A homily for the Second Sunday of Advent, December 7, 2025
Isaiah 11:1-10, Romans 15:4-9, Matthew 3:1-12
Dictionary.com recently made a lot of people shake their heads in disbelief when the organization chose a number as the Word of the Year for 2025. Not even a number, really; it’s more of a number phrase, because it’s not pronounced in the familiar way it appears.
Even wackier, the online dictionary — whose purpose supposedly is to identify, categorize and define words — found 67 to be … well, here’s what the Dictionary.com website says:
Perhaps the most defining feature of 67 is that it’s impossible to define. It’s meaningless, ubiquitous, and nonsensical.
By the way, in case you’re not up to speed (unlikely, but), this 67 is pronounced six-seven and not sixty-seven.
Pop culture uses number phrases to replace words in a variety of ways, most often as secret codes or as shorthand. For example, writing 1 4 3 has come to mean “I love you” apparently because “I” has one letter, “love” has four and “you” has three. The use of 1 4 3 is widespread and almost universally accepted, while other combos invite disagreements about their meanings.
Does 910 mean “I’m sorry” or 107 plead for someone to return? Depends.
But at least those have some semblance of definitions.
So, for 67 on this Second Sunday of Advent — this finger-wagging, heavy-preachy Scriptures Sunday — please allow me to offer this:
Let’s define 67 as “Repent. Forgive.”
Six-letter word. Seven-letter word.
Our passages from the Bible today are familiar at this time of year, with Isaiah promising the best is yet to come in the days after the Messiah arrives and sets things right. Matthew quotes Isaiah to hang some serious bona fides on the Baptizer, and to amplify John’s mission of making straight the way of the Lord.
In today’s Gospel, Matthew then quotes John lambasting the religious leaders as vipers and hypocrites for seeking baptism, or at least checking out other people’s baptisms, because John is certain the Pharisees and Sadducees have no spirit of repentance among them.
And why should they? The religious leaders believed they were living according to the dotted I’s and crossed T’s of the letter of the law. All of the Ten Commandments and the no-shrimp-no-tattoos-style rules in Leviticus and Deuteronomy as well.
Nailed it!
Perfection on Earth!
Nothing to be sorry about. No reason to wear sackcloth and ashes; no reason to wash clean of sin. Repent? Phooey.
But a couple of chapters later in his telling of Christ’s Good News, Matthew closes the repentance loop when he quotes Jesus instructing the world about the proper way to pray.
“This is how you are to pray: Our Father in heaven, hallowed be your name, your kingdom come, your will be done, on Earth as in Heaven. Give us today our daily bread; and forgive us our debts, as we forgive our debtors; and do not subject us to the final test, but deliver us from the evil one.”
“Forgive us our debts,” as in, “Loving God, I’m sorry I disobeyed you. I’ll do everything I can to never do that again. Thank you for forgiving me.”
“[A]s we forgive our debtors,” meaning, “Loving God, if I am to live in the way you want me to, then I can and must show the same mercy to others that you have shown me. Only with your help, of course.”
Repentance requires two elements, two concerted efforts. For us to repent, really repent, we must acknowledge and be sorry for the wrong we committed, and in turn, we must commit ourselves to never doing whatever it was again. Otherwise, all we’re doing is a cycle of getting dirty, washing, and getting dirty again. Anybody who’s ever laundered a child’s jeans knows they are progressively dingier on subsequent washings. Residual dirt builds up, the same way incomplete or insincere repentance pushes away from Christ’s light and weakens or destroys our relationship with God.
Forgiveness is a pay-it-forward process. We repent and we are forgiven, thank God, but then we are obliged to forgive anyone who has slighted us. From an even-later chapter of Matthew’s Gospel, Jesus tells his disciples the Parable of the Unforgiving Servant, the story of a man whose pleas to the king won him relief from his debts, but who in turn would not wipe out the debt of someone who owed him. (It did not end well for Mr. Unforgiving.)
We imperfect humans in the 21st century, bombarded as we are with temptations small enough to see on our smartphones and large enough to need airplane hangars to house them, have ample reasons and opportunities to repent.
We imperfect humans in the 21st century, battered as we are with the angry words and actions of people in pain all around us, have ample reasons and opportunities to forgive. And, truth be told, to seek forgiveness ourselves. Especially in New Jersey traffic. (California 405?)
So in what’s left of 2025, and in every year yet to come, maybe we can live our own definition of Six-Seven.
Repent-Forgive.
