Here it is the darkest week of the year outside, but light and joy are all around us inside. In today’s Gospel, John the Baptist testified about Jesus being the light and words of joy were scattered throughout the other readings. To represent this joy, we see the rose-colored candle on the Advent wreath lit. It may also bring some of you joy to see the priest and deacon wearing what some might describe as pink dresses. Sorry, Fr. Jeremy, I mean rose-colored vestments; real men wear rose, right? All this focus on light and joy may seem puzzling with Thursday being the darkest day of the year when the earth is tilted furthest away from the sun. But our light and joy don’t come from the earth’s tilt toward the sun of the sky. Our light and joy come from tilting our lives toward the Son of God.
The path to true joy begins with making room in the inn of our hearts to fully welcome Jesus. God made each of us with room in our hearts perfectly sized to be the dwelling place for Jesus. The problem is we tend to try to fill this space in our hearts with smaller substitutes for Jesus. St. Thomas Aquinas said the four small substitutes for Jesus we use are wealth, power, pleasure and honor. These four small substitutes for Jesus never fill this Jesus-sized room in our hearts, so we are left feeling unfulfilled and frustrated. If we release from our hearts unhealthy attachments to wealth, power, pleasure and honor, we can fully welcome Jesus into the dwelling place of our hearts. Which of these four substitutes for God do we most need to release an unhealthy attachment to in our lives?
For me, sixteen years ago, I was so attached to wealth that I couldn’t bring myself to embrace welcoming a child into my life. When Julie and I got engaged, I told her that after we got married, I wanted 0, 1 or 2 kids. Julie’s wanted 3-5 kids. You see, I viewed welcoming a child into my life as getting in the way of me doing what I wanted to do with “my money.” After we got married, I tried to delay having a child by giving as an excuse that we needed to have the perfect amount of money saved first before we could welcome a child into our lives. The truth is, if we would have waited to have the perfect amount of money saved up before having a child, we would have been waiting forever. Eventually, Julie’s persistence, encouragement and love paid off and I released this unhealthy attachment to money. Because of this, I was able to embrace welcoming our three children into my life. They have helped bring me closer to Jesus and have brought more joy into my life than I could have ever imagined.
The second substitute for God is power. It was one of the darkest days of the year 73 years ago. The year was 1944 and two of the world’s most powerful nations, America and Germany, were on the battlefield during World War II’s Battle of the Bulge. This was one of the costliest battles in American history where 80,000 of the American and allied troops were killed, wounded or captured. However, the light that came into this world with the birth of Christ hadn't lost its ability to overcome even these darkest of days. It was in the heart of this battlefield in the Belgium wilderness on the dark night of Christmas Eve, where American soldiers and enemy soldiers from Germany laid down their guns, gathered together in the home of a civilian family to give thanks to God, to break bread together for Christmas dinner and to sleep in peace under the same roof. The darkness that was all around them in the battlefield that night, couldn't overcome Christ’s light and joy in that little corner of the battlefield.
Soldiers and saints alike have had to let go of substitutes for God. The poster child for an unhealthy attachment to pleasure is St. Augustine. As a lustful younger man, his prayer was “God, grant me chastity and continence, but not yet.” Over time, he released this unhealthy attachment to pleasure and then he wrote a...