Sacred Heart Parish

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We are looking for persons able to transcribe the audio portion of our town meetings.
Please call the rectory if you can help.


FIRST SUNDAY OF ADVENT (C)

  1. A gentleman by the name of Jonathan Sacks is Chief Rabbi in Great Britain. In the opening paragraph of a recent, most significant address, he describes the context for us today as we celebrate a new liturgical year, a new year of grace. Sacks writes: “Religion’s survival in the twenty-first century cuts across some of our most basic intellectual assumptions. After all, how can anyone still need religion if: to explain the universe we have science; to control the universe we have technology; to negotiate power we have politics; to achieve prosperity we have economics. If you’re ill you go to a doctor, not a priest. If you feel guilty, you go to a psycho-therapist, not to confession. If you are depressed you take Prozac and not the book of Psalms. And if you seek salvation you go to our new cathedrals, namely shopping centers, where you can buy happiness at extremely competitive prices.” The rabbi asks a question – Why has religious faith survived in the modern period? The answer he suggests is this: The human person is a meaning-seeking being who asks – Who am I? Why am I here? What is my goal in human history? How shall I conduct myself here and now? The sources of meaning in our European liberal democracies (the market, the state, science and technology) have no substantive answers to these basic human questions. If they seek to outlaw religion, these European liberal democracies will very likely destroy themselves.

  2. We begin today a new liturgical year: the great news, the amazing story, of the eternal Son of God and his adventures in human history. Time, of course, is part of God’s creation. God is time-less. St. Augustine expresses the mystery of Christ and time when he writes – “He who is the great and eternal day came from the great and endless day of eternity into our short day of time.” Advent has a two-fold character: 1) it is a season to prepare for Christmas when Christ’s first entrance into time is remembered; and 2), it is a season when that remembrance directs our minds and hearts to await Christ’s second coming at time’s end. Christ’s first coming belongs to the past; his second coming lies hidden in the future. In the meanwhile, in the interim, the risen Christ meets us and we him in sacramental mystery.

  3. Why did the eternal Son of God come into the world? John the Evangelist says – God so loved the world that he sent us his only Son whose mission was to reveal to us the mystery of God the Father and his love, and to send us from the Father the great gift of the Holy Spirit. In doing so, Christ’s mission was to unwrap the enigma which is the human person. Only the Incarnation of the Son of God can unravel the conundrum which is the human person. Thus, we can say – it is Christ’s coming among us that fully reveals man to man himself; it is Christ’s coming among us that makes all things new.

  4. This notion of newness is important for us to grasp. Through no merits of our own we are God’s new people, we are men and women of the new covenant promised by Jeremiah of old. We have new life which we call everlasting life. We have a new law. We have the Lord’s new commandment of love. We have a new song to sing, namely, the Alleluia.

  5. A good name for the liturgical year is “Christ in his Mysteries”. This notion of mysteries has nothing to do with the wonderful mystery stories of Agatha Christie. A mystery in the liturgical sense is a visible act in human history with an invisible content that relates us to God. The Lord Jesus lived the mysteries of his birth, life, death and resurrection for us and for our salvation. Now risen in glory, He invites us to share in these mysteries through word and sacrament so that we may grow in his likeness. Our focus throughout the liturgical year is on the risen Christ. He is no longer a baby, a child, a preacher and worker of marvelous signs; He no longer suffers; but he has become what He is now in glory, humanly speaking, by virtue of his earthly experiences. As we receive God’s grace through the celebration of Christ’s mysteries, we grow in holiness of life.

  6. Let me tell you what happened to Timothy Kelly last Sunday afternoon. In his birthday suit he was plunged into the nice warm water of our baptismal font. As he rose with Christ to new life, he was clothed in his baptismal gown. I said, then, to Timothy – “You are a new creation. (He looked at me as though to say – I’m just getting used to this first creation, and now you’re telling me I’m a new creation!) Listen to what St. Paul has to say about this in his 2nd Letter to the Corinthians – “The love of Christ impels us, once we have come to the conviction that one died for all; therefore, all have died. He indeed died for all so that those who live may no longer live for themselves but for him who for their sake died and was raised. Consequently, from now on we regard no one according to the flesh; even if we once knew Christ according to the flesh, now we know him no longer. So whoever is in Christ is a new creation. The old things have passed away; behold, new things have come.” I did not explain to Timothy that his baptismal gown is the outward sign of his new Christian dignity. I did say to him, because his parents and godparents were listening – “With your family and friends to help you by words and examples, bring that dignity unstained into the everlasting life of heaven.”