Weekly HOMILY for December 7, 2008: Operating Systems and the Present and Future “Comings” of the Lord

2nd Sunday of Advent, Cycle B
Our Lady of Grace
December 7, 2008

Operating Systems and the Present and Future “Comings” of the Lord
By (Rev. Msgr.) Nicholas P. Amato


Cleaning the Hard Drive

A man named Jack Sacco tells a story about his computer.

Sacco says that he once bought a state-of-the-art computer. Over the years, he installed a number of different operating systems.

One day, after Sacco had just installed the latest and greatest operating system, his computer crashed. He couldn’t figure out what had gone wrong.

Sacco took the computer to an expert and explained what he had been doing. The technician asked if he had deleted the former operating systems from the hard drive before installing the new one.

Sacco said, “No, I’ve just been installing new ones on top of the old ones.” The technician replied, “That’s the problem.”

“Your computer has so many confusing instructions telling it how to operate that it doesn’t know what to do. So it shut down.”

The technician then deleted all former operating systems from the hard drive and re-installed the latest one. The computer worked like a charm.


The Coming(s) of the Lord

That story helps us to appreciate what we are to do in this Season of Advent.

Our English word “Advent” is from the Latin word that means “coming.” There are three comings of the Lord that form the heart of this Season, Advent.

First, we believe that the Lord has already come to us in the birth of Jesus. We will celebrate this past coming on December 25th.

Second, we also believe that the Lord comes to us in the present. He comes to us here in the liturgy in the Word and in a few minutes in the Sacrament of the Eucharist.

And third, we also believe that the Lord will come again. This will happen at an unknown moment in the future.

Saint Peter in today’s second reading says that. “The day of the Lord will come like a thief in the night.” So Advent invites us to get ready for this future coming and this is where the image of cleaning out the hard drive comes in.

We need to clean out our spiritual hard drives, if you will. This is what John the Baptist means in today’s Gospel by his Baptism of Repentance.

It is what Isaiah means in the first reading with his images of filling in the valleys and leveling the mountains. The idea is that we need to allow the Lord to come to us more fully in the present moment, right now.

And in doing that, we are also preparing for his coming at that unknown, future moment.

We need to clean out the old operating systems and allow the new operating system, God’s ways, to work within us.


Our Preparation

For example, maybe we, especially we in America, need to clean out the operating mindset that says, “I am what I have.”

So often we are tempted to identify ourselves by the size of our home or the make of our car or the amount of our savings, thus fulfilling my self-identity in the belief, “I am what I have.”

We need to clean out this mindset and allow space for the new mindset of “being more” instead of “having more.” Jesus would say: “It is more important for you to be more than to have more?”

Perhaps we can take this as a positive message from all of today’s negative financial news. If there is a bright spot in all of this negative financial news most of us find ourselves in, it may be that it takes us back to this message.

So, being or becoming more grounded in God’s Word, more reflective, more understanding, more affirming, more willing to listening, more other-centered – this is our real task of life.

I am suggesting that Advent invites us to this very fundamental task of being more instead of having more.


Conclusion

To go back to where we began, we need to clean out the old operating systems and allow the new operating system, which is Jesus Christ’s modeling and his way of loving, to operate within us.

This is the task of Advent. This allows the Lord to come to us more fully into the present.

But, perhaps, equally as important, it prepares us for the Lord’s coming at that unknown future moment, and it enables us to celebrate on Christmas day the real meaning of the Lord’s coming in the past.