3rd Sunday of Advent, C December 12, 2021
Fr. Albert St. John the Evangelist, Jeanerette
Rejoice! Rejoice! Emmanuel shall come to you O Israel. It is Guadete Sunday, from the Latin word for rejoice… the same word used in that ancient and beautiful hymn and in our entrance antiphon. And that is not just a verb. It’s not just describing rejoicing. It is in the imperative mood, it is commanding us, saying “you must rejoice!” But to get there, we should perhaps first try to follow another command, one that St. Paul gives in the second reading: “Have no anxiety at all.” That’s right, scripture is ordering you and me to not have anxiety. Based on the statistics I’ve seen, we are not only not obeying him, we are obeying him less and less every year. Anxiety continues to increase among adults in every generation.
But how does St. Paul’s command help? If you tell an anxious person “stop being anxious,” wouldn’t it just make them more anxious? Probably, but that’s why Paul doesn’t just leave us with that simple command, he gives us an alternative, something to do instead of and in order to avoid being anxious. “in everything, by prayer and petition, with thanksgiving, make your requests known to God.” Yep, the way to stop being anxious is to pray.
I’m afraid that, when most people say “pray and you won’t be anxious,” it comes off as more empty platitude than helpful advice. In part, this is because it is all too easy to use this saying as a way to shield ourselves from someone. They express that they are anxious and we tell them “just pray” as a way to shield ourselves from their anxiety, to stop ourselves from having to feel compassion for them, and to make ourselves feel better because we have the answer.
That’s not what St. Paul is doing though. This is the man who wrote in another letter that he felt trapped in “doing what I do not want and not doing what I want to do.” He has letters filled with frustration and anger at the hardheartedness of communities he established. He begged the lord to be delivered from a “thorn in the flesh” only to have God tell him “no.” He knows the meaning of anxiety, he is not dismissing you or your concerns. He’s telling us “do not be anxious” because he knows it is bad for us and because he knows why and how we should overcome it. Look closely at the kind of prayer he commands.
He doesn’t say to mindlessly recite memorized prayers, he says to “make your requests known to God” and to do it “with thanksgiving… in everything.” I can recall a moment in my life – I think I was driving or in a car – and I was filled with anxiety, frustration, and probably some depression. I remember something like this passage occurred to me. So, I started to thank God for the only thing I could think of at the time: my toes. “Thank you for my toes, Lord. Thank you for my feet, my ankles…” I moved up through the body and covered all sorts of things. And something amazing happened. At some point, peace began to wash over me. What started out as a forced prayer for something small became an internal emotional experience. I actually felt grateful and excited about the most basic parts of my body. And my anxiety was gone… and I think at some point I was able to pray for whatever was bothering me and move on. I don’t even remember now what was bothering me back then.
Gratitude is powerful. But it’s not as simple as distracting ourselves from anxiety by being grateful for something else. That helps, yes, but gratitude for your toes is not a magic formula for every situation – though I do recommend it for a difficult moment on occasion. Paul commands gratitude in everything. One of the deeper mysteries of our faith is the deep conviction that God’s providence covers everything, that he takes the greatest evils and pains and turns them into good. Faith in this providence can and eventually should get so profound that we can learn to be grateful even for our sufferings. Not because we are masochists, but because, by faith, we trust that these difficulties can be surrendered to God and turn out for the greater good.
So, yeah, there is a kind of prayer that takes exactly what you’re anxious about and thanks God for the thing causing you anxiety. It’s a trivial example, but I tried it in preparing for this homily. I was feeling anxious about having to sit down and do it, so I said “I thank you Lord that I have to do this, I’m grateful you are forcing me out of my selfishness and laziness, I’m grateful I get to preach” Much greater people than I have taken much greater trials and thanked God for their problems. Does the thought of doing that make you anxious?
Do not fret, that is the end of a process, the top of a climb with much smaller steps to start. It has to do with two things: making “your requests known to God” and God’s “threshing floor.” John the Baptist is warning people about the judgment of God. He uses this metaphor of a threshing floor. In ancient times, you prepared wheat by taking the stalks and beating them on a hard floor. You then used a big winnowing fan to blow away all the debris. The grain itself was heavier and the rest – the chaff – would blow away, and eventually be gathered to be burned.
The wheat metaphor is intentional. The word in Greek for thanksgiving is “eucharisteo.” The secret to overcoming anxiety is to beat your anxieties into the Eucharist. Every Mass, during the offertory, you can take your anxieties and troubles and make them “known to God” by mentally placing them on the altar. When you get anxious, use your imagination to picture whatever you’re worrying about as a stalk of wheat. Then take that stalk and beat it against the floor. Then invite Jesus to come with his fan and blow it way. What’s left is the wheat that becomes bread that becomes the Eucharist. Eventually, with the help of grace, you may come to the point where you see how to be grateful even for the problem because God can take it and transform it.
Tell God your problems honestly. Make the choice to express gratitude even when you don’t feel it, if not for the problem itself then for some other good thing. Give it to Jesus in the Eucharist and let him beat, set it on fire, transform it, and give it back to you as something better than a solution. What he gives you in exchange is his very self. That’s why he was born. That’s why we can – and indeed must – rejoice.