The Second Sunday of Advent

Prepare the way of the Lord, make straight his paths.” Mk 1:2

Pope Francis never ceases to amaze!

He appears to be someone willing to be totally honest about his very human qualities. For example, not too long-ago Francis opened up about some of the ordinary jobs he held before he decided to become a priest.

Perhaps the most unusual aspect of his work history was the brief time he worked as a bouncer at a night club! This fact so amused one comedian that he suggested this may mean that “on Tuesday nights, ladies get into heaven free.”

This unusual dimension to Francis’ life story continues into his years as Pope.
In one recent instance, he invited a delegation of five NBA players and several National Basketball Players Association officials to the Vatican to meet with him.

Why?

The Pope wanted to hear firsthand how the world of professional sports was tackling the issue of social and racial justice. He wanted to know how the players brought national attention to these concerns and how they planned to continue that work in the future.

Five of the players who attended this meeting were part of the Milwaukee Bucks team that walked out of their playoff game in late August – a decision that sparked a league-wide walkout that spread to numerous other sports teams.

In a press release following this first-ever meeting, one of the Bucks’ players said “We are extremely honored to have had this opportunity to come to the Vatican and share our experience with Pope Francis. His openness and eagerness to discuss these issues was inspiring and a reminder that our work has had a global impact and must continue moving forward.”

Pope Francis continues to appeal to a lot of people precisely because of his remarkably human qualities. This is not in any way to suggest, however, that he is not offering a powerful and authoritative challenge to the world at large.

This is the same Pope who reminds us that we are to “remove our sandals before the sacred ground of the other” – a phrase, I submit, each of us would do well to meditate on.

This is also the same Pope who insists that the face of God is most especially found in the “other” who is immersed in poverty, who is sitting in a prison cell awaiting his or her death, who is homeless and panhandling for change, who is an immigrant without proper papers, who is an addict in the throes of withdrawal – or who is an unborn child in the womb of a poverty-stricken mother.
This is no native Pollyanna Pope.

Rather, he is the Pope who challenges each of us in the most uncomfortable and unfunny ways. He is the very same Pope who asks the shepherds of the church to “smell like the sheep,” to “love more than judge”, to not be “sourpusses.”

And that’s where John the Baptist enters our discussion.

It would be reasonable to describe John as a major “sourpuss.”

After all, he’s described in the gospels as a man wearing “clothes made of camel’s hair,” who eats food consisting of “locusts and honey,” and who warns people “to fleefrom the coming wrath.”
Not exactly the sort of fellow you’d invite to any of your Christmas parties – even if our pandemic allowed them to take place!

Pope Francis is a modern-day John the Baptist. Like John, Francis is challenging each of us to “Prepare the way of the Lord” in our lives.

The very first Christian communities thought of themselves, above all, as followers of a new “way” – a new “way” of thinking; a new “way” of living; a new “way” of loving, that John the Baptist pointed to and Jesus of Nazareth fulfilled. For those early communities, believing in Jesus meant, as the Letter to the Hebrews describes it, a “new and living way” that Jesus “opened up for us.”
Accordingly, the very first followers of Jesus were actually called “the people of the Way” before they were ever referred to as “Christians.”

Aside from all his human – and sometimes humorous – ways of identifying with people throughout today’s world, this is the same “way” that Pope Francis calls us all to embrace in our own day and age. He is truly echoing both John the Baptist and Jesus himself when Francis says, “Along this journey of life … we will have our moments of … darkness and fatigue” – a reality we have all encountered with the present pandemic.

And then Pope Francis tells us: “Challenges exist to be overcome! Let us be realists, but without losing our joy, our boldness, and our hope-filled commitment. Let us not allow ourselves to be robbed of missionary vigor.”

Or, in the words of John the Baptist, let us each continue our daily efforts to “Prepare the way of the Lord” in our lives – a way that will “make straight” our pathway to a whole new “way” of seeing and living and loving.

Ted Wolgamot, Psy.D.

NOTE:
CHRIST LOVED AND AWAITED
                              By St. Oscar Romero

Advent should admonish us to discover
In each brother and sister that we greet,
In each friend whose hand we shake,
In each beggar who asks for bread,
In each worker who wants to use the right to join a union,
In each peasant who looks for work in the coffee groves,
The face of Christ.
Then it would not be possible to rob them, to cheat them, to deny their rights.
They are Christ,
And whatever is done to them
Christ will take as done to himself.
This is what Advent is:
Christ living among us.