This is my homily for December 7, 2008, the Second Sunday of Advent. The readings can be found at https://www.usccb.org/nab/120708.shtml. Thanks for reading and your feedback!
HOMILY:
Think about the words “New and Improved.” How often are we enticed by those words? Just hearing them triggers some psychological effect on us. We hear them in a commercial, we see them labeled on the box of a product and our interest is raised.
The iPhone that you spent $200 on just 8 months earlier seems to become the equivalent of a rotary phone as we hear that Apple is launching a brand new and improved iPhone. The video game that you were addicted to day af ter day for months on end becomes lame as Madden Football 2008 vastly improves Madden Football 2007.
Up until some big event that announces the release of this new and improved product – whatever it has been for the most part has fulfilled our needs – BUT our minds cannot help but wonder “what is new, what has improved.” Even something simple as shaving has constantly evolved. I went from shaving with a single razor blade, to the new and improved shaving with two razors, to the vastly new and improved shaving with three blades, to (wow, shockingly unexpected!!!) the new and improved shaving with four blades AND with a battery inside to supposedly lift the hairs from my face and theoretically help improve the shaving experience (aha – you didn’t see that coming). Sad to say, I still lose a pint of blood each time I shave – and like Homer Simpson, I have a 5:00 shadow within an hour of shaving – but I live in hope each time I see that “new and improved” shaving product, I am willing to try it out
Politicians even capitalize on this, in fact it’s the key to their success. Every election cycle, we hear how things will change, how things will get better if we vote for this candidate or that political party. Whether they really do or not is a whole different debate, but I think we can agree that those who are able to successfully market the message that they will produce results that are “new and improved” over whatever current state of affairs exist are often times successful in winning an election.
The phrase “new and improved” taps into our desire that things will keep getting better. There’s a longing, a yearning within us that things will constantly evolve into something that is new, somehow improved. That desire goes way beyond personal hygiene products, electronics equipment and politics.
Deep within our hearts and souls, there’s a longing for newness, and for improvement. Which is why today’s scripture readings from thousands of years ago speak with a freshness, a hopefulness to us today. In these two prophets, Isaiah in the first reading and John the Baptist in the second, what is happening here? What is the core, or heart of their messages?
They are saying that God’s coming and will bring something vastly new to His people.
In Isaiah, the Jewish people had been in exile from their homeland and were longing to return. What is God going to do for them? He will fill in every valley, he will level every mountain, he will make straight a highway so that his people will experience a new freedom, a new exodus. The glory of God will be revealed and his people will rejoice in their new and improved existence.
In the Gospel, we meet this great forerunner of Jesus, John the Baptist. People were coming to him knowing that they were waiting for something, someone to come to them. We hear that they were coming to hear John the Baptist preach and that was making them “acknowledge their sin.” John wasn’t doing that to make them feel bad about themselves and cause them to just beg God for mercy, but rather to point to the one who was to come – Jesus who would make “all things new” in giving and granting forgiveness of their sin.
That ushers in an entirely new experience of how we relate to God. God’s people no longer obey laws simply out of fear of being sent to Hell – we do it because we’ve experienced the Love of God in our lives and we know that He wants us to constantly be “new and improved” as well. We experience that in being freed from our sins, freed of the guilt and shame of being anything less than what God created us to be – and in constantly striving to live that new and improved life.
As we continue through this season of Advent, we are often times reminded of the necessity of “preparing for the Lord” which is an essential part of this season where we celebrate at Christmas how God has come to be with us. But part of that preparation is to recognize how God continues to reveal His love for us, how he desires for us to grow in that love and respond to that love – in many, and often unforeseen ‘new and improved’ ways.
