Beginning Again and Doing Our Work, First Sunday of Advent (B), December 3, 2023

Fr. Roger J. Landry
Columbia Catholic Ministry, Notre Dame Church, Manhattan
First Sunday of Advent, Year B
December 3, 2023
Is 63:16-17.19.64:2-7, Ps 80, 1 Cor 1:3-9, Mk 13:33-37

To listen to the recording of tonight’s homily, please click below: 

The following text guided today’s homily: 

• Today is New Year’s Day in the Church. It’s a new beginning. A fresh start. One of the great mottos of the saints is “Nunc, coepi!,” Latin for, “Now I begin!” In his famous conversation with Nicodemus, Jesus talks about the experience of being born again from above, something that happens in a unique way in Baptism, occurs regularly in the Sacrament of Penance, as is meant to be a staple of the Christian life. As St. John once wrote, God wants to give us “grace upon grace.” God wants to help us build on the gifts he’s given us previously. He also wants to draw greater good even out of our sins and what we’ve suffered, so that, as St. Paul wrote in his Letter to the Romans, everything can work out for the good for those who love God. In today’s second reading, Paul reminds us that God has “enriched us in every way … so that [we] are not lacking in any spiritual gift as we wait for the revelation of our Lord Jesus Christ,” promising that God will give us everything we need to “keep [us] firm to the end, irreproachable on the day of our Lord Jesus Christ,” provided that we receive and respond to that help.
• The first Sunday of Advent inaugurates a new year dedicated to our reliving in time the central mysteries of the life of Christ. Christ is the “the Alpha and the Omega, the first and the last, the beginning and the end” (Rev 22:13), and the Church has us begin each year focusing both on the end and on the beginning so that we might better live the present. Advent is that season in which we prepare for reliving the beginning of Christ’s life on earth, as we enter with the help of the Prophets, especially Isaiah, into the experience of the Jews awaiting the Messiah Christ’s coming in the past in Bethlehem; we prepare for the end, Christ’s second coming in the future on the clouds of heaven to judge the living and the dead; and we grow in our appreciation for both by means of embracing Jesus’ coming in the present, in prayer and the sacