Last week in my homily, we talked about patience — we talked about how Advent is a “season of patience” — a season of learning how to wait… how to peacefully endure all of the stuff that annoys us, bothers us, disturbs us…  And we talked about how impatient we can be with the people and the circumstances of our lives… 

Today, I’d like to address something else very important with regard to this theme of patience — and that’s the impatience that we can easily experience towards our own faults and failings.

Another way to put this is: 

We can become VERY impatient with our own sinfulness.

…With our imperfections!

It annoys us, bothers us, and disturbs us when we see how IMPATIENT we really are… how poor our love really is… how short our tempers can be… how quickly we judge… how little suffering we willingly endure.

That experience can be overwhelming. And it can be very discouraging.

That’s why I love our second reading so much this weekend from St. Paul’s letter to the Philippians.

He says these very encouraging words to us:

“I am confident of this, that the one who began a good work in you will continue to complete it until the day of Christ Jesus.”

The one who began a good work in you… will complete it!

Who’s doin’ the work? — God is!

And what is this good work that God is beginning and continuing in us?

The work of forming JESUS in us. 

The work of becoming more and more like Him.

We are, after all, Christians… which literally means that we are called to be “Other Christs”… ‘alter Christus’ in Latin.

St Bernard of Clairvaux in his homilies on Advent speaks of three separate “comings” of the Lord — first, Jesus came at His Incarnation in the womb of the Blessed Virgin Mary… second, Jesus will come at the End of Time at the Parousia, the Second Coming… But then St Bernard speaks of a third coming of Christ which is no less important — a coming that can begin happening RIGHT NOW:

The coming of Christ into your soul… to live and dwell there, to act through you! To live His life in you!

We have a word for this:

It’s called “holiness.”

EVERYONE, and I mean absolutely EVERYONE is called to the heights of holiness! And “holiness” is NOT about finally figuring out how to never screw up or sin again… Holiness is NOT about spending more and more time at church until you basically live here…

No, HOLINESS is first and foremost about permitting Jesus to come and live His life in us. 

To allow Him to love people through us. 

To allow Him to be patient in us. 

To allow Jesus Christ to be FORMED in us.

“It is no longer I who live, but Christ who lives in me” St. Paul says.

That’s the key! — Holiness is all about Jesus. “He must increase, and I must decrease.” His perfect life must grow in me, and my old life, the life of sin… must decrease more and more.

St. Elizabeth of the Trinity went so far as to say that each one of us — every single Christian — is to become a “new Incarnation” of Jesus.

That is astonishing, and yet, that is what holiness is all about… To become holy as God is Holy. To be the presence of Christ here and now. To truly become “another Christ.”

But this transformation takes time. 

Holiness… the formation of Jesus in us… takes time.

Even the Incarnation itself… took time, didn’t it?

Think about it! 

God the Son was sent into the womb of the Blessed Virgin Mary, where He then waited 9 months before He was born. And then He waited 30 more years to grow up in Nazareth before beginning His public ministry. And then He waited another two thousand years for us to come along… so that He could come and live His life in us!

God is very patient, isn’t He?

And so…as we grow up… as we grow more and more in holiness and undergo this transformation into Christ… we need to learn how to be patient.

It’s going to be a process… a process of self-discovery, of healing, of growing more and more in intimacy and trust in the Lord… At times, it’s going to be a painful experience of realizing just how sinful we really are, and how much conversion we still need. 

But St Paul’s words give us courage, don’t they?: “I am confident…that the one who began a good work in you will complete it.”

Who began this good work? …This work of holiness in you?

The Lord!

…Not you!

And who is going to complete this work? Who’s gonna finish it? Who’s gonna make you holy as Jesus is holy?

The LORD!

…Not you!

This is very freeing, isn’t it?

Of course — we will need to exert all our efforts. Yes, we need to actively cooperate with God’s grace — We need to make room in our hearts for the Lord, invest time in prayer, practice penance…  We need to “Prepare the way of the Lord” as St John the Baptist exhorted us in our Gospel today…

…But we can also rest assured that the Lord Himself will bring this good work to completion as long as we don’t give up! 

