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Our Lady - Star of the Sea |
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Homily for the Fourth Sunday of Advent, Year A: 2010
Last Wednesday evening, I visited the CCD class,
and I asked the children:
where is God? They answered quickly without
thinking: God is every
where. I am wondering how many people in this
church ask yourselves
this question when you have a problem or crisis.
In my experiences,
Jesus never failed me. Every time I was
desperate, or hopeless, I ran
to him for help and I found peace and
consolation again.
Today we see two different men who acted
differently with their
crisis. The first man is King Ahaz of Judah who
refused to rely on the
Lord. He said to prophet Isaiah: I don’t
bother the Lord. I have my
own plan for my crisis, so I don’t need any
sign from God. After that
he followed pagan idols. The second man is St.
Joseph who is Mary’s
husband. St. Joseph also had his own plan when
he learned that Mary
has a child in her womb. He was about to run
away quietly when the
angel, in a dream, told him it is God’s plan
for him to accept Mary as
his wife and Jesus as his son.
What do we learn from these two stories? We have
to ask ourselves:
When we have a crisis like: lost our job, lost a
spouse, carry an
illness, or broken marriage, etc, what will we
do? Do we try to solve
it by ourselves or do we turn to God for help
and do the best we can?
When people come to me for their problems, I
want them to talk to God
first. We should visit and talk to him when we
are stuck. He wants to
listen to our problems. He wants to help us, but
most of us look for
some one or something else. Remember, we will be
stuck in our problems
if we put God outside our life. In other words,
we don’t have hope in
ourselves because we are weak, we are fragile,
but we can only have
hope in the Lord who is powerful and caring. We
used to think that God
is up there, and he does not care what situation
we are in. This is
not true. Today we heard from the prophet Isaiah
and the angel deliver
the same message: “Emmanuel,” God is with
us. This is really good news
for humankinds. Although we don’t see Jesus in
human form nowadays,
but we believe that he is present with his
Children through his
Church, through his word, and through the
sacraments we celebrate. I
believe if we abide with him in every moment of
our life, we will know
what God’s plan for us in this life.
When we visit Jesus, we should put our agenda,
our plans, aside in
order to have a pure heart and mind to accept
whatever he wants to
teach us. Don’t be afraid! God is with us. So
come to him regularly to
receive his consolation and strength.
From today to Christmas, the scriptures
will lead us to Mary, Joseph,
Elizabeth, and Zachariah. They all trusted in
God’s plan for them. Let
us follow their examples. Let us renew our hope
in the Lord when we
are preparing to celebrate his birthday.
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