This is the edited text of the homily for the Centenary Mass of Holy Innocents’ Parish, 1st Sunday of Advent, 1 December 2024.
Reading the tea leaves is a common expression for attending to signs and being prescient in interpreting them with a view to knowing the future. Pope John XXIII and the Second Vatican Council used an equivalent Scriptural phrase when they talked of “reading the signs of the times”. “Tasse/ography” or “Tasseomancy” is the fancy name for an art common to many cultures since ancient times. The Indo-Aryan Romani people are said to have brought the practice from India and Western Asia to medieval Europe. The Chinese and the Ottomans were enthusiasts for it also.
Lest we think only unsophisticated ancients could be drawn to such nonsense, we might note that a mysterious Scottish figure known only as “The Highland Seer” popularised tea-leaf reading in Victorian England and the Australian colonies. A quick search online reveals numerous texts and courses on fortune-telling through interpreting the remains of a cup-o’-char. Even the highly respected tea-merchants Twinings offer advice on “The basics of reading tea leaves.”
Tasseography is just one of many ways people have tried to predict the future: some have resorted to oracles, interpreters of dreams or animal gizzards, crystal-gazing or star-gazing, tarot-card or palm reading, even octopuses that can supposedly predict soccer results. The fascination with foreknowledge of the future is understandable: it can relieve anxiety and prepare us for the inevitable, or help us avoid disaster and make advantageous choices.
In our Gospel today (Lk 21:25-28,34-36), Jesus might seem to be indulging in a little reading the tea leaves Himself. He identifies various signs of the end-times: astrological (sun, moon, stars), geological (earthquakes and tsunamis), political (global conflict and nations in agony), psychological (men dying of fear) and spiritual (the Son of man returning on the clouds with power). When you see these things, Jesus says, you’ll know the end—and your liberation—are at hand. Is Jesus the Scottish oracle showing us at last a sure-fire way to read the tea leaves?
Not really. For one thing, Jesus is very clear that the end comes when we least expect it; it’s not so obvious and you can’t rely on cosmic fireworks as warning (Mt chs 24-25, esp. 24:36-44 & 25:6,13; Mk ch. 13; Lk 12:40; ch. 24; Jn ch. 4; Acts 1:7; 1Thess 5:2; 2Pet 3:10; Rev 3:3,20; 16:15). Which is why He counsels being constantly on guard, alert, ready; that we watch ourselves, lest our senses are dulled, our minds distracted, our hearts coarsened, our consciences dead.
A story is told of one Saturday morning when the then Dean of St Mary’s Cathedral, Monsignor O’Reilly, heard the doorbell of Cathedral House ring and an agitated lady declare, “The Lord has appeared at the Sydney Opera House.” The priest was about to suggest some medication when another person came running with the same news: Jesus was in the parish. “When?” the Dean asked. “He’s there right now,” they both answered. So Fr O’Reilly scampered down Macquarie Street and, sure enough, Jesus was there. He hurried back to Cathedral House and found the Archbishop. “Christ has returned and appeared on Sydney Harbour,” he said. The archbishop thought for a while and told the Dean he’d get back to him. He then called the Vatican. “Holy Father,” he said, “one of my priests, a reliable one, reports that Jesus has appeared in the cathedral parish in Sydney. What do we do?” After a few moments the Holy Father replied, “Look busy!”
You might say this is the Advent message, if not just to look busy, to actually be busy, busy about the Lord’s affairs, and not just in Advent but all year round, and to busy ourselves in ways that do not distract us from the main game. None of us knows the day or the hour, of our own end or of the world’s. So we must invest every moment with the significance of the last, with the weight of eternity. Lest we be sidetracked by “the cares of life” and coarsened by “debauchery and drunkenness”, we should watch and wait, Jesus says, as if we had read the tea leaves and knew the day and the hour was right now!
A sign is coming more powerful than any solar eclipse or earth-shattering climate event. A baby. Not just any baby but, in the words of the Prophet Jeremiah today, “a virtuous shoot from the tree of King David”, a child of innocence and integrity in a world of corruption and deceit. A babe born in royal David’s city, in Bethlehem. Advent is a reminder to keep our eyes and ears open for the Babe, God’s gift of Himself, before whom we can “stand with confidence and kneel in prayer”.
In 1924 the first Parish Priest of Croydon, Fr Michael Tansey, wrote in the Croydon Record: “Time’s moving finger is rapidly writing our history; a few short months ago we were not; today we are a parish—the Benjamin [or baby brother] of the flock [of Sydney]—pulsing with energy. [Already] before Christmas, our church will be built, a striking enthusiasm which inspires you.” Fr Tansey had an Advent urgency about him. He invested each moment with the weight of eternity. So he built a church as a “loadstone” for the people of Croydon and beyond, where their babies would be transformed into children of God in Holy Baptism, their offerings into the Christ’s Body and Blood in the Holy Eucharist, their sins into sanctity in Holy Penance, their lives into vocations in Holy Matrimony, their sicknesses and dying into roads to immortals though Holy Anointing and the Church’s rites. From this church, he said, “the Sacramental Christ” would look out with comfort, and to this church, young and old would come to pour out what troubled their souls. Or as Fr Tansey put it in his first letter to parishioners a hundred years ago, this new parish and church would be an “outpost in God’s kingdom.”
To wait in faithful expectation of God’s coming to our world, our suburb, our hearts, and for our coming to Him and to His saints in heaven is to act here and now to make Holy Innocents a true “outpost in God’s kingdom”—our families, school, community, selves—in the century ahead, as we have tried to do in the century past. And so my dear friends, make this place, in the words of St Paul to us Thessalonians today (1Thes 3:12-4:2), a place where hearts are confirmed in holiness, where lives are lived in blamelessness, where more and more progress is made in the kind of life we are meant to live, and where your love for one another and the whole human race keeps growing. Then you will indeed be ready for that day “when the Lord Jesus Christ comes with all his saints”.