This essay first appeared in our weekly Scripture reflection newsletter on December 6, 2025.
Isa 11:1-10, Rom 15:4-9, Mt 3:1-12
You can find the readings for the Second Sunday of Advent here.
Roots are stubborn things. Long after trees collapse or suffer the fate of human hands, roots remain, thirsting for water, clinging to life, sprouting new shoots. Isaiah harps on this message in today’s first reading: from the stump of Jesse, from that which appears beyond restoration, a shoot will dare to grow.
The Messiah of Isaiah comes draped in the Spirit of wisdom, understanding, counsel, strength, knowledge, and fear of the Lord. God’s Spirit will rest on the one who judges with justice, who comforts the afflicted and afflicts the comfortable. Isaiah’s lyrics aren’t fantasy, but vision. God’s vision for the world is sketched into the stubborn resilience of life itself, urging us to trust that God is already laboring in the places we fear are beyond repair.
Psalm 72 continues Isaiah’s melody. We hear of a ruler whose justice is not ornamental but lived. Justice and peace shall flower in his days, the psalmist sings. This ruler rescues the poor when they cry out, and guards the lives of the vulnerable. Blessed in him are all the tribes of the earth. These verses are a reminder that God’s dream for the world has always been liberation; God’s reign has always been justice braided tightly with mercy.
God’s reign has always been justice braided tightly with mercy.
Writing to the Romans, St. Paul urges the early Christian community to cultivate that same stubborn, shared hope. Scripture, he reminds us, is a gift of endurance and solidarity, encouraged by promises that outlive empire. Welcome one another as Christ welcomed you. Not reluctantly or conditionally, but with the same radical embrace that Jesus extends to the margins. Paul invites us into harmony as a shared, sacred commitment to the God who draws every nation into peace.
John the Baptist greets us on the Second Sunday of Advent with disruption.
“Repent!,” he calls out in the desert of Judea, “for the kingdom of heaven is at hand!”
He clamors in the wilderness, clothed in camel hair and sticky with honey, a striking contrast to the comfort of a synagogue. He preaches at the intersection of passive and active faith. John has arrived to shake us awake, reminding us that the coming of Christ is rarely comfortable or convenient. The Good News calls us to prepare the way of the Lord in word and works.
Queer Catholics know something of wilderness.
Faith on the margins is not limited to suffering; faith on the margins is survival. Our faith is not fragile but fierce. We have encountered God in spaces the church has yet to explore. With the boldness of John the Baptist, LGBTQ Catholics open doors and enlarge our tent. Advent, and waiting in general, extends beyond sweet anticipation, leaving LGBTQ Catholics with a hunger for belonging, an unquenchable thirst for the God who tends our roots. Belonging is not born of passivity; we create belonging because we already belong to God. We persist in preparing the way of the Lord, despite the roadblocks. We share a sense of kinship with John the Baptist, holding disruption and hope in the same breath, wrapped in the holiness of the wilderness.
Preparing the way of the Lord means encountering God in all holy tension.
Ignatian spirituality invites us to encounter God in all things. Ignatius guides us to notice God not only in consolation, but in desolation, too. God is present in the city and the desert, in candlelight and rubble, carols and resistance. Preparing the way of the Lord means encountering God in all holy tension. Advent is not a season of passivity; we must clear our paths for Christ and meet Him in the joy and suffering of the wilderness.
The wilderness of our world cries out against grave injustices: In what I can only call genocide as Palestinians are still sheltering from Israeli bombs and bullets, despite the ceasefire. In the terror-inducing ICE raids, in which masked agents kidnap migrants and subject them to overcrowding, starvation and other inhuman conditions, denying their right to spiritual care. In the refusal to see Christ in the transgender community, and weaponizing faith to justify transphobia. God is present in all these tragedies, and many more, wounded and waiting.
Advent faith is not satisfied with recognition alone. Repentance is action. Advent, at its core, is the stubborn belief that God still breaks into human history, that even the harshest desert can become a road God travels. We prepare not by quiet sentiment but by courageous love. We keep watch, not for fear of missing Christ, but because we want to be ready when Christ comes disguised as the wounded, the displaced, the forgotten.
No single gesture topples injustice by itself, but each clears a piece of road. Each plants one seed of the kingdom that is coming. Protests humming with prayer, grief, and hope. Boycotting and divesting from companies that are complicit in violence and injustice. Writing, calling, and meeting with representatives. Fundraising for humanitarian aid. Action does not have to be perfect to be holy, only faithful.
Christ is coming. Let us be found wide awake, tending the roots of justice, daring to believe that new life can rise from severed places. The kingdom is at hand!
