The Fourth Sunday of Advent

I don’t usually publish my homilies … or even write them down for that matter … but I enjoyed my homily this morning so much that I really wanted to share it with you.

As the Church celebrates each of the Sundays of Advent, she presents a virtue for us to meditate upon each week. The first week we looked at Hope, the second week we looked at Peace, then last week, “Pepto-Bismol Sunday,” we meditated together on Joy. Now, today, the Fourth Sunday of Advent, the Church asks us to meditate on the great virtue of Love.

Now something happened this week that can teach us a lot about Love – the new Star Wars movie came out. I haven’t seen it yet, and if any of you tell me how it ends, you’ll go straight to Hell. But we learn about love from an important moment in the original trilogy when Luke Skywalker crash lands on a swampy little planet called Dagobah and meets a little green fellow named Yoda. Now Dagobah is really a lot like Bethlehem: they’re both places that nobody really ever wants to be. But while Luke is there, Yoda tells Luke to pull his X-Wing fighter ship out of the swamp using only the power of his mind. Luke’s response is, “I’ll try”, but Yoda tells him, “Do, or do not; there is no try.”

That’s the same advice we can take today as we try to live the great virtue of Love. I’ve never tried to pull a fighter ship out of swamp so I can't tell you how difficult that is, but I can tell you for sure that loving God with all my heart, mind, soul, and strength is really hard, and so is loving my neighbor as myself. And yet Yoda’s words strike us as very true: no matter how hard it is to love, “Do, or do not; there is no try.”

We see beautiful examples of that kind of love in the readings of today’s Mass. In our second reading, from the Letter to the Hebrews, we hear about Jesus, who showed the greatest love for us when He gave all of Himself on the Cross for our salvation. And in today’s Gospel, we hear about our Blessed Mother, who showed a tremendous love for her cousin Elizabeth as an example of love of neighbor. When she arrives at the house, she had just made a tremendously difficult journey through the mountain country, and yet her first words are not, “The road was long, the food was terrible, and the donkey sweated the whole way.” Instead, her first words are greetings for her cousin: her love for Elizabeth trumps everything else. “Do, or do not; there is no try.”

So what about us? It’s our job to clean up the table after Christmas dinner, but we clank and clatter and crash around so much that we drown out the football game on TV. Or we need to take Great Aunt Susie to the airport, but we complain about it the entire way there and all the way back. Sure, we’re doing the right thing, but are we really doing it with love?

Thankfully, today's Scripture readings tell us what it takes to live the virtue of love, the same way that Mary and Jesus do. It’s the same thing that the prophet Micah uses to describe Bethlehem in our first reading today – it’s about being small, so that there is enough room for God and others. Unless we can be small enough to leave room in our hearts, in our lives, and in our calendars for God and others, then we aren’t going to be able to live this beautiful virtue of love.

Now, this is hard work. But just like Luke in the swamps of Dagobah, as we try to become small enough to leave room for the love of God and neighbor, we can Do or do not; Love or love not. There is no try.