Jack Hardaway
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Sometimes, if you are lucky, once in your life, you find a certain dog, usually the dog finds you, and there is a bond that is rarely repeated.
I’ve had many pets over the years, but only one dog like that. She found me when I was in college. A little black foxlike stray with 17 ticks in her ears.
I called her Slie, because she paid attention, always looking for her next meal, looking to take advantage. We grew very attached to each other.
One day, years later, we were both much older, when I was at my previous parish, she slipped under the back yard fence, and never returned.
I drove around at night looking for her for weeks, I whistled in the darkness, the window rolled down.
She was gone.
One night, months later, I got home late from a difficult meeting and walked into the living room and she was sitting there wagging her tail.
It was like a dream, the impossible, she was gone, she was back.
My mind and my heart exploded.
One of the great lost loves of my life returned.
I had never felt anything like that before.
Homecoming.
The lost was found.
We began Luke’s Gospel last week. We will be with Luke 3/4th of the Sundays over this next year.
Luke has the parables that stir our hearts more than any other.
Including the Parable of the Prodigal Son, the lost one is found, the dead one lives. Our hearts and minds explode.
Today we meet John the Baptist, he tells us to prepare.
Somewhere along the way we lost God, either God left or we left, or God went into exile or we were exiled, at some point one of us slipped under the backyard fence never to return.
The love of our life.
We lost God. How did that happen?
John tells us to prepare, either God is being found or we are being found, who can tell? We lost each other, be ready for homecoming, be ready to find and be found, the love of our life, life itself, our hearts and minds or going to explode.
Get ready.
That is message of John the Baptist on this second Sunday of Advent.
The prodigal finding of God.
How did we ever lose each other? How did we ever wander so far apart from each other?
Suddenly that will change.
Our hearts, our minds, our tongues will explode in song.
The opposite of grief.
The opposite of loss.
That is what God is like on this day in Advent.
It is like a tomb breaking open.
Like chains falling away.
Like bandages and bindings unraveling.
Like the long sadness fading with the mist at sunrise.
Get ready.
What we thought was the way of things, our lot in life, it is ending.
Get ready.
What is this feeling?
Finding God? The love of our life, life itself?
How can it be after all this time?
Our hearts are going to sing.
The Dawn from on High shall break upon us!
Prepare?
How can we possibly prepare for something like that?
Our hearts can’t bear it.
Words fail. The Joy breaks our minds wide open like the shell of an Easter egg.
That is what happened when the Word of God came to John, son of Zechariah in the wilderness.
The impossible prodigal homecoming of God.
Get ready. If you can!