Sunday, December 8, 2013

Second Sunday of Advent

The kingdom is for all of us. Jesus came and is coming for all of us: Jew and Gentile, Christian and Pagan, believer and unbeliever alike. There is no "chosen people" among our many tribes, just one family of the one God. Let us prepare our hearts during this Advent season to receive the gift of such truth, for we so desperately need it. Right now, millions of us are in mourning for Nelson Mandela, a man who tried to teach us the truth about our family. We are rightly celebrating his life and his work. But this very same week, we also buried the ashes of 1,464 brothers and sisters whose bodies went unclaimed. If we lived the truth of our family, none of those siblings would have their remains lying in a common grave. We would be memorializing each one of them as loudly and proudly as we are now doing for Mandela. But we do not do so, because according to our scales Mandela was important and unclaimed persons clearly are not. The truth of our family tells us that our scales are ridiculous. None of us are any more or less important than the rest of us, for we are the one family of the one Parent. Such unquenchable truth is straining to be born once more. Will you prepare to live it?