And that’s where patience comes in.

St Francis de Sales famously once put it this way: “Have patience with all things, but chiefly have patience with yourself. Do not lose courage in considering your own imperfections, but instead set about remedying them…. Every day begin the task anew.”

What St. Francis de Sales, this doctor of the Church, is saying here is absolutely essential for us — Don’t be so hard on yourself that you work yourself up into a frenzy and lose your peace! 

This is called perfectionism, and perfectionism is rooted in pride. In fact, let’s just renounce the spirit of perfectionism right now:

In the name of Jesus, I renounce the spirit of perfectionism.

Amen!

Instead of beating ourselves up and raking ourselves over the coals for not being perfectly holy right this second… we need to instead be patient, take courage, and… humbly begin again with the help of God’s grace.

I’ll warn you: The enemy — the devil — is going to come very hard at us on this point. 

Every single time you commit a sin, or fall short of perfection in some way… he’s going to be right there to accuse you and discourage you and make you feel like trash. He’s going to point out all the ways you didn’t behave like Jesus, and he’ll be sure to tell you how awful a person you are.

Listen closely — The devil’s entire game is to try to get you to despair… he’s trying to get you to believe that holiness is not actually possible for someone like you, that God is NOT currently bringing your holiness to completion. And so… he tells you, you should just go ahead and give up…Throw in the towel. You are hopeless.

Ignore all of that.

Listen to the words of our first reading from the book of Baruch instead — which are words of HOPE — Christmas hope! 

“Every valley shall be filled and every mountain and hill shall be made low. The winding roads shall be made straight, and the rough ways made smooth.”

The roughness of our sin will be made smooth… all our impurities will be polished little by little by God’s grace… if we only allow Him to do His work! If we only give Him a chance to perform His surgery on HIS time… not ours.

We can trust Him.

…We can be patient.

And with peace in our hearts: We can try to be holy again… every single time we fail.

Think about this: 

Every time Jesus fell along the way of the Cross during His Passion, he didn’t stay down on the ground, did He? 

No! 

He patiently stood back up again, and kept going, dragging his Cross forward — And that’s what you need to do as well! Jesus will give you the strength whenever you fall down through your human weakness… to stand back up again. 

Here’s the truth, and I ask the Holy Spirit to open up our hearts to this:

God is not as concerned about whatever particular sin you happen to be really struggling with… as He is that you never EVER despair of His mercy.

This is very very different than becoming lax towards sin. 

Laxity is when we become indifferent and permissive towards active sin in our life or in the lives of others… When we think to ourselves presumptuously: “It doesn’t really matter… God is forgiving, right? So maybe He doesn’t even really care that I’m doing BLANK…”

No… He does care. He cares because He knows that every single sin — venial OR mortal — is harmful to you… God never wants us to sin.

And yet — somehow, in God’s mysterious Providence — we can also say that the Lord somehow still works through our sins. He writes straight with crooked lines! He teaches us valuable lessons EVERY single time we fall.

And often enough…as annoying as it may be… that lesson is patience.

Patience with our own frailty.

Patience with our own weakness and failure.

But just think how proud and self-reliant we would be if we very quickly and easily became 100% perfect without any suffering and without any failures or set-backs whatsoever? 

I mean — why would we even need God at that point? Why would we even need to depend on mercy?

You know who understood this very well…?

St. Thérèse of Lisieux.

She once wrote this: “If you can bear serenely the trial of being displeasing to yourself, you will be for Jesus a pleasant place of shelter.”

That is so beautiful. 

What she’s saying is that if we can become more patient with ourselves… patient even with our own imperfections… trusting peacefully and confidently in the mercy of God… then we can and will become a place of refuge and shelter for Jesus.

He will come and dwell in us… live His life in us!

Holiness will fill the temple of our souls!

So be patient with yourself. 

…Be patient with your fellow sinners.

God isn’t finished with us yet!

“I am confident of this, that the one who began a good work in you will continue to complete it until the day of Christ Jesus.”

Amen.