Memento Vivere

Propers: The First Sunday of Advent, AD 2022 A

 

Homily:

 

Lord, we pray for the preacher, for you know his sins are great.

 

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. And as for Herod, he thought for sure that he’d killed off any rival claimant to his throne, even his own sons.

 

Despite being born into an age fervently watching for the imminent arrival of the 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 either; not the Apostles, not the Romans, not even the devils in hell. Jesus is always surprising us, awaking us from our stupor, dazzling us as the Light amidst our darkness.

 

Remember that God’s judgment and God’s mercy are both alike His 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 our 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, no-one expected a Flood. In the time of Lot, nobody prepared for a conflagration.

 

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 the daily decisions we so blithely take for granted. Our problem, as they say, is that we think we have time. How different might our interactions be, if we knew that today, this day, were our last on this earth? How differently would we treat our loved ones, if we understood that this would be the last time that we saw them until the age to come?

 

That might sound morbid, but in fact I believe that if we did know this to be our last day, we wouldn’t despair; not all of us, anyway. We would love! Without restriction, without holding back. We would tell our children how much we adore them. We would write to old friends whom we haven’t seen in years. We would be generous with our possessions, all the things we can’t take with us. We would be free to truly love. So then why don’t we live like this all the time?

 

Of the many changes wrought by science and technology over the past century and a half, perhaps the most underappreciated yet 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, increased 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 into his nineties more than 3000 years ago. What it means, rather, is that death had 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 that 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 one day, in theory. But death is no longer imminent to us. It no longer surrounds and surprises us throughout our lives, claiming parents, brothers, sisters, children, unexpectedly.

 

Death is now something that we can ignore, that we can pretend on most days isn’t really there, isn’t really near. It’s a someday-thing, a latter bother. And so I am freed from concern for the deeper questions of life—what is my purpose? where am I going? what will I leave behind when I’m gone?—to go about the import business instead of wondering what sort of dining set defines me as a person. Pressing matters of that sort.

 

Of course, no-one will deny that better health and longer life are blessings. I just hit 43, and I’m rather hoping for another 30 or 40 to come. Yet 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. I have a medallion that I carry, which on one side reads memento mori, “remember death,” and on the other memento vivere, “remember to live.” They go hand-in-hand, you see, literally two sides of the same coin.

 

When death is distant, so is life; because the ending makes sense of the story. Without an end, there is no story, no climax, no purpose, no plot; just as without a goal, without a destination, there is no journey, no adventure, no quest. And so we don’t go anywhere. We just buy things. We loop through endless repetitions of the sleep-work-entertainment cycle, which is designed to keep us acquiescent. And it’s killing us, because we were not built for ease; we are built for greatness.

 

This is the torpor from which Jesus shakes us. 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, eyes to see, hands to help. Life is not about stuff, and petty worries, and a tomorrow that may never come. It’s about the people whom we love, and our neighbor in his need, and the God who upholds us in every moment, every breath, every day that we have.

 

And if we forget this, when we forget this, then we become 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 to lose. Memento mori. Memento vivere. We are not promised tomorrow. What we are promised is the grace of God today. In truth, there is no tomorrow; it is only ever today.

 

Advent, my brothers and sisters, 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 in the midst of all that 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. As strange as it may sound, waiting is not about the future. It’s about living in expectant hope today. Imagine being perfectly present, perfectly in the now, unconcerned about tomorrow because you know in whose hands the future rests secure.

 

Such is the freedom offered to us in 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 and unreservedly as though it were our last—and so greet each new morning as a joyful and unexpected gift; indeed, as a daily resurrection in Christ.

 

We are freed in faith precisely because the imminent arrival of the One for whom we wait is assured. It is already and not yet. He is with us even now, in our waiting for Him. Advent is not simply the Christmas pre-show. Advent is the heady joy of knowing that your beloved is on His way, that He is 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.