Readings for Sunday, December 8, 2024

Second Sunday of advent

Jerusalem, take off your robe of mourning and misery; put on forever the splendor of glory from God.

— Baruch 5:1

Click here to find the daily readings on the USCCB website

Opening the Word

Editor’s Note: Fr. Peter shares insights from a variety of voices on the Sunday readings.

Coming Home

Coming home can take place in many varied ways. Sometimes it’s at the end of a long day when we come home to where we can be ourselves without any pretentions. Sometimes it’s going back to the neighborhood we grew up in, to the old haunts that remind us of the dreams we had and how they now seem tucked in every niche. Sometimes coming home is what happens after many wanderings, after we’ve sown our oats and harvested little and now have nowhere else to go. That too is a coming home, back to where it all began, back to where we dare to hope that life might begin again.

All of this is how the Hebrew people found themselves coming home to Jerusalem after eighty years of exile, coming back to start anew with the hope that their God would once again be proud of them, back to where they could be as God intended them to be. All of that is what we do when we decide we will try to be the sort of person we’d always hoped to become. It’s when we attempt a second effort at making a marriage work, or a job productive, or maybe simply putting the pieces of our lives back in some sort of order. It’s all about coming back home to God’s dream for us, a kind of second Advent, when God comes into our lives and is born once again.

~Fr. Joseph Juknialis

Reflect

Have you wandered too far from the values of your true home? Can you find your way back?

 

Fr. Joseph Juknialis, a retired priest of the Milwaukee Archdiocese, is the new author of reflections for Liguori Publications’ Our Parish Community bulletins. Fr. Joe has served in ministry as a parish priest and a teacher of homiletics at St. Francis de Sales Seminary in Milwaukee. Retirement has given him time for hiking, canoeing, writing, poetry, gin rummy, the Green Bay Packers, and pursuing his appreciation of nature. In noting the most amazing aspect of his life, Fr. Joe says, “God has always brought me to the place I should be.”