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. Monsignor Fisher is a Catholic priest, a member of the Diocese of Dallas, and founder of the Pastoral Reflections Institute, a nonprofit in Dallas, Texas, dedicated to to enriching your spiritual journey. We appreciate your listenership and if you find this program valuable, please subscribe and share with your friends. This program is funded with kind donations by listeners just like you make your donation@pastoralreflectionsinstitute.com we’re celebrating the readings from 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 into his company, who lives and reigns with you in the unity of the Holy Spirit, one God, forever and ever. Amen. A Reading from the Old Testament from the book of Isaiah 11:10 on that day a shoot shall sprout from the stump of Jesse, and from his roots a bud shall blossom. The Spirit of the Lord shall rest upon him, a spirit of wisdom and of understanding, a spirit of counsel and of strength, a spirit of knowledge and fear of the Lord, and his delight shall be the fear of the Lord. Not by appearance shall he judge, nor by hearsay shall he decide but he shall judge the poor with justice, and decide aright for the land’s afflicted he shall strike the ruthless, and with the rod of his mouth, and with the breath of his lips he shall slay the wicked justice shall be the band around his waist, his faithfulness a belt upon his hips. Then the wolf shall be a guest of the lamb, and the leopard shall lie down with the kid.

The calf and the young lion shall browse together with a little child to guide them the cow and the bear shall be neighbors together their young shall rest. The lion shall eat hay like the ox the baby shall play by the cobra’s den, and the child lay his hand on the adder’s lyre. There shall be no harm or ruin on my holy mountain, for the earth shall be filled with knowledge of the Lord, as water covers the sea on that day the root of Jesse set up as a signal for the nations the Gentiles shall seek out for his dwelling shall be glorious. The word of the Lord. Justice shall flourish in his time, the fullness of peace forever. O God, with your judgment endow a king, and with your justice the king’s son he shall govern your people with justice, and your afflicted ones with judgment.

Justice shall flourish in his time, the fulness of peace forever. Justice shall flourish in his days and profound peace till the moon be no more. May he rule from sea to sea, and from the river to the ends of the earth. Justice shall flourish in his time, the fullness of peace forever. We shall rescue the poor when he cries out, and the afflicted when he has no one to help him. He shall have pity for the lowly and for the poor.

The lives of the poor he shall save. Justice shall flourish in his time, the fullness of peace forever. May His Name be blessed forever. As long as the Son His Name shall remain in him shall all the tribes of the earth be blessed all the nations shall proclaim his happiness. Justice shall flourish in his time, the fulness of peace forever A Reading from the New Testament from St. Paul’s Letter to the Romans 15:4, 9th verse Brothers and sisters, whatever was written previously was written for your instruction that by endurance and by the encouragement of the Scriptures we might have hope.

May the God of endurance and encouragement grant you to think in harmony with each other, in keeping with Christ Jesus, that with one accord you may with one voice glorify God, the Father of our Lord Jesus Christ. Welcome one another then, as Christ welcomed you for the glory of God. For I say that Christ became a minister of the circumcised to show God’s truthfulness, to confirm the promises to the patriarchs, but so that the Gentiles might glory in God’s mercy as it is written. Therefore I will praise you among the Gentiles and sing praises to your name, the word of the Lord. Hallelujah. 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 St. Matthew 3:12 verse. John the Baptist appeared, preaching in the desert of Judea and saying, repent, the kingdom of heaven is at hand.

It was of him that the prophet Isaiah had spoken when he said, a voice of one crying out in the desert, prepare the way of the Lord, make straight his paths. John wore clothing made of camel’s hair, had a leather belt around his waist. His food was locust and wild honey. At the time, Jerusalem, all Judea, and the whole region around the Jordan were going out to him and were being baptized by him in the Jordan as they acknowledged their sins. When he saw many of the Pharisees and Sadducees coming to his baptism, he said to them, you brood of vipers, who warned you to flee from the coming wrath, produce good fruit as evidence of your repentance. And do not presume to say to yourselves, we have Abraham as our father.

For I tell you, God can raise up children of Abraham from these stones. Even now the ax lies at the root of the trees. Therefore every tree that does not bear good fruit will be cut down and thrown into the fire. I am baptizing you with water for repentance. But the one who is coming after me is mightier than I. I am not worthy to carry his sandals.

