Advent 4 – Love
During the Sundays of Advent we have focused on a theme for each week…Hope Peace and Joy and lit a candle at Mass. This Sunday we focus on Love

Some years ago I played the song “Love Changes Everything” during a parish mission session. Afterwards a woman angrily complained to me, “That song should not be used in church. It does not mention God even once”. I replied, “St John’s gospel tell us that Jesus said, “God is Love”. After looking a bit stunned she walked away.

In the church we have so often complicated gospel love by putting the emphasis on rules, on do’s and don’ts, wheras in fact it is rather simple. Jesus said, “Love one another as I have loved you”!

Nowhere is love better described that in St Paul’s first letter to the Corinthians. Paul begins in Chapter 13 by saying, “I may speak in tongues or use the language of an gels, but if I don’t have love, I am a noisy gong or a clanging cymbal” That lady who spoke to me after the missions session was a noisy gong. She missed the whole point – that Love changes everything!

Christmas has been cancelled in Bethelehem this year
This will also be the case in Gaza, Jerusalem, Nazareth and Amman, This is an act of solidarity for all the children who have been killed in the current war. The crib in the Lutheran church (see below) is made from rubble. The baby Jesus is amid the rubble and all the other characters including the baby’s parents are in the perimeter, looking for him amid the rubble.

This year began with one war in the headlines and ends with two. The war in Ukraine, so shocking when it began in February 2022, is now a dismally familiar feature of the news, grinding on as destructively as ever with no end in sight. The war in Gaza, which began less than two months ago, has already changed the Middle East forever.
The governments of many countries, including the US, had been hoping that the Israeli-Palestinian conflict—as old as Israel itself—would simply disappear over time as younger generations of Palestinians resigned themselves to statelessness. Now we know better. Despair may sometimes lead to resignation, but more often it leads to rage. Meanwhile, beyond the headlines, other conflicts carry on largely unnoticed in this country: civil wars in Sudan and Myanmar, savage gang violence in Haiti. Behold, the world brings us bad tidings, again and again. Peace on earth? Not now or anytime soon.

Advent
Advent means ‘the arrival’ and liturgically we understand this to refer to the arrival of Jesus at the first Christmas. Advent marks the beginning of the new liturgical church year. This is Year B which features Mark’s gospel.

Originally, Advent was a time of preparation for January 6th (the feast of Epiphany) related to the visit of the wise men from the East. These wise men only appear in Matthew, so we won’t hear about them in Year B. Often they are called kings and usually people refer to them as the ‘three’ wise men, but Matthew doesn’t tell us how many ‘wise men’ (or astrologers) from the East followed a star and came to Bethlehem.

 Epiphany is an important feast because it celebrates Jesus as the universal Lord. The men from the East signified that people from ‘east and west’ had come to pay homage to Jesus, the ultimate revealer of God’s love and fellowship. The period of advent used to start on December 17th and it was a festival period of prayers and activities celebrating that Jesus had arrived, rather than it being a preparation period during which we wait for Jesus to arrive. 


Homily for a priest
Some years ago in the United States, a group of seminarians were on retreat. They were due to be ordained deacons later in the year. As part of the retreat, the seminary rector arranged for the seminarians to undertake a three kilometre walk following a direct route, to a church in the city where they were to spend 30 minutes in prayer, before returning home the same way. They were asked to walk alone and not talk with one another until they had returned.

After they arrived home, the rector invited into the room where they were gathered, ten people, and he asked the seminarians if they recognised any of them. None of them did.

He then explained that he had asked these people to take up positions along the route the students took to the church and back. Some had been dressed as beggars. One had lay down on the pavement. Some asked for help. Not one of the students even stopped to acknowledge them!

Humour
A heart surgeon was waiting for the service manager to come take a look at his bike when a mechanic shouted across the garage, 
“Hey, Doc, can I ask you a question?”

The surgeon, a bit surprised, walked over to where the mechanic was working on the motorcycle.

The mechanic straightened up, wiped his hands on a rag, and asked, “So, Doc, look at this engine I open its heart, take valves out, fix 'em, put 'em back in, and when I finish, it works just like new. So how come I get such a small salary and you get the really big bucks, when you and I are doing basically the same work?”

The Holy Land is at war. Israel and the Palestinian Territories – (a fifth of the size of Victoria), are home to roughly 15 million people. There is an equal number of Jews and Muslims, while there are only 350,000 Christians. Half are natives of this land, the other half are migrants. Many of us have been reduced to silence in the face of violence, in the face of the hatred that hardens hearts and slyly comes knocking at our doors to draw us into its madness.

The Christian community is not uniform. Hebrew-speaking Christians include Israelis. They react like their Jewish compatriots, suffering in their flesh the massacres that could have been theirs. Four Christian migrants died in the villages bordering the Gaza Strip.

November is traditionally a month for remembering our departing relatives and friends. As many of Mass community members of Holy Cross continue to age, we have to acknowledge the sad reality of loved ones who have died and the pain and consequence of that loss. We see obvious signs that we are growing closer to that reality for ourselves.
Bereavement is something we become more familiar with as we age, and few of us have been spared the experience. We encounter friends and faith companions everywhere who suffer from the death of loved ones – sometimes after a long illness, sometimes at an advanced age or as the result of sudden illness, accident or something worse. Some have lost parents, spouses or children many years ago and have lived with that loss. Some are experts in loneliness. Everyone has a story.

We can benefit from some insights and sharing of the theory and experience of bereavement.

This week’s newsletter is shorter (‘hurrah’ some will say) because I tested positive to COVID on Sunday morning, and for most of the week I haven’t had much energy. Three other community members (JD, Thang and Cu’ong) were positive as well as my brother Paul who came over from New Zealand on Wednesday night for the PFG weekend and tested positive on Friday! All of them tested negative on Wednesday. Joseph Liaia went over to Endeavour Hills to help out for two weeks and he and Tuan Paul both have had COVID this week. Kevin Hennessy went to Sydney for a week’s work and was forced into isolation. There must be others who contracted COVID from the same source as us. Apologies to you. Our brothers, especially Phi and Tri have been remarkably diligent in ‘caring for the sick’. I tested negative an hour ago.

The Hamas-Israeli War and the death of diplomacy
This brief reflection by Isabelle de Gaulmyn was published by La Croix on October 9, 2023. Isabella is a senior editor at La Croix and a former Vatican correspondent).

It is not possible to place the State of Israel and an armed terrorist group "on the same level". One is a democratic country, albeit in crisis, while the other is a violent, clandestine and dictatorial organization.  Hamas's attack on Israel, and its inhumane treatment of civilians, must be firmly condemned. But it is never wrong to ask why, and to see how years of prevarication, indifference and Israeli nationalist policy have led to this.