A Homily for the Second Sunday of Advent
Readings: Baruch 5:1-9 Philippians 1:4-6, 8-11 Luke 3: 1-6
I once memorized a line of Latin prose, from an epistle of St. Ambrose of Milan. Our Latin teacher, Father Reginald Foster, thought it to be such an eloquent turn of phrase. It is found in the Office of Readings on his feast day, Dec. 7. Tene clavum fidei, ut te graves huius saeculi turbare non possint procellae. “Take firm hold of the rudder of faith so that the severe storms of this world cannot disturb you.”
That admonition of St. Ambrose came to mind as I was reading the prison diaries of the recently murdered Russian dissident, Alexei Navalny. They were published in the Oct. 21 edition of The New Yorker. In them, Navalny explains how he made peace with the possibility of dying in prison.
One approach was to lie in his bed and imagine “the worst thing that can happen, and accept it.” For Navalny that meant, “I will spend the rest of my life in prison and die here.”
As a preamble to his second mental exercise, Navalny wrote:
I have always thought, and said openly, that being a believer makes it easier to live your life, and, to an even greater extent, engage in opposition politics. Faith makes life simpler.
Navalny then wrote of his second approach to the unendurable, the unimaginable:
The initial position for this exercise is the same as for the previous one. You lie in your bunk looking up at the one above and ask yourself whether you are a Christian in your heart of hearts. It is not essential for you to believe some old guys in the desert lived to be eight hundred years old or that the sea was literally parted in front of someone. But are you a disciple of the religion whose founder sacrificed himself for others, paying the price for their sins? Do you believe in the immortality of the soul and the rest of that cool stuff? If you can honestly say yes, what is there left for you to worry about? Why, under your breath, would you mumble a hundred times something you read from a hefty tome you keep in your bedside table? Don’t worry about the morrow, because the morrow is perfectly capable of taking care of itself.
My job is to seek the Kingdom of God and His righteousness, and leave it to good old Jesus and the rest of his family to deal with everything else. They won’t let me down and will sort out all my headaches. As they say in prison here: they will take my punches for me.
How is it that the Russian Alexei Navalny, in the early 21st century, so closely echoes the Roman Ambrose of Milan, writing in the fourth? “Take firm hold of the rudder of faith so that the severe storms of this world cannot disturb you.” Both believed that the only way to survive this world, to love and to serve this world, is to know of a world yet to come.
Jerusalem, take off your robe of mourning and misery;
put on the splendor of glory from God forever:
For God will show all the earth your splendor:
you will be named by God forever
the peace of justice, the glory of God’s worship (Bar 5:1,3-4).
Its critics often accuse the Christian faith of being a delusion, an opiate that keeps its followers tranquil, lulling them into an acceptance of this world’s evils. But how is it that so many of those who have most radically changed this world have, like Alexei Navalny, believed in a world yet to come? Does this knowledge bracket the world we see, putting its passing truths into a more permanent perspective? Does it show its sorrows to be passing? Does it contrast the best this world offers with the still insatiable desires of the human heart?
A cordon of confidence stretches from Alexei Navalny…
Being a believer makes it easier to live your life, and, to an even greater extent, engage in opposition politics. Faith makes life simpler.
through Ambrose of Milan…
Take firm hold of the rudder of faith so that the severe storms of this world cannot disturb you.
all the way back to John, baptizing in the Judean desert:
A voice of one crying out in the desert:
“Prepare the way of the Lord,
make straight his paths” (Lk 3:4).
What a queer consistency! This delusion or this truth. Either way, it refuses to be silent.