He will baptize you with the Holy Spirit and fire. His winnowing fan is in his hand. He will clear his threshing floor and gather his wheat into his barn. But the chaff you will burn with unquenchable fire. The Gospel of the Lord Let us reflect on these beautiful words of scripture as we listen to the music of Ryan Harner. The opening prayer always sets the tone for the homily, and it’s beautiful in this particular passage because this is the season of being awakened, awaken to who Christ is, because Christ is the fullness of God.

So it states in the opening prayer that we long to reach a place where we can meet God in the person of His Son and learn from Him. And the heavenly wisdom that we gain is what creates the community that we belong to. Let me say it again. The heavenly wisdom that we have in our hearts, where God dwells within us is what unites us. It’s what religion is primed to do. It just doesn’t do it as well as it can because it doesn’t realize that this invitation is not to be so much riveted to the church and its rules and regulations, though those can be very important, but to a personal encounter to meet with God in the form of His Son and to be taught.

So let’s look at the first reading, because it’s reminiscent of the period in the history of the Old Testament where God was ruling his people with kings, and it was a major disaster. Almost all the men that were chosen to lead the Israelite people as a ruler couldn’t handle, I suppose, in one sense, the power that they had. And they fell always to the side of indulgence and egocentricity and false gods. But there was one king, one king that was special, and that was King David. And so this reading is really about King David longing for someone like King David to come. And there’s a beautiful image of a trunk of a tree, and out of that trunk, of the tree, the stump of Jesse, which is Jesse is the father of King David.

There sprouts something new. And definitely King David was something new in terms of his own wisdom and understanding and counsel and strength and knowledge and fear of the Lord. I want to say something about fear of the Lord, because in this sense, this great king, this King David, but also it is a foreshadowing of Jesus. His delight shall be the fear of the Lord. And fear is so interesting because you look it up in the Oxford English Dictionary, and number six of its meaning is awe and reverence for God. Awe and reverence.

Not being scared of, but being filled with awe and reverence. And basically it says that he will come to judge. And that’s the remnant of the Old Testament. Constantly going back in this New Testament that we live in, reminding us always that there is something about justice that is so important and needs to be followed. But it’s not enough. Because justice can only divide the good from the evil, can only reward the good, and can only punish the evil.

So this reading talks about a new king that’s going to come. And even though it goes on to say that it will create this wonderful place of peace, the only one that’s been able to do that, the only leader who has come is Jesus, who has enabled things that were at odds with each other, were things that were poisonous, were so dangerous that you had to stay away from them. No, in this new kingdom, it’s really interesting, the cobra’s den, you know, the place of harm, it’s fine to be there. The child can lay his hand on the adder’s lyre, no harm on this holy mountain. What is that trying to say? It strikes me that one of the things that the Old Testament sought to do over and over again was to remove sin.

And you did it by punishing sinners, or even more dramatically, by killing them. And yet this new king, this Christ figure that’s coming, that’s longed for in our hearts, says that, no, that deadly thing called sin is not the problem. We can’t get rid of it. That’s not God’s plan. But God’s plan is somehow to allow that sin in the world to be a source of deepening what we prayed for in this beautiful opening prayer, Wisdom, divine wisdom. So we look at Paul.

Paul is talking about this new thing that has come into the world and listen to the difference of the words that in the Old Testament reading we just listened to. It was basically the idea that this great king would come and he would be filled with justice, and he would punish the evil and save the good. And here we have something different. We have a new leader. Not so much just filled with justice, but something else in endurance and encouragement. And that creates hope.

Hope is the. Not the wish and the desire that we be saved by God, but the conviction that we can be if we just simply open ourselves to him and admit our faults. We are absolutely part of the fruitfulness of being engaged with someone who never, ever limits his enduring love and never stops infusing. That’s what the word encouragement means. Infuse with courage and strength so that we can live in harmony with one another. So a very different shift from the.

Or a shift from the difference of a world of justice and now a world of justice and mercy. And in the Gospel, we see John the Baptist as a bridge between the Old and the New Testament. And what I love about John is he’s on the right track, but he’s really rooted in the Old Testament. And he calls for a new repentance. And repentance is an interesting word because it means to regret. He wants people to simply realize what they’re doing to other people.

