The cause of our joy - God is always with us: Homily for Sunday, December 17, 2023

So one of the things that I try to do with some success and some failure is to exercise on a regular basis. I know it's good for me, I know I feel better physically, I sleep better, and quite honestly my mental health is better. So there's all kinds of good benefits from it. And so I was a little surprised when I started on the elliptical machine that we have in our basement how hard it was. Now I've been on elliptical machines before, I mean I know that there's supposed to be some work, but I'm telling you this was really hard. I was all out of breath, I thought oh my gosh I can't possibly endure this, so how is this going to happen? But I did, I stuck with it and put my half an hour in even though it was hard and it was on the lowest level. I thought my gosh, this is one demanding elliptical machine. Well the other night I was on the elliptical machine and we fortunately have a little television because I'm going to tell you, anybody that tells you that exercise is not boring is lying to you. And I'm on this and I've been at this for about 26, 27 minutes and one of the other brothers comes down, he's doing his laundry, he said oh I see you're using the elliptical machine, I probably should tell you something, we don't know how it happened, but it's flipped. So even though you see it, you might think oh I'm on level one, that's actually level 20. And level 20 is actually level one. So I immediately put it up to 20 because I thought well I've been 28 minutes, I'm exhausted, I don't want to die on this thing. But I was thinking about it over the weekend as I was preparing for my homily these past few days, this image struck me as a good one for where we are in the season of Advent. See I'd done a lot of hard work, but then I got a little reminder that maybe there was joy at the end of the tunnel. And that's kind of where we're at with Advent. Now there was a period of time I would suggest not really right in the long history of the church, that tried to push aside from Advent the notion that it was a penitential season. There was color changes and so forth, but quite frankly that's not accurate when we look at the texts for the Mass, when we look at some of the things that change during this particular season. It's not as penitential as the season of Lent. But there are hints that it is intended on some level to be penitential. What do I mean by that? Well, for example, we don't sing the Gloria during Lent. We don't sing the Gloria during Advent. There's a little bit of time where we're called to recognize why it is that God has made this great promise to us. Why it is that we have the season of Advent at all. It's not just because we need something spiritually to do before Christmas, because we'd be bored otherwise. It's because we need to recognize the reason why God made promises to us in the first place. What is the biggest reason? Well, we need a Savior. And if we need a Savior, we need something from which we are being saved. We need to be reminded that even though we sin, even though we fall short, we need to change. We need to convert. But more than that, we need to know that God still loves us. That God still cares for us. It would have been just if God had left us in our sin. But God's justice is tempered by His mercy. And that indeed is the good news. That indeed is the good news that we are not left alone, that we are not condemned, that Jesus did not come into the world to condemn us, but to save us. Look at our world today. It's a mess. We've got more wars than I can possibly keep track of. And as Pope Saint Paul VI said, every time there's war, it's a failure. It's a failure. War is not a solution. And it's a sign that whatever we should have been doing, we've failed. Look at our world. . .