Now

Propers: The First Sunday of Advent, A.D. 2016 A

Homily:

Grace, mercy and peace to you from God our Father and from our Lord and Savior Jesus Christ. Amen.

You also must be ready, for the Son of Man is coming at an unexpected hour.

So many of Jesus’ parables repeat this theme: keep alert, keep awake. For the day of the Lord’s return will come unexpectedly like a thief in the night. Indeed, Jesus’ arrival seems always to be surprising. Mary did not expect to become the Mother of God. Joseph did not plan to raise the Messiah as his own. Shepherds in the field certainly weren’t expecting an angel chorus, nor Wise Men the Star. As for Herod, he thought for sure that he’d killed off all rival claimants to the throne.

Even born into an age fervently expecting the imminent arrival of God’s Christ, Jesus slipped in unexpectedly, surreptitiously, a dark horse candidate for the Kingdom of God. He fulfilled every prophecy, every promise, but not in the ways that we expected. We certainly hadn’t prepared ourselves for a Crucified Christ, crowned with thorns, enthroned with nails. And in spite of all His forewarnings, nobody saw the Resurrection coming. Not the Apostles, not the Romans, not even the devil in hell. Jesus Christ is always surprising us, awaking us from our stupor, dazzling us by His Light amidst the darkness.

Remember that God’s judgment and mercy are both truth, experienced in different ways. And they both tend to scare the daylights out of us, because we never see them coming, as we sleepwalk through the day from dawn ‘til dusk.

We forget how close God is to us. We forget how imminent His judgment is. It breaks into our lives unexpectedly, shocking us, terrifying us, catching us forever unawares. In the time of Noah, nobody expected a Flood. In the time of Lot, nobody expected a conflagration. In the time of Isaiah, nobody expected an Exile. We go about our everyday lives rather anesthetized, to be frank, forgetting the things that are truly important, forgetting how precious is the time we are given and how consequential are the daily decisions we so blithely take for granted. Our problem, as they say, is that we think we have time.

How different would our interactions be, if we knew that this were our last day on earth? How differently would we treat our loved ones, if we knew this might be the last time that we saw them, until the age to come? That may sound morbid, but in fact I believe that if we did know this to be our last day, we wouldn’t despair. We would love! Without restriction, without holding back. We would tell our children how much we adore them. We would write to old friends we haven’t seen in years. We would be generous with all the things of life that we simply cannot take with us. We would be free to truly love.

But then why don’t we live like this all the time?

Of all the changes wrought by science and technology over the past century and a half, perhaps the most underappreciated yet most revolutionary is the doubling of our lifespans. In 1900, a healthy American male could reasonably expect to live into his mid-forties. Today that number has hit 80. We are living twice as long as our forebears, two of their lifespans for every one of ours. For our kids it might be three. And this has changed everything, from the length of our educations to our expectations of society and marriage and family.

Now, life expectancy doesn’t mean that people used to just keel over when they hit their thirties or forties. There have always been old people. Rameses the Great made it to his nineties more than 3000 years ago. What it means, rather, is that death has been a daily and visceral reality for all of humanity, right up until the present day. Right up until us. Our grandparents were reminded of their mortality from the day that they were born. They lost brothers and sisters. They lost parents at a young age. It used to be that children died of diseases we now cure with but a simple injection. The antibiotics, the surgeries, the pharmaceuticals developed since the end of the Second World War have transformed certain death into mild inconvenience.

And this has led to the illusion that we will never die. Nobody comes out and says it in so many words, of course; we all know that we’ll die someday in theory. But death is no longer imminent. It no longer surrounds and surprises us throughout our lives, claiming parents, brothers, sisters, children, unexpectedly. Death has become a someday thing, a concern for later, not something we need to deal with now. Not something that’s real today. And so I am freed from the deeper questions of life to go about the import business of wondering what sort of dining set defines me as a person. Pressing matters like that.

Of course, no one will deny that better health and longer life are blessings. I just hit 37, and I’m hoping for at least another 37 yet to come. But as paradoxical as it sounds, when we stop thinking about death—about how precarious and precious our time on this earth truly is—then we also stop thinking about life. And instead we just sit around thinking about stuff. And then ordering it online.

This is the great torpor Jesus warns us about. Wake up, He says. Keep alert! The grace of God surrounds and suffuses the whole world about us if only we would have ears to hear. Life is not about stuff, and petty worries, and a tomorrow that may never come. It’s about the people we love and our neighbor in need and the God who upholds us in every moment that we have. And if we forget this, then we are already the walking dead: no longer persons, just consumers. And consumers don’t have to worry about losing our lives, for we haven’t much of a life left to lose.

We are not promised tomorrow. What we are promised is God’s grace today.

Advent is a season of waiting. I know it often doesn’t seem that way. There’s travel to arrange, meals to plan, decorations to put up, gifts to buy. We all know how hectic the holidays can be. But Advent is the time to take a step back, to breathe: to model patient, spiritual waiting amidst a culture addicted to instant gratification. To truly wait for something is more than mere preparation; it has nothing at all to do with the anxiety of a culture that already has one foot in the next cycle of holidays two and three months down the road.

Waiting is not about the future. It’s about living in expectant hope today. Imagine being perfectly present, perfectly in the now, unconcerned about the future because you know in whose hands the future rests secure. Such is the freedom of Advent: the freedom to pay real attention to our loved ones and to the needs of our neighbors: the freedom to live every day as fully as if it were our last—and so greet each new morning as a joyful and unexpected gift. We are freed in faith precisely because the imminent arrival of the one for whom we wait is assured. He is with us even now, in our waiting.

Advent is not simply the Christmas pre-show. Advent is the heady joy of knowing that your beloved is on His way and even now at the door, and so all is right with the world.

God will surprise us. He will break into our lives at unexpected times and in unexpected ways. Keep awake. Keep alert. Be ever ready, ever watchful, ever living in the now. For God only ever comes to us—now.

In the Name of the Father and of the +Son and of the Holy Spirit. Amen.