Mass readings for the 3rd Sunday in Advent (Gaudete Sunday):
Zephaniah 3.14-18 Isaiah 12.2-6 Philippians 4.4-7 Luke 3.10-18
Today, we tell people to rejoice; rejoice in what? For many that’s a good question. The state of the world, the state of many of our lives is not the stuff of rejoicing. Indeed, for a lot of people, getting up the enthusiasm for Christmas is a challenge – but for those of us who understand, there is cause for rejoicing now, and if we can communicate that reason for joy, maybe a few more people will understand Christmas and the possibilities that arise in the world, in our lives, when we recognize we can turn things around – literally repent, turn around, and God makes that possible for us through Christ. But can we get folks to the spiritual place they need to be to make that u-turn? Even if we can get them here in the church Christmas Eve, Christmas Day, or any Sunday, can we get them to stay long enough to open themselves to the needed grace to make that turning?
In the gospel the crowds gather around John the Baptist by the Jordan River. These are ostensibly people of faith; they believe in God, and specifically the God of Israel, the creator God of Genesis and liberating God of Exodus. Curiously, they have not gone to the Temple in Jerusalem to plead to the Almighty, make the blood sacrifice, and receive the benediction of the High Priests. It’s the Temple that embodied their religion, that is supposed to be the spiritual space of encounter with God, yet they are in the wilderness, and there find God at work in John. So, as Jesus will make plain later, the true temple of God is not made with human hands, but is a spiritual reality that manifests where God’s people gather in sincere worship and desire for communion.
If you follow Catholic media, in the past two years, there have been reports of a Catholic resurgence in places where secularism had appeared to have triumphed: western Europe, North America. The Catholic Church in Sweden added over 10,000 new members this past year. That country was once one of the most militantly Protestant around; and then, as it’s so familiar a pattern, it became one of the most aggressively secular societies up to the present. While 10,000 new Catholics is hardly a full-blown conversion event, that it’s happening is telling. In France, a nation that turned its back on the Church, there were over 7000 adult baptisms this past year – double the average. They had over 5000 adolescent baptisms in 2024, again double the average. Those extra 2500 are from families that had not baptized their children as infants; now they’re bringing their kids to the font.
This could be dismissed as anecdotal, but the Vatican has registered the uptick. For all the falling away of recent decades, the numbers are turning around, and since 2021 we’ve added, by some estimates, 200 million members or more to the body of Christ; and that is not accounted for by Catholics having kids because heaven knows, too many Catholics don’t baptize their children. A rise of 10 percent or more a year since 2021 in the number of baptized Catholics indicates adult conversions. Something is going on. It would seem that people are again, metaphorically speaking, gathering at the banks of the Jordan. Why?
Is it hard times? We’ve had recessions and high inflation before, we’ve had political chaos and international crises before; but never before in the post-modern era has there been such a sense that we as a civilization are facing our end if we don’t do something, and soon; something more profound than voting a particular way at election time, or protesting in the streets – again, we’ve seen that sort of thing lately, and the media make big stories out of it. However, it’s in the realm of the spiritual that true revolution occurs, and the legacy media simply cannot comprehend that, let alone report on it intelligently.
In humanity’s embrace of modernity, the spiritual turn was a diabolical one, the modern age gave us the most horrific era in all humanity’s collective experience, even as it gave us unprecedented material abundance. But as many are coming to find, as the Bible tells us, that treasure is prey to moths and to rust, it is decaying and leaving us empty, with fear that this leaves us only renewed horror.
Since coming to the parish, I’ve had quite a few encounters with the spiritually inquiring. They’ve come to the end of themselves as secular people. The world does not provide what they need, humanity’s many ideologies and godless philosophies give no good answers. Indeed, they’ve led them astray, into regretted decisions, failed relationships, loneliness, despair. By grace, they sense that God has answers, and they come to my office and ask if they can start over; can they truly repent? The answer is, of course you can; the heavens rejoice at our turning back. This is good news. Turn back to God and he will receive you with open arms, so for heaven’s sake, do turn back from destruction, repent.
And as with those who gathered at the Jordan river, they have a sense that their personal decisions may yet have the aggregate effect of saving the nation. But we know that Jerusalem fell, there was a catastrophe. Yet out of that was the miraculous emergence of a new Israel, the Church; a resurrection of humanity’s hope.
Will coming back to faith save the western world? Well, I’d say ‘yes and no.’ For whatever may be resurrected will not, can not be as it was before. But I would hope that where we have this sense of civilizational fatigue, cultural stagnation, the joy we celebrate today in the 3rd week of Advent, is but a taste of the joy to be had when what is to come of the current crisis at last arrives.
In the meantime, we will see many among our elites, our opinion leaders in politics, the media and academia, trying to rally people around the project that was liberal western democracy – to defend it for its own sake. But these constitutional arrangements, the whole institutional edifice does not exist for its own sake. The great Catholic philosopher of the last century, Jacques Maritain, argued the point of them is to make possible the living of the Christian life. That we’ve perverted the system to serve selfish, sinful lives, has compromised them; but to reiterate they are not compatible with just any culture, any creed or philosophy. Western political systems struggle where Judeo-Christian principles are not ingrained.
You’ve heard me cite such eminent historians as Tom Holland, Christopher Dawson and Michael Burleigh before, who’ve all argued that Western Civilization is at its very core a Christian enterprise. With the abandonment of the faith by too many in positions of leadership, in education, at all levels of society, the foundations crumble, and the walls start to crack.
I mentioned Sweden; if you follow events there, you will know of the naïve attempt to remake it into a “post-national” country, much as has been proposed for Canada. This has led to a loss of social cohesion, rising crime, and frankly, a suicidal tolerance toward cultural groups who don’t share the values of the Gospel. People are waking up to the reality of it; there are major cities where women cannot walk unaccompanied; neighbourhoods avoided because the police no longer patrol there. Swedes are coming to now ask, “what are we going to do?”
The Jews of the 1st century had the Jerusalem Temple; a place to reconcile themselves to God by way of animal sacrifice, priestly intercession, and their own humbly offered prayer. But the sense was it didn’t work anymore, even though many were desperate to believe it did. Even those who had given up on it, couldn’t let go of God; and so, they went searching for him elsewhere. God is found not so much in a place in the sense of a building, or a patch of ground on the banks of a river – but he is encountered where his people gather in earnest desire to reach him, to renew the relationship.
In my agnostic days as a young man, I adopted a minimalist religious practice: getting to church at Christmas and Easter. I reduced my religion to what so many Jews had in the days before John the Baptist: to a seasonal trek up to the Temple, to make the sacrifice, to say the prayers, to have the feast, and then to go back to the life of work, family, friends, etc. and leave God behind til the next holy day when I would come, pay my respects, offer up my meagre sacrifice and wonder what the point of it all was. And my own life progressively sank into one of despair even as I was alive in an age of technological wonders and renewed prosperity that was the tech boom of the 1990s.
I needed the true God; the one that Israel encountered at Sinai, who was there as they crossed over Jordan with the ark; the one who preached on the mount and on the plain, who cast out demons, healed a little girl, raised a dead friend. So too today do so many need to escape the worry of the world to live instead in joyful anticipation; the kind a child has at the prospect of Christmas morning, the kind we have as the faithful at the Easter Vigil.
It is for us to create among us by grace that space for the searching, that place of encounter, to let the Jordan flow through here, and make it a place where people can repent, where they can turn around and return to God.
Amen.