Our People

3rd Sunday of Advent Year C

Celebration of 30th Anniversary of the Opening of the new church of St Michael’s, Lane Cove

By Most Rev. Anthony Fisher OP
Auxiliary Bishop of Sydney
17/12/2006

Today is Gaudete Sunday. In the middle of a season of penitential preparation for Christmas and the End of Time, the Church, as it were, breaks out into laughter. It’s almost as if the Church is unable to take the dour purple of Advent seriously. The Church seems to be impatient, like a child eyeing Christmas presents under the tree, picking them up when no-one is looking, shaking them, feeling them, listening to them, knowing something good is coming. Hence rose-coloured vestments that mean I look like a Christmas present today. Hence the prayers and readings today. As Paul puts it: ‘Happy! I want you to be happy, always happy in Lord, not anxious…’ (Phil 4:4-7). Even John the Baptist, our Advent prophet with all his scary talk of fires and threshing ultimately announces ‘Good News’. Something wonderful is coming. We wait expectantly like the people described in the Gospel.

Some years ago there was a popular song Don’t Worry, Be Happy (1988). I don’t know if Bobby McFerrin knew he was quoting St Paul’s letter to us on Gaudete Sunday! But he was possibly influenced by a Christian culture. Not that Christianity looks at the world through rose-tinted glasses: far from it. Our God was tortured, beaten, humiliated, crucified. He was stripped of everything: his divinity, his human dignity, his comfort and success. He was stripped of his clothes, his friends, his life, even (so he felt) his God and Father. The God for whom we wait in Advent came and comes again to enter fully into the human mess.

He knows that violence is real, that loved ones die, that people are hungry, sick or lonely, that families break up, that people fail, that fires destroy homes, that people lose jobs and businesses and hope. And his Church continues to identify with all who carry a cross. We seek with Him to address those evils directly. Christinity is, in fact, a brutally realistic religion: it knows about the cross, about suffering. The promises of the First Reading (Zeph 3:14-18) were made to poor, broken-hearted captives, prisoners who needed something to hope for. Our Gospel passage, too, is very realistic about the human muddle, with its references to violent soldiers and corrupt businessmen (Lk 3:101-8). John the Baptist offers Good News, to be sure, but it is to people who desperately need some good news and even then it is in the context of talk of eternal hell-fire, judgment, sorting and threshing.

Yet in all this, the true Christian remains optimistic, not cranky, repressed, censorious. Fake Christianities take a dim view of the world and the flesh and associated vices such as partying and smiling! Our faith, on the other hand, calls us in Zephaniah’s words to “Shout for joy, daughter of Zion! Rejoice with all your heart daughter of Jerusalem! The Lord will come and dance with joy over you…” We believe that John, that we, are sent to be good news to the poor, to bind up those with broken bodies or broken hearts, to proclaim liberty to captives and a great year of Jubilee to all.

Which seems to bring us to an emotional stale-mate, a Catch-22: how can we be brutally realistic, yet joyful; confident, yet not facile and clowning. How is this possible without self-contradiction, without an emotional split personality?

Enter our Advent Saint, John the Baptist. Today we find preaching against extortion, intimidation and selfishness, and muttering strange talk about a Coming “Christ”, whose sandals he will be unfit to tie, whose baptism and words of judgment will be altogether different. For all his talk, the main thing John does, of course, is wait. He is an ever-patient saint. And his patience, Christian patience, is not about masochism or Stoicism or weakness. No-one ever called John a shrinking violet! The patient John does not hesitate to take evil on, head-on, correct it, chasten it, solve it.

St Thomas Aquinas taught that patience and perseverance are parts of bravery (fortitude): the ability to endure despite hardship and sorrow. It comprises a strong activity of the soul, namely, a vigorous grasping of and clinging to the good, the true and the beautiful despite the waiting, the pain, the fear or whatever. It takes a strong person to turn the other cheek, to endure the cross, to despise the shame.

In our modern consumer society the pervasive temptation is to demand an immediate technological or consumer or government ‘fix’ for every discomfort. In the face of unfixable suffering we gape uncomprehending or rail like petulant children demanding immediate satisfaction. But the fact is: there are evils we cannot ‘solve’ in any simple, morally acceptable way, and that call for patient endurance, even heroism.

I remember all those decades ago our previous church building here at St Michael’s, where I made my First Communion, served as an altar-boy for Monsignor Hugh Maguire and was confirmed by Bishop Muldoon. The crowds in those days were so big and church so small that ushers were used to try to find us seats on Sunday.

I remember also how our patience was tried as the old church was closed and we had to wait for the building of the new church. We used to go to Mass in parish hall or, for the bigger occasions, in the Town Hall where the Protestant establishment set a picture of the Queen of England before our eyes rather than a picture of the Queen of Heaven!

I remember the opening of our new church which was big enough for us all and the excitement and controversy about the daring new shape and furnishings chosen to meet the needs of the new liturgy.

I remember many more Masses I attended here in this my parish church for so many years. Here it was that I celebrated by First Mass as a newly ordained priest 15 years ago. Here I have baptised or confirmed or communicated many of our parishioners. And I am sure that for so many of you there are many happy memories, too, of parishioners and clergy who have gone before us, marked with the sign of faith, of marriages and school Masses and youth gatherings and parish councils and all the rest around this building.

Today we celebrate that history with thanksgiving, not just for a building, but for the priests and people who have built this parish for nearly a century now. But we do not only look backward in Advent: we look forward also, to the future . We look forward with joy to the advent of the Christmas babe, who is “joy to world”, Good News to the suffering, strength to the weary and weak of our parish. He is coming to join us on our way through all life’s struggles. He is coming to give back heart to the down-hearted and broken-hearted amongst us – which is all of us at one time or another. He is coming to be crucified with the dying, that they might join him in Paradise.

As a parish we look back to our origins, but also forward with hope to a new future; we wait expectantly, joyfully and patiently, knowing that Christ will come again to open the gates of heaven for us and to ‘dance with shouts of joy for us on the day of festival’.