Welcome to Finding God in Our Hearts. The following production, Pastoral Reflections with Monsignor Don Fisher, is a weekly program of deep spiritual insight on Scripture, revealing the indwelling presence of God. We appreciate your listenership and if you find this program valuable, please subscribe and share with your friends. Share this program is funded with kind donations by listeners just like you. Make your donation@pastoralreflectionsinstitute.com we are celebrating the second Sunday of Advent. The Opening Prayer Almighty and merciful God, may no earthly undertaking hinder those who set out in haste to meet your Son, but may our learning of heavenly wisdom gain us admittance to his company, who lives and reigns with you in the unity of the Holy Spirit, God forever and ever.

Amen. A reading from the Old Testament the book of Isaiah 41st through the fifth verse and ninth through the 11th verse. Comfort, give comfort to my people, says your God. Speak tenderly to Jerusalem and proclaim to her that her service is at an end. Her guilt is expiated indeed, she has received from the hand of the Lord double for all her sins. A voice goes out in the desert, Prepare the way of the Lord.

Make straight in the waste land a highway for our God. Every valley shall be filled in, every mountain and hill shall be made low. The rugged land shall be made a plain, the rough country a broad valley. Then the glory of the Lord shall be revealed, and all peoples shall see it together, for the mouth of the Lord has spoken. Go up to a high mountain, Zion, herald of glad tidings. Cry out at the top of your voice, Jerusalem, herald of good news.

Fear not to cry out and say to the cities of Judah, here is your God. Here is, here comes with power the Lord God who rules by his strong arm. Here is his reward with him his recompense before him like a shepherd he feeds his flock in his arms he gathers the lambs, carrying them in his bosom, and leading the ewes with care the word of the Lord. Responsorial Psalm Lord, let us see your kindness and grant us your salvation. I will hear what God proclaims the Lord, for he proclaims peace to his people. Near indeed is the salvation to those who fear him.

Glory dwelling in our land. Lord, let us see your kindness and grant us your salvation. Kindness and truth shall meet, justice and peace shall kiss. Truth shall spring out of the earth, and justice shall look down from heaven. Lord, let us see your kindness, and grant us your salvation. The Lord himself will give his benefits.

Our land shall yield its increase. Justice shall walk before him and prepare the way of his steps. Lord, let us see your kindness and grant us your salvation. A reading from the letter of second Peter 3, 8, 14. Do not ignore this one fact, beloved, that with the Lord one day is like a thousand years, and a thousand years like one day. The Lord does not delay his promise, as some regard delay, but he is patient with you, not wishing that any should perish, but that all should come to repentance.

But the day of the Lord will come like a thief and and then the heavens will pass away with a mighty roar, and the elements will be dissolved by fire and the earth and everything done on it will be found out. Since everything is to be dissolved in this way, what sort of person ought you to be conducting yourselves in holiness and devotion, waiting for and hastening the coming of the day of God, because of which the heavens will be dissolved in flames and the elements melted by fire. But according to his promise, we await a new heaven and a new earth in which righteousness dwells. Therefore, beloved, since you await these things, be eager to be found without spot or blemish before him at peace. The word of the Lord our levers prepare the way of the Lord. Make straight his paths.

All flesh shall see the salvation of God. Hallelujah. The gospel for this second Sunday of Advent is taken from Mark, first chapter, first through the eighth verse, the beginning of the Gospel of Jesus Christ, the Son of God, as it is written in Isaiah, the prophet. Behold, I am sending my messenger ahead of you. He will prepare your way. A voice of one crying out in the desert, prepare the way of the Lord.

Make straight his paths. John the Baptist appeared in the desert proclaiming a baptism of repentance for the forgiveness of sins. People of the whole Judean countryside and all the inhabitants of Jerusalem were going out to him and were being baptized by him in the Jordan River. And as they acknowledged their sins, John was clothed in camel’s hair with a leather belt around his waist. He fed on locusts and wild honey. And this is what he proclaimed.

