all there seems to be around us is darkness, weariness, discouragement, violence,  sadness. And then that day comes when there is the turning of the year, and light floods our hearts, our communities, right to our depths. ‘It is better to light a candle than to curse the darkness‘.

And in the face of that, how about this? The first Reading this third Sunday, this ‘Rejoice’ Sunday, speaks to all of us who have  ‘weary hands…trembling knees… faint hearts’. Isn’t this what the approaching celebration of the coming of the Christ into our world and into our lives, is all about? Hear the words deeply:

Strengthen all weary hands, steady all trembling knees, and say to all faint hearts ‘Courage! Do not be afraid. Look, your God is coming.’ ‘

Then the eyes of the blind shall be opened, the ears of the deaf unsealed, then the lame shall leap like a deer, and the tongues of the dumb sing for joy, for those whom the Lord has ransomed shall return….everlasting joy shall be on their faces…sorrow and lament will be ended.”

“They shall see the glory of the Lord, the splendour of our God.”

Our Lord,- yours and mine and all of ours- is on the way towards us, to flood the chambers of our hearts and communities with his glory, his presence, his own joy, his light. Our faces will be radiant when we gaze at the human child, the Son of the Most High, lying there for the world and for us in the feeding trough of the animals, and wrapped in the swaddling clothes of our welcome.

And then, in our blindnesses we will see, in our lameness we will begin to walk again, in our diseases we will be cleansed, our deafness will be taken away, and our deadness will waken up to a whole new aliveness, as we hear glad tidings of great joy announced to each of our hearts and communities.

‘Rejoice in the Lord, always! Again, I say, Rejoice! The Lord is near!’

Everlasting joy shall be on our faces!

Fr. Seamus Devitt C.Ss.R.  seamus.devittcssr@gmail.com

To see ‘Soul Food for Young Adult Communities’ for this Sunday, click here.

Soul Food for Hungry Adults:

‘MARANATHA! COME, LORD JESUS!,

The Budget is coming and the days are cold, – but the lights are being lit up,

Newgrange- Waiting for the Light

there’s a growing excitement in the air. The shortest day of the year, the Winter Solstice, is nineteen days away, and then….

And then, the days will be longer,- a tiny bit at first – ‘the length of a cock’s step on a midden heap’,- ‘ar nós coiscéim choilligh ar charn aoiligh’, as we say it in Irish. But then, even four days later, we know – as civilisations in the Northern Hemisphere have known for millennia- that the Light is increasing. ‘Festivals of Light’ were celebrated from Scandinavia to Rome, long before Christ, to celebrate the Turn of the Year and the Lengthening of the Days. Christians took the ancient and popular feast and ‘baptised’ it as the Feast of the Birth of the Christ, the Light of the World.

And so, we begin, this weekend, the new year of the Church, the First Sunday of

A people preparing to receive the Light

Advent. We prepare to welcome, not just the infant king in the manger, but the adult Saviour, Jesus the Christ, into our hearts and homes and society, once more.

The words we associate with Advent (which means ‘the Coming’), are:  hope, longing, preparing a welcome, cleaning the heart, and having the light in the window to welcome the Holy Family into our home. The Lord is coming! But have we the space or the vessel prepared to receive him?

In a time when we face a very harsh Budget, when we live with emigration of our young, with unemployment, with hardship, with discouragement and fear, we need also to find reasons for hope, for solidarity, for compassion and community, for togetherness in family and society. The lighted candle has more right to exist than all the darkness. We need light. We need to be reminded, yet again, of our human dignity, touched by the divine. The Christ child came into a world of wars, of violence, of degradation of peoples, of great poverty and hardships by whole peoples. We need again the message of the Prince of Peace in our pained world.

Every

making the journey in our generation

generation in its turn is invited to make the journey, as if for the first time, to the manger of Bethlehem, later to the Upper Room, then to Calvary’s hill, then to the Empty Tomb, and then often, to the Breaking of the Bread. We, in our generation,  journey this road together in 2012 and 2013. We are the people who are now invited to prepare a way for the Lord to come among us and to us again in our generation. We are the people who begin, this First Sunday of Advent, to hunger again, to long again, to prepare again for the birth of OUR Saviour to us in this moment of history.

Our Sunday Gospel this weekend (Luke 21:25-28, and 34-36) is full of foreboding and of fear of wars and disasters. We have our own forebodings and fears and realities of wars: but we are encouraged to hold our heads high, to stand erect, to stand with confidence before Jesus.

Our prayer, through this time of preparation for his Coming, is:

An Adult Christ at Christmas

‘MARANATHA! COME, LORD JESUS!,-  the very last words of the Bible.

Enjoy the gift of your Advent Season!

Seamus Devitt C.Ss.R.

e-mail  seamus.devittcssr@gmail.com

First Sunday of Advent, December 2^nd, 2012. Beginning ‘The Year of Luke’, when the readings on Sundays are mostly from St. Luke’s Gospel.

Sinead and Mark are two young adults.

DEAR SINEAD AND MARK,

Happy New Year to you both! Am I a bit early? Let me explain.

The Passage at Newgrange, - Sunrise on December 21st.

The ‘turn of the year’ is almost with us. We are only 20 days from the shortest day of the year, December 21^st, the day of the longest darkness: then nature rejoices with the turn of the year, when the days get longer and there’s more light in the world. My own heart gives a leap of joy when we reach that lowest point, and I am  filled with hope and joy again.

And Christians, for many centuries, have linked the birth of the Saviour in Bethlehem with that ‘turn of the year’, with the coming of hope and of light into the world. For centuries long before Christ was born, civilisations in the Northern Hemisphere celebrated in late December after the Winter Solstice of December 21^st had come and gone. We have our own Newgrange as one of the great examples of this, thousands of years ago.

ready and waiting....

And in the Christian Churches, Advent (meaning the Coming) has been the start of the new cycle of the Church’s year, when we start to prepare for the coming of Jesus, the Light of the World. We have four weeks to prepare our hearts and homes, to make a space in ourselves when Jesus can be born again into our lives and society, where we will pull back the curtains and let his light come in, once more. Advent is the time when we prepare, as it were, an empty vessel to receive him.

Our prayer in Advent is simple:  ‘Come, Lord Jesus!’;  they are the last words of the Bible, and the first words on our lips.

So, Happy New Year, as you begin to welcome the Master, once again, this First Sunday of Advent in 2012. Enjoy the journey!

Fr. Seamus Devitt,  C.Ss.R.

e-mail: seamus.devitcssr@gmail.com