November 27, 2016
1st Sunday of Advent – Year A
(Isaiah 2:1-5; Psalm 122; Romans 13:11-14; Matthew 24:37-44)
26/27 November 2016 – St. Austin Parish, Austin, TX
This weekend, we begin a new liturgical year, with lots of changes in our liturgy. We switch to the color violet to indicate the season of Advent, the season of quiet waiting. We begin a year of journeying through the gospel of Matthew. Matthew has undoubtably been the most influential of the four gospels in the development of Christianity.
Matthew is the gospel of parables, but today, we’ll hear a bunch of similes. Matthew tells us that when Christ comes again, it will come like “a thief in the night” in the middle of a time “as in the days of Noah.” But let’s be clear, friends: we are to wait for Christ’s second coming with joyful hope, not with heavy foreboding.
We will now light our Advent wreath, to celebrate our call to walk in the light of the Lord!
Advent is the season of the year when the Church seems most out of step with our secular society. For these next two weeks, as we stress the importance of waiting for the second coming of Jesus Christ at the end of time, we seem especially out of sync. We say, “Not yet!” even as Christmas decorations festoon the stores, Christmas music fills the air, and many of us have been planning Christmas parties.
And yet, Advent is the favorite season of the year for many Catholics. Why is that? Not only do we get a lot of really awesome Scripture readings – this is a great time of the year to attend daily Mass – but also we celebrate some great wisdom that our secular society doesn’t understand.
As a Church, we understand that waiting is an inevitable part of life. No matter how eagerly we anticipate the end of the semester, we must wait for our grades, for our letters of acceptance, and for job offers. No matter how worried we are about illnesses we’re facing, we have to wait for the results of medical tests before making decisions. No matter how much we may wish to get married and settle down, we have to wait to meet that special someone.
There are good ways and bad ways to wait. We all know people who complain about their current lot in life – a bad relationship, a lousy job, their medical conditions, and so on – but they never do anything about their problems. It’s one thing to accept things that we cannot change… but it’s a completely different thing to not address circumstances that we can change. We can’t expect a relationship, a job, or certain illnesses to work themselves out unless we take action!
Others of us fall into the other extreme of poor waiting skills. We spend hours ruminating about every future contingency – what if I get to be thirty without meeting that special someone? What if no one hires me when I graduate in three years? What if my hair falls out during chemotherapy? We naturally spend time worrying, and that’s OK. But so many of us rev our brains, turning the information over and over in our heads. Deep down inside, we recognize that our condition won’t change by thinking about it… in these situations, we must wait for more information to be revealed.
So, what’s the healthy, holy way to wait? Reinhold Niebuhr summed it up pretty well: “God, give me grace to accept with serenity the things that cannot be changed, courage to change the things which should be changed, and the wisdom to distinguish the one from the other.” Another prayer that captures it is the embolism that we place at the end of the Our Father at Mass. I consider it to be a mini-Advent prayer that we say all year: “Graciously grant peace in our days, that, by the help of your mercy, we may be always free from sin and safe from all distress, as we await the blessed hope and the coming of our Savior, Jesus Christ.”
A lot of us feel distressed when we wait. When we hear Paul tell us to “throw off the works of darkness and put on the armor of light,” when we hear Jesus speaking that some people will be taken and others will be left, we have a tendency to panic. The Church gives us Advent to remind us that in that mix of all the feelings we have while waiting, we should strive for the predominant emotion to be joyful hope.
Pope Francis created quite a stir in his first year as pope by releasing a big apostolic exhortation, Evangelii gaudium, or The Joy of the Gospel, right before Advent. In it, he challenges each of us to not to turn inward on ourselves, but to turn outward towards others, to those who are impoverished, to those who do not know the gospel. How can Francis use the word “joy” to describe sharing the gospel with such people? Francis writes: “I realize of course that joy is not expressed the same way at all times in life, especially at moments of great difficulty. Joy adapts and changes, but it always endures, even as a flicker of light born of our personal certainty that, when everything is said and done, we are infinitely loved.”
Where is the joy in our Scripture readings today? Well, it’s most apparent in that glorious vision of Isaiah, when all people will stream toward the mountain of the Lord, beating their swords into plowshares and their spears into pruning hooks. But it’s also in Paul’s call for living in the light and in Jesus’ promise that we will be taken up at the coming of the Son of Man.
How are we to wait for the coming of the Lord? Not by sitting around passively, but not by ruminating about what the end of time will be like, either. God calls us to do things that can actually make a difference. Let us share the joy of the gospel with everyone we know!
Wherever we are on that final day, whether we be in the field or at the mill, wouldn’t it be truly wonderful if no one was left behind and we all went rejoicing to the house of the Lord?
Let us spread the joy of the gospel. What are we waiting for?