Advent 2

Advent 2 (Mark 1:1-8) “

He will baptize you with the Holy Spirit.”

Jesus is God up front and personal.

For those who say there is no God, God Himself gives the answer. The answer is Jesus.

When speaking with people, religious, secular or spiritual, never argue belief. Moses, the prophets and Jesus himself show us that arguing over belief is futile. Never seek to impose belief by authority. Quoting, “the Bible says” to someone who believes the Bible is filled with errors and contradictions is counterproductive. Similarly, never invoke the authority of the Church in matters of salvation. The Church is the instrumentality of the Plan of Salvation. Jesus is the Plan of Salvation.

The beginning of the Good News of our Heavenly Father’s Plan of Salvation is the archangel Gabriel’s annunciation to Mary that she will be the mother of the Son of God. The Good News unfolds in the context of personal relationships.

Mary and Joseph are the first to greet Jesus into the world. The animals in the stable are right there with them. The poorest of the poor – the shepherds, the richest of the rich intellectual class come in the caravan of the Magi. Angels are also there. As we ponder the meaning of Christmas consider how the personal God reveals himself in a single infant in the context of a series of personal relationships.

This is a pattern. It is the pattern of evangelism. It is how God Himself brings us Good News. It is how God invites us to share this Good News with our families, friends and neighbors.

The pattern of the personal God reaching out to our species through personal relationships is the pattern of the very reality of God. The one God is a co-eternal community of three persons. The Father sends the Son into the world by the power of the Holy Spirit to reunite the lost to Divine Love.

Jesus anoints us with the Holy Spirit to follow the pattern of the Plan of Salvation in the way we affect other people though our relationships with them. The reality of the Plan of Salvation is the Real Presence of God in our lives through our relationships.

This is the meaning underlying John the Baptist, the last of the prophets, declaration that Jesus will baptize with the Holy Spirit. John could only administer the outward and visible sign of repentance. Jesus is the one who takes away the sin of the world by taking all sin into himself and transforming it by love into love.

Jesus is the co-eternal Beloved of the Father. All of human sin is but a single drop of ink in the vast infinite ocean of love that is God. Jesus takes away sin and transforms sin. His ongoing and indeed never ending gift to us is the Holy Spirit. The Holy Spirit is the all pervasive and omnipresent reality of Divine Love in the universe, our planet, our species and our souls. He is the one who Helps us to transform our desires and reset our priorities.

Evangelism is our response to the personal presence of God the Holy Spirit in our souls. He invites us into the new way of life and the new way of living by grace through faith in the community of divine love.

John the Baptist points the way. The Way is Jesus. Jesus baptizes us in the Holy Spirit daily, hourly, moment by moment to fill us with the joy of salvation. In that joy, Jesus invites us to celebrate his real presence with us here at the altar of sacrificial love. In that joy, the Holy Spirit enables us to celebrate the birth of Jesus who is God with us. The joy emerges as we learn to live and choose to love in union with the Father, through the Son, by the indwelling of the Holy Spirit.