4th Sunday of Advent

Homily: Wonderful are your works

Wonder is born from the heart of frailty

As we grow older we perhaps can become all too aware of the truth that illuminates the lines from Shakespeare’s play “Hamlet”: “When sorrows come, they come not single spies, but in battalions.” Loss seems to get ladled onto more loss, like snow falling on snow. Tragedy follows tragedy and not just on the worldwide stage, but the little daily tragedies of illness, limitation, and a body that won’t do what it once did. So we ask where’s God in the sorrow? Where’s God in the mounting sense of loss? Where’s God in the daily little tragedies of life?
And again we come to Advent; again we come to Christmas and we hear words that are perhaps as inviting as they may also be frustrating: Wonder is born from the heart of frailty.

Let’s take a moment and track the usual path of our sorrows that seem to come in battalions. I can personally attest to what happens. The fleet-footed pace of life and the evermore profoundly revealed frailty of human existence can too easily lead us to the kind of fear that fuels cynicism and the kind of anger that gives birth to bitterness. And they become the desperate attempts we all make to defend ourselves against what we cannot understand; what we cannot reverse; what
we cannot fix.

But today, once again, we hear the name of God that is the final and complete name of God. It’s a name that names us as well: Emmanuel. For as Matthew reminds us it means “God is with us!” God is with us. In one single name we meet the fullness of who God is and who we are called to be. God is with us, fully, finally and completely in Christ. It is what God has always wanted even though we too often have resisted it with everything that is in us.

From the moment God wandered in the garden, in the cool of the evening and asked: “Where are you?” Because Adam and Eve didn’t want to be human, they wanted to be gods… so they hid themselves. And through all the times that followed when God said: “I am with you.” “I will go with you.” But we instead determine to launch off on our own paths. It’s always been God’s deepest desire: to be with us. We just too often refuse the terms; we find them a bit too steep:
“Just be human,” God says, “and I will be with you!”

God came as a desperately dependent and frail infant. God made himself known in his fullness on the cross; revealed within human suffering. Not only, does it seem, that Wonder is born from the heart of human frailty, so too is God.

Meister Eckhart tells us God can’t help himself! When he sees human sorrow, limitation, weakness, frailty he runs towards it and he desires to fill it with nothing but his very self. And when he does even our frailty is illuminated from within by a warm light that glows through translucent skin and emanates a divine presence in our very brittle bones that speaks of a life that will never be defeated by human suffering, tragedy, and loss.

Pope Francis has told us what the world needs most are people willing to witness to Beauty. But let’s not be deceived here. That Beauty is not found in youth, in the sure and the certain, in the strong and the capable. That Beauty is found in the wonder that emanates from the heart of human frailty. It speaks without words the very name of God: Emmanuel (God is with us)! In our frailty, we are finally found and in being found we are set aflame with a fierce undefeatable fire that strangely enough burns hot just at the time of life when we are convinced it’s growing cold; as this human body grows old.

But, I want to be clear! I do not understand this. And I’m not saying you should understand it. But it does seem to me that this is the path our God has chosen. Everything that is in us will resist it, but if we are willing to come out from behind the shrubbery of sham strength and out from behind the shame that taints our vulnerability, we too will know God with us… not as we once were; not as we always felt we should be; not at full strength but rather confronted by the
cross and confined to the crib.

Wonder is born from the heart of human frailty. Perhaps it is the last great gift and the greatest gift of God. There he gives us himself and he makes himself known through us as a Beauty that burns and to which we must give witness. Emmanuel! God is with us!