And he was mostly consumed with the way the Pharisees and the Sadducees treated the people. The temple had become anything but what it should have been. It was a disaster, in a sense. It laid burden after burden on people and really did, in a way, focus so much on justice that if anybody didn’t keep a rule or a law, they were considered to be absolutely worthless. So he’s now saying that there’s something new coming. And he’s saying, I want to prepare all of you for this.

And what he’s talking about is this incredible gift that God is giving us in this person filled with mercy called Jesus Christ. And I love the fact in this particular passage of Matthew, he has the reaction of John the Baptist to those coming forth, the Pharisees and Sadducees. And I was just imagining what it would be like for these men that came forward. Maybe they were really sincere. Maybe they fel for the first time that there was something wrong with the temple. And they saw it causing pain in people.

And just as anybody in an institution that is abusive, some of people know it and they just don’t know what to do about it. But anyway, the Pharisees and Sadducees come and he just calls them right away, you brood of vipers, you snakes, you poisonous people, who warned you to flee the destruction that you deserve. I mean, that’s so Old Testament and so perfect. And he says, you presume that maybe you’ll just get in because you said, abraham’s our Father. What he’s attacking is not maybe these men, but their attitude toward everything that was going on in John’s life in the community called the Essenes, where John was. Where he was practicing this wonderful ritual of forgiveness, cleansing everybody every day with water, saying, your sins can be forgiven, your sins can be forgiven.

But then what I want you to pay attention to is when he’s talking about the baptism that he has been offering to people for repentance. It’s water cleanses the outside. In a sense, if you’ve got dirty hands and you wash them, they clean, but the hand is the same hand. So he’s saying, and this is the beauty of this passage that. That Matthew is revealing that without John even realizing it, he knows something about what Jesus is going to do, doesn’t fully understand it, but he does have a sense of it. And what he does is he said, I do my work, and it has an impact.

It helps people. But he that’s coming after me, the one who is destined to be the savior of the world, he’s radically different. He’s filled with spirit and fire. Holy Spirit and fire. Holy Spirit could be the wisdom that the first reading is talking about, or rather the opening prayer was talking about this gift of God giving us understanding of who we are and why we’re here and who he is. And basically he says that this.

This work of infusing wisdom is also infusing this thing called fire. And fire is a purification. And it’s so interesting to think that wisdom can be a purification. So can the threat of punishment, so can fear be a motive for moving in the right direction. But fire is so different. And look at this image where he says, I will clear my threshing floor and gather the wheat into the barn.

The chaff I will burn with unquenchable fire. It’s very easy and maybe even in John’s mind, he was saying, the good people will be saved, the bad people are going to be burned, and we just got to separate them. That’s not in the mind of Jesus, not the separation of one from another, good from evil, binary world. No. He wants everyone to be saved. So I want you to think of this image that.

That John the Baptist is using and understand as it may well mean this, that the wheat is the core of who you are, your being, the person that God created you to be. And the chaff is everything in you that isn’t all illusion, all anxiety, all fear, all worry, all shame and what he’s doing. And this is the way it worked when you were threshing on a threshing floor, you threw the wheat and the the stuff that wasn’t wheat up in the air. The wind would blow the impurities away and there would be left the wheat and then the chaff would be burned. But chaff burned could be not so much destroyed in the literal sense of you being destroyed if you don’t purify yourself, but rather that wisdom of its nature does this purifying, sanctifying work. That’s the awakening that God wants us to move toward in this season to see more fully, completely the awesome gift that this God man Jesus will bring at his birth to the world.

The Closing Prayer Father, we long to be transformed. We have such a hard time changing ourselves, trying to follow regulations and rules that we’re confused at times by and also find so difficult to overcome. Bless us with this divine wisdom so we see clearly what sin does. Be freed of its illusions and its lives and live in the kingdom of peace, oneness and goodness. And we ask this in Jesus name, Amen. The music in our program was composed and produced by Ryan Harner for this show.

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Executive Producer Monsignor Don Fisher produced by Kyle Cross and recorded in Pastoral Reflections Institute Studios. Copyright2024.