1st Sunday of Advent, Year B
Preached at the Church of the Assumption in Bellingham, WA
Previous Years:
2020 || 2017 (Year B, Same Readings)
2021 || 2018 (Year C)
2022 || 2019 (Year A)
Recording
https://moorejesus.podbean.com/e/a-chaotic-classroom/
Transcript
Thanks to J.Y. for editing the transcript.
I have a couple deep fears that I think about all the time. One of them is being bored. But thankfully the Lord gave me parish priesthood, so I haven’t been bored for six and a half years now. The other one: chaos and anarchy. And this comes a little bit from being the smallest kid on the playground. I never would really have protection except for the rules and the authority figures. It also comes from my parents who divorced when I was nine—which just causes you to feel like life is out of control. And it comes from always wanting to please the authority figures in my life for reasons I still don’t understand. I really want to follow the rules and the laws; it matters a lot to me, on like a very deep emotional level. So, one of my great nightmares is an unsupervised classroom. I’m 35 years old. I still think about unsupervised classrooms. A teacher maybe gives us group work. There’s some instruction on the board about what we’re supposed to do and then the teacher gets called away. Suddenly it’s just me and my classmates, and I’m there trying to be, you know, the people pleaser. Okay, I’m going to do it right like the teacher asked us to do. And some of my classmates, they start talking. They start throwing things at each other. One of them gets out of their seat, for goodness sake. It’s horrifying. It’s chaos. It’s anarchy. It just…it fills me with dread.
And it’s that dread that I hear in our first reading. Isaiah says, You, Lord, are our father, our redeemer you are named forever. Why do you let us wander, O Lord, from your ways, and harden our hearts so that we fear you not? We can talk about classrooms—and it is a little funny—but when you think about how this applies to all humanity, we never really grow out of it. We have concupiscence from original sin. There is part of us that is always oriented toward disorder, toward sin, toward chaos. When God our Father and Redeemer, our great authority figure, is not obviously present, when He is not clearly in front of us, then we tend toward chaos and anarchy. And like the good student who’s reading the board, some of us, the faithful, those who are here every Sunday listening to the Word of God, we know what the instructions are. We know what the Lord expects of us, even if His presence is not obvious, and it breaks our heart and fills us with dread when we see our brothers and sisters falling away from what the Lord has asked us to do. This is where Isaiah is. He’s begging the Lord, why? Why do You let us wander, O Lord, from your ways and harden our hearts so that we fear you not? Why have you left the classroom? Where are you? What are you doing leaving me with these people?
There is also a prayer there. Isaiah is praying. Even though he knows where his brothers and sisters are headed, he’s praying that they would not be found unaware or disobedient. Right in the middle of the reading, we hear, Would that you might meet us doing right, that we were mindful of you in our ways! When I teach eighth grade, my disciplinary method is to put the word “quiz” on the board, and if I think they are not listening or if they get out of hand, I just put a little check mark there. Once they get to three, I give them a pop quiz their next class. And once I get to two check marks, you can see the classmates shushing each other because they don’t want to be found guilty. The line is very gray; they are like, we’re going to get a quiz if I don’t keep these people in line. That is where Isaiah is at. He’s saying, Lord, would that you would find us obedient, would that you would find us following You—I pray for that because I know it will go better for all of us in humanity if we follow You. And yet he says, Behold, you are angry, and we are sinful. He knows that despite his prayers, his nation, his people, his brothers and sisters are not going where they need to go.
Ultimately, this is our prayer as Christians. Our prayer is that the Lord should make Himself manifest, that He should make Himself known, because we as a race do better when God is front and center. We do what we need to do. We grow in virtue when God is here before us. And so, we are constantly praying that the Lord would make Himself known. And then during Advent, we are praying even deeper for that second coming. Lord, we pray that You would come. We pray that you would restore humanity by Your authority, by Your presence, by Your love, by Your command. We pray that we would be brought back into right relationship with You. We are the faithful; we are here. We know; we follow. We have faith that allows us to put God front and center. But we know not everybody has that faith. And so, our prayer this Advent is that the Lord would come again to us and to our brothers and sisters, that we might finally be restored in Him.
Fr. Moore 