Readings for Second Week of Advent:

Baruch 5: 1–9

Philippians 1: 4–6, 8–11

Luke 3: 1–6

Advent reminds us that our faith is contagious. We have everything we need inside our hearts to receive and share God’s love and light. We just have to honor the promise of our faith to do so. But therein lies the challenge, and that’s why we need Advent, to prepare.

The readings for the second week of the season call us to place our faith and hope in God and remind us to be messengers for God.

In Luke’s gospel, we witness the prophetic and courageous faith of John the Baptist: a man who knew the Messiah was coming and lived his life to bring people closer to God.

Crying out in the desert, John the Baptist proclaims:

“Prepare the way of the Lord,
make straight his paths.
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,
and all flesh shall see the salvation of God.”

 John preached a baptism of repentance so “the winding roads shall be made straight.” John’s words, although spoken thousands of years ago, are timeless and timely. He knew the human condition presented obstacles in preparing our hearts to realize the fullness of God’s love.

So how do we overcome our own obstacles and respond to the call to be messengers of love, hope, and peace? How do we live like John the Baptist and bring ourselves and others closer to God?

We might think about the messengers in our own lives who have helped bring us closer to God. Their contagious faith reminds us that we have a contagious faith too.

I met one such messenger years ago while working on a community bread-giving campaign to honor veterans. Our daughter offered Harold a loaf of homemade bread to thank him for his service to our country, and he offered us the gift of his friendship and faith until his passing, at 95 years of age, last February.

Harold Eckman was a World War II United States Army veteran who had never been thanked for his service until that moment. He was overcome with emotion, and he could barely speak. “You don’t know me, yet you offer me bread?” he whispered.

The encounter with Harold didn’t end there, it continued over several cups of Starbucks coffee that afternoon. Sharing a chilling flashback, Harold took me back to a post-World War II Czechoslovakia. It was 1945, and he was stationed there as a member of the Army’s 94th Infantry Division on occupation duty. He said that chaos was still the mood of the time, his voice cracking as he recalled the trains overflowing with displaced people. “The war was over but their fight was far from over,” Harold muttered. As he was talking I couldn’t help but think about what he was going through at the time, being a Jewish-American soldier during World War II.

Harold’s eyes welled up. “I looked into their eyes as they stumbled from the trains. I saw what the war had done. I saw their hunger, their need for anything that resembled hope.” Like the prophet Baruch, in this week’s first reading, who reminds the people of Israel in exile in Babylon that God has not forgotten them, Harold knew he needed to find a way to offer these refugees hope for the future.

Harold decided he would save his daily ration of food, especially bread, to feed as many people as he could. He asked some of his comrades to do the same. Not all of them agreed, but the ones who did helped him set up makeshift tables on rocks to share their food. Harold said that by sharing bread with others he felt they were all united in peace, in hope, and in faith.

Soon, a German woman in her late thirties approached Harold. She said that he had reminded her of her only son. Harold offered her bread and they began to speak, Harold in his broken German and she in her broken English. The woman told him she had lost everything in the war—her family, her home, her bookstore, even her 19-year-old son, fighting on the Eastern Front. Stunned at the offering of bread from a stranger, and a Jewish-American Army soldier, she began to cry.

“You don’t know me, yet you offer me bread,” she said. She in turn offered Harold one of the only things she had left, her deceased son’s knife. The knife was her bread. She asked Harold to hold onto the knife as a symbol of peace for our world.

When Harold finished his story, he looked at me and repeated, “You don’t know me, yet you offer me bread.” I smiled. He went on to say that he still had the knife and wanted to pass that on to me, but Harold had already given me the knife and so much more. Before he left that afternoon, he reminded me, “We will never have real peace until we have peace in our hearts.”

His words echo like those of John the Baptist. If we open our hearts to God we will find peace in our hearts and “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.”

Harold reminds us to be that messenger, so that our lives mirror the gospel. We are all called into a relationship with God that is never separate from our relationship with others. The bread, the Eucharist, the knife, the cross, the Advent candle, each moment presents a new opportunity to encounter God.

Our faith is contagious. This Advent, may we prepare to find peace in our hearts so we can point others to God.

God is waiting.

Let’s live Advent. The Christ Child is coming.