One mightier than I is coming after me. I’m not worthy to stoop and loosen the thongs of his sandals. I’ve baptized you with water. He will baptize you with the Holy Spirit. The Gospel of the Lord Take a few moments as we listen to the music to ponder the wisdom and the truth found in these readings. I’ve always wondered why the Old Testament is so long and the New Testament is so short.

Because really what you. What you need to know and to focus on is the New Testament is the Fullness of who God is. He reveals fully his plan for us. And so it would seem that we would spend much more time talking about that than we would the centuries of recorded story after story of people who have struggled to try to understand this God and who he is and what he’s asking of us. And God had a problem in the Old Testament. He had to be both the God of good and the God of evil, because gods were the source of everything.

So, so many people look back on the Old Testament as a way of saying, that’s the God I don’t want to be a part of. That’s the God that frightens me. He’s violent, he destroys people because they don’t respond to him. And that’s not a God I want to get close to. And what we need to understand fully, and especially it’s important to listen to those words that we just listened to from the letter of Peter, like time. Time is really not the issue.

Time is in God’s way of looking at things, a day is the same as, you know, as a thousand years. So the length of the Old Testament is not anything to pay attention to. In a sense, it’s a story about human beings resistance to who God really is. And when God knew that this resistance was there, he worked with people, patiently guiding them through patriarchs and prophets and kings, and all kinds of important things took place that would shake the way in which people were thinking and change it so that it could be something seen as new. So just imagine with me, when we look at the stories of the Old Testament, they’re all terribly important, but what’s important is to do what God did in the Old Testament. And that is slowly he revealed himself not as a God that lives like other gods, a God of vengeance, a God of destruction, but slowly, slowly he began to reveal himself as who he fully is.

And that didn’t come until the time was right. And it’s hard to know exactly what it was that had to be in place, but it had to be some kind of basic instinct that they were ready to hear, ready to open themselves to a new image of God that would have been considered absolutely insane in the beginning of the Old Testament. God was always holy, Other. He was always so holy and we were always so evil that when we got too close to God, we just. We burned up. His light was so strong, our inability to receive anything directly from him was so limited.

And yet in the story over centuries, we see this change coming over people being more receptive to, to their openness to God, perhaps because they suffered so much and they did so much in terms of turning to God and trusting in him, even though they would fall away, they would go back and trust Him. It’s interesting in the first reading, when Isaiah is talking about something that’s going to come, some new thing that’s going to happen. This is the season when we focus on this great shift in the Old Testament to New Testament. And he says something there when he says that the people in the Old Testament paid for all their sins. They were so often punished and went through difficult trials. And it’s almost to say if we ever feel like we’re not worthy of this great gift of God freely coming and choosing to be with us, our ancestors paid a high price.

And human nature likes somehow to say, I earned this. But it’s already done, it’s already finished. And now something is going to happen. And what happened at this time was that God revealed himself for the first time as one who comes with power and enters into a human being. And we need to shout this out. We need to proclaim it to the world.

The God that was the distant God who was demanding and required reconciliation and repentance constantly has now shifted into the God who fully is who he always has been. He’s this incredible, loving human like God, who shepherds us, feeds us, gathers us, carries us next to his heart and leads us as children are led. No one in the Old Testament ever could imagine that there would be a God like this, a God so caring and so interested in us that anything that we think now in the New Testament time, that is our responsibility to create something in us that allows God to enter into us. If we think about that as our weakness and our greatest sin, then the answer is simple. It’s this. Stop saying no to God’s presence.

Don’t look at reasons why you don’t deserve it. All God wants, and this is so important for you to hear, all that God wants from us is our permission for him to enter into us and to somehow reimagine what it’s like to be filled with divinity. John the Baptist, the man who came crying out and saying, there’s something coming after the law, something coming after this whole, whole notion of a religion surrounding rituals that primarily do nothing more than forgive, though I shouldn’t say that’s just forgiveness. But they were constantly given a way to be forgiven. And instead of a ritual doing that, now we have a God who comes in the form of Jesus and he looks at you and he looks at me. And he says, there is no need for you to make up for your sins.

It is already done for you. Jesus says, that’s why I died on the cross, for you. And I’m not talking about you trying and struggling to do better. And you’re going to confession, that’s fine. But I’m trying to say that the heart of what God is saying about the new earth, the new heaven that he’s creating, is nothing like the old. It’s so radically different.

And the difference is in the intention of God. He’s not looking at you and he’s not looking at me, saying, why aren’t you better? Why don’t you work harder? Why don’t you get your act together? None of that is applied to the heart of a human being from a God who is love. He’s rather saying, I want you to listen to me and learn from me.

And I’m going to do this by being your teacher. And the way I’m going to teach you is by entering into you and living inside of your heart. And from there, I’m going to guide you into doing the things that you saw me doing when I was on this plane, on this earth. We are children of the Father. We are like Jesus. When I was growing up, I always thought I had to be like Jesus.

And all I could think of is that I had to try to be sinless. Jesus is so much more than a person who came on this earth and was sinless. He was a person that came on this earth to teach us about the mystery of the incarnation. God was living inside of Jesus. The part that was God and the part that was Jesus is indistinguishable. You can’t tell one from the other.

And we don’t have that kind of intimacy with God, but we have something like that. He enters you, he enters me. And he wants so much for us to give comfort. Comfort my people. And we can do that so powerfully by not making us the source of that power. Not using our ego to do the right thing, to impress or to help or to heal.

No, he just wants us to let him work through us. And we need to give him permission to not only use us, but to change us. So many images of the end of the world are so dark and frightening that many people feel the kingdom of God will only come when there’s a great catastrophic destruction of everything. That’s one way to look at that. But another way to look at destruction and fire is to look at radical change. A landscape is radically ripped of Everything that’s there when a great fire goes through it, when an earthquake shakes everything, everything crumbles.

They’re all images of radical change, not ending, not God destroying those who aren’t worthy and then saving the few that are good. That’s such a misunderstanding of the final times that we are in the final times. And the final times are this extraordinary invitation to be like the Christ, to be Christed, that is, to be anointed as he was anointed, with spirit and power and healing. And I tell you, when you shift from thinking about how do I make myself more attractive so God will love me? And shift it to how can I open my heart and my very being to the God who loves me beyond anything I could ever imagine and has one single longing to bring us to the glory that God has created us to be, to bring us into fullness? That’s the obligation.

And when you realize that the entire New and Old Testament are all directed toward these final times, and we’re living in the final times now, the image of the destruction is about everything being broken open, everything being seen for what it is. There’s no way you could miss the fact that in today’s world, everything that is being. Everything is being exposed that is there for a purpose. And the purpose is not being accomplished because the people who. Who are doing the work have lost their sight of what the work is fundamentally about. To care and to encourage and to grow and comfort people into fully who they are.

When that’s gone, then there is this darkness. And the darkness, when it’s below the surface, is so powerful and the darkness is so vulnerable. When we see it, when it’s evident, when it’s clear, if there’s any kind of confrontation with the disaster that fits the end of the world, it’s the breaking down and breaking open and breaking new into something that was corrupt and broken, into something that is renewed and glorified by the presence of God that continues to use everything for us, for our comfort, for our sense of value, our sense that everything is as it must be? These are his gifts. It’s a new earth. It’s a new world.

It’s a world that’s been redeemed and now is ready to be filled with light. Foreign Father, open us to this great mystery of your indwelling presence, your life living within our hearts resonating a healing presence, a life giving present, a comforting presence with this gift. We have so much to accomplish for the good of the human race. It longs for a transition, and the transition has begun and our task is to surrender to the part that you asked us to play. And we ask this in Jesus name, Amen. The music in our program was composed and produced by Ryan Harner for this show.

Pastoral Reflections with Monsignor Don Fisher is funded with kind donations by listeners just like you. You can make a one time or recurring tax deductible donation on our website, pastoralreflectionsinstitute.com we thank you for your listenership and your continued support. Without it, this program would not be possible. Pastoral Reflections with Monsignor Don Fisher is a production of the Pastoral Reflections Institute, a nonprofit in Dallas, Texas, dedicated to enriching your spiritual journey. Executive Producer Monsignor Don Fisher produced by Kyle Cross and recorded in Pastoral Reflections Institute Studios. Copyright 2023 SAM.