Fr. Brian Soliven Sermons

Prepare the way of the Lord! 

"My soul magnifies the Lord!" 

If Christianity were something we had stitched together out of our own imaginations, I suspect we should have made a far more sensible job of it. We should have arranged a thunderous arrival: God descending like a general at the head of an army, the world brought to heel by sheer magnificence. But that, of course, is precisely why the story has the ring of truth. No one invents a God who chooses to enter His own universe not at the top of the staircase, but at the very bottom.

For consider what is being claimed. The One by whom all things were made – whose voice set the stars burning and the galaxies spinning – comes among His creatures unable to speak a word or steady His own limbs. The hand that holds the oceans in their place must first be held. The omnipotent becomes, in the most literal sense, dependent. If this does not disturb our neat ideas of power, then we have not yet begun to understand it.

At Christmas, all our ordinary measurements are quietly overturned. We habitually equate power with loudness, greatness with height, importance with the ability to command. God, however, chooses another grammar altogether. He does not shout; He whispers. He does not overwhelm; He invites. The Incarnation tells us that real strength is not diminished by humility, and that true majesty is perfectly at home in low places.

We are tempted to treat the manger as a pleasant religious decoration, something to be admired and then passed by. But if we linger, it becomes a challenge rather than a comfort. God did not merely become a man; He became a baby. In doing so, He claimed every stage of human life as His own, from our first breath to our last. There is no corner of our experience, however small or humiliating, that He has not entered and redeemed.

And here the blow falls squarely on our pride. The manger tells us, without rancor and without compromise, that the world is not saved by human cleverness or moral effort. Salvation comes not by our ascent to God, but by God’s descent to us. We do not scramble our way into heaven; heaven comes quietly to earth. Grace is not a wage to be earned but a gift to be received, as simply as a child is received into waiting arms.

Christmas, then, is not a festival of human achievement but of divine generosity. It is the moment when Eternity puts on the clothes of time and asks, not for admiration, but for trust. God does not bully us into belief; He makes Himself small enough to be loved. The Infinite becomes an infant so that even the smallest and weakest among us might dare to come to Him. 

To ponder, to be bored in thought, offers a tremendous window into the depths of reality. 

 The fulfillment of prophecy is not merely a proof offered to reason, but an invitation to faith—calling the human heart to recognize that God truly enters history and walks with his people.

Today, the words of our Lord confront and unsettle us. He declares that “tax collectors and prostitutes” go before us. Why is this so? Because they possess a quality that every saint instinctively understands.

When John the Baptist sends his disciples to Jesus with that piercing question, “Are you the one who is to come, or should we look for another?”, we must not too quickly suppose that John had lost his faith. Far more often, doubt is not the absence of belief but the collision of belief with unexpected reality. Even the greatest saints may stand bewildered before the mystery of God’s methods.

Here is Jesus healing the blind and lifting the poor, hardly the thunderous overthrow of evil John may have expected. The prison cell in which John waited could not have made the contrast less stark. He had preached a roaring lion; Jesus seemed more like a quiet lamb. And so the messenger goes to the Messiah with the cry that every disciple must eventually utter: “Explain Yourself.”

Jesus answers not by argument but by evidence. The blind see; the lame walk; the dead rise. That is to say, “Look at what is happening. The Kingdom is already breaking in, though not in the way you imagined.” God’s power often arrives not as a mighty earthquake but as a seed, small enough to be ignored by the proud and yet strong enough to split the stones beneath it.

Jesus refuses to conform to our ideas of what God should do. We want a Savior who fits our expectations; He gives us a Savior who fits what we truly need, even when we do not realize it. 

In praising John, Jesus reminds us that greatness in the Kingdom is measured not by one’s spiritual résumé but by one’s nearness to the Light. John stood at dawn, pointing to the coming Sun; we stand at mid-morning, bathed in its warmth. The smallest soul who trusts Christ on this side of the Resurrection possesses a gift even John longed to see with his own eyes. What then shall we learn from the imprisoned prophet and the unconventional Messiah?

Perhaps this: God may not behave as you expect, but He will always be better than you expect. His answers may not thunder, but they heal. His Kingdom may not arrive with spectacle, but it transforms everything it touches. For such a Savior does not simply rule the world; He remakes the human heart.

My friends, if only we could grasp this staggering truth: God does not love you as one among many, but as though you were the only soul He ever fashioned. His gaze is not a broad beam cast over humanity; it is a narrow and radiant shaft aimed straight at your heart. The One who carved the stars has considered every sorrow you carry and every hope you scarcely dare to utter, and He loves you not in spite of these things but through them, with a tenderness fierce enough to pursue you into any darkness and a joy eager to welcome you home. When this truth is allowed to enter the secret chambers of the soul, it becomes impossible to believe you are forgotten; for the God who holds the universe in His palm has never once let go of you. 

We are far more valuable than we imagine ourselves to be; we are sons and daughters of the very Father whom Christ called His own. If we could see ourselves as Heaven sees us, we would walk with a courage that would unsettle every shadow in the world. And perhaps that is why the devil strains so fiercely to cloud our identity. For if he can lure us into forgetting whose children we are, he need not chain us; our own confusion will do the work for him. But the moment we remember, even faintly, that we belong to the Almighty, the darkness trembles, for it knows he is losing his grip.  

Sooner or later every one of us reaches a moment when we realize we are lost. Perhaps someone here today feels that very thing – an inner drifting, a sense that spiritually or morally we’ve wandered from the path. Life hasn’t unfolded the way we expected. The days begin to blur into one another, wake up, eat, work, sleep, repeat. Somewhere in that routine we ask, Where is my life going?

Dante, the Medieval Italian poet, put it powerfully when he wrote, “Midway on the journey of our life, I found myself alone and lost in a dark wood, having wandered from the straight path.” Many of us know exactly what that dark wood feels like.

But hear the good news: Jesus Christ comes precisely for those who are lost. Christianity is not a reward for the strong; it is a lifeline for the weary. It is not a trophy for the disciplined; it is hope for those who finally admit they cannot fix themselves. That is why, in this Sunday’s Gospel, St. John the Baptist does not whisper but proclaims: “Repent! For the Kingdom of God is at hand.”

To repent is to say, “Lord, I have lost my way, and I need You to lead me home.” Unless we acknowledge that, we will never leave the dark wood. If we pretend we have everything together, we will never reach for the hand of the Savior stretched out toward us. And if we do not reach for Him, we will never know Jesus Christ as the One who rescues.

Some say the Catholic Church asks too much – too many rules, too many expectations: confess your sins, fast during Lent, give back to God a percentage of your income, honor the Sabbath by attending Mass each Sunday. And yes, the Church asks much. But she asks much because she loves much. She has learned, through two thousand years of saints and sinners, that holiness requires real commitment. There is no such thing as cheap grace. As Scripture tells us, “You shall be holy, for I the Lord your God am holy.” (Cf. Leviticus 19:2) 

When John the Baptist saw the Pharisees and Sadducees, religious men with impressive knowledge, he rebuked them sharply: “You brood of vipers!” Why? Because they knew the law but lacked the heart. They understood Scripture, but their lives bore no fruit. Knowledge without surrender had left them unchanged. And so John cried out, “Produce good fruit as evidence of your repentance!”

As we walk through this season of Advent, let each candle we light be a small but steady call out of the dark wood and into the marvelous light of Christ. He is coming, not to condemn us for being lost, but to lead us out if only we will let Him.

So, do not imitate the Pharisees and Sadducees who believed they needed no Savior. Instead, lift your hands in surrender. Admit your need. Welcome Christ into the places where you feel most lost. Let Him take the lead, guide your steps, and show you once more the path home.