Mass Readings for the 3rd Sunday of Advent:
Isaiah 61.1-2a; 10-11 Luke 1.47-50, 53-54 1 Thessalonians 5.15-24 John 1.6-8, 19-28
Who are you?
They asked that of John the Baptist; and he had an answer. He knew who he was.
Do we have an answer? Do we know, each of us, who we are? “Who am I”, is the question all of us needs to answer. So many of us don’t have this question intrude into our lives until middle age, the cliché mid-life crisis that arises when the easy answers that come of being a parent, a son or daughter, a man of business, a professional woman, volunteer, philanthropist, and so on, no longer satisfy. I fear, however, that in these anxious times, this question is on the minds of young adults too.
Those roles in life, potential or realized, are grounded in this transitory life; and so, are impermanent, they don’t endure. Their meaningfulness then, absent Christian faith, is contingent on merely human values, and so are vulnerable, uncertain, subject to the shifts of opinion that today are fast undermining ambition, aspiration, hope.
With regard to the latter, think about what is happening in our world today as there are continuing attacks against the institution of the family. There was once universal admiration for father and mother; but as so many know, there are powerful forces that embrace the idea that the traditional family is the source of all human oppression – and this is taught as gospel to the thousands of undergraduates who study their way through our post-secondary education system. Some graduate into jobs of influence from which they will reshape this world, or rather warp it; while others are dumped into a world where these ideas will not serve them in living a good life, but rather lead them into bitter resentment.
And far too many Christians strive to make peace with this ideology, to reach a compromise; and so, unwittingly, sell their patrimony cheap and make the faith incoherent to others.
The best observation I’ve come across of these critical theories grounded in warmed over Marxism is that they take notice of problems we can all see, but offer no better remedies than those of, say, classical liberalism. Where one would have us extinguish our rights and morality and hand ourselves over to the power of the state; the other would have us abandon our morality to the marketplace, and make our God-given rights just another commodity to exchange. And strangely enough, both of these things are happening.
In the absence of any sense of truth, and values grounded in it, any number of contradictory ideas has streamed into the void. And so, we’ve had several generations of confusion with parents increasingly hesitant to parent, guide, instruct, protect. Those who try are regarded as retrograde, and a problem to be reckoned with by our institutions, our courts and political power.
Worse still, as evidenced in the increasing psychological fragility of young people, we see a growing tendency of parents to overprotectiveness; and that only deepens this crisis. But how does one militate against this? In an argument with one’s child, can any man bring it to an end by gently saying “because I’m your father” or any woman assert her authority with “because I’m your mother”? So successfully has the idea of family been upended that to answer the question, “who am I?” with reference to family life, especially as a man, is to be mocked by our culture – the idiot father being now a commonplace trope as seen on our screens daily.
We can go through the other categories of identity that our civilization had hitherto upheld as admirable, those that I had mentioned at the outset of my talk. The critical impulse at work today is viciously tearing all these down. So, the person of business, be that one man working out of his pick up, or the woman who runs a small service company, gets lumped in with the giant and predatory corporate capitalists; the noble city alderman gets his modest political career conflated with the general corruption and fecklessness of western governance, and so on. That is, we’re seeing those roles and functions that were aspirational dismissed as unworthy, even contemptable, with nothing but cynicism and anger to fill the void.
This is all to say, so much that gives so many meaning is threatened by forces that are bent on removing our agency as individuals, and stripping of us of our dignity according to the Judeo-Christian understanding of humanity, in both its virtues and its faults.
Now, this has been an ongoing struggle since the Garden; as Christ tells us, the deceiver, the fallen archangel, Lucifer, Satan, he is the ruler of the world.
It’s in recognizing that this is our situation that we will have any prospect for, not reversing the course we’re on (because there’s a lot in our past we would never wish to revisit or revive), but in charting a new course forward.
But we need to know where to start from, and acknowledge who we are. Jesus tells us not to worry, that in following him, in understanding ourselves as first and foremost seekers after the kingdom of God, as strivers after true righteousness, that all else will be added to our lives – our material needs, but also our deeper spiritual need for meaning. So, we need to recall that as baptized Christians, at our spiritual rebirth, we became like the great prophet Isaiah, anointed by the Lord, the Spirit came upon us, and we were mandated to do God’s work.
But what has happened to many of us? The world has prompted us to quench the spirit, and to do what St. Paul warns us against: we’ve despised words of the prophets; and we’ve accepted what we’re told by the powers of this world without really testing them; we’ve now experienced several generations of the consequences of worldly wisdom but are proving unwilling or unable to reverse any of our bad decisions.
So, we need to answer the question, “who are we?” And I would hope that in the new Church year just begun we will do that as a parish comprised of individuals and families, of parents and children. We hope, as a parish to offer opportunities for this, and soon. And I thank most earnestly those who have agreed to help us all in this work of asking difficult questions of ourselves and of God, and with patience and confidence hearing the answers. Because it is in that where righteousness will spring up, testimony to the light occur and a fresh anointing of the Holy Spirit be made – we will know who we are, and be glad. Amen.