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I was leaving the airport recently and upon exiting the parking garage I noticed graffiti spray painted on a wall with the words:
“The Lord is coming SOON!”
That really put me in an Advent mood. “The Lord is coming SOON!”
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But beneath that someone else added, “Not if he’s flying American Airlines!”
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When is the Lord coming? Is he delayed? Is he not coming at all?
It’s confusing, much like today’s Gospel passage.
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We’ve all come here with Christmas cheer – joy is in the air! But it feels like John the Baptist is trying to take the wind out of our sails.
“Repent!” he says. “Repent!”
Why is John so grouchy?
I wonder, did he wake up on the wrong side of the bed this morning like the Grinch? Nobody wants to see John’s face on a Christmas card – that scraggly beard and a camel hair shirt.
Maybe the Church made a mistake in giving us today’s Gospel passage.
Or maybe there’s wisdom to be found in it.
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Commercials and advertisements won’t lead us to repent.
They’re doing the opposite, trying to convince us that our Christmas won’t be complete without the Amazon Echo smart speaker, Apple’s AirPods, and a Fitbit.
Everything we never knew we needed!
In fact, Black Friday shoppers spent a whopping $7.4 billion online – all in a single day.
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But if we push pause on the holiday craze, then we may find a reason to repent.
While it’s great to be generous – as we all should be! – sometimes we forget to be generous to those who need it most.
There are an estimated 800 million people without enough food or access to clean water.
Perhaps more surprisingly, 35% of the world – some 2.5 billion people – do not live in sanitary conditions.
A friend of mine is travelling to Mexico in a few weeks, for example, to serve a community that lives entirely inside a landfill. They’ve even built their church out of garbage.
I wonder, do I need those AirPods as badly as someone else needs clean water? Or a sanitary place to worship?
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Of course not.
But how much of my Christmas budget have I earmarked for the poor?
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Perhaps a more subtle point is this. How many of us would feel cheated if we woke up on Christmas day with little to nothing underneath our Christmas tree?
From our youth, we’ve been trained to expect gifts – and lots of them – on December 25th. Though it’s not always the case, the holidays do have a strange way of making us selfish.
I’ll be the first to admit it.
That doesn’t mean that we shouldn’t give gifts to those whom we love. In fact, giving gifts is one of the five love languages; it’s how some people show their affection for others.
But if we only spend our time and money on those we love – and neglect those truly in need – then we’ve missed a significant part of the Christmas message.
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A final point.
The one thing we all need – I’d say just as much as food and clothing – is love. Without it we become cold, empty inside, like the Grinch who stole Christmas.
Perhaps this is the other half of the story.
While many of us are filled with holiday cheer, we must remember that there are others who feel alone.
Think of that person who lost his or her spouse this year; that homebound neighbor; that aging relative who’s stuck in a nearby nursing home.
A simple phone call or a handwritten Christmas card can go a long way.
Who’s one person I’ve not thought of, whom I can reach out to this Christmas?
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We’ve all come here with Christmas cheer – joy is in the air!
But John the Baptist reminds us to see the bigger picture.
Christmas is about love – the love that God has for us and the love that we should have for one another – not only our family and friends, but also the poorest and most vulnerable among us.
After all, that’s how God entered our world – as a poor child without a place to lay his head.
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(Note: The picture was borrowed from “Hope of the Poor,” an organization dedicated to serving the poorest among us in Mexico. For more information, please go to: www.hopeofthepoor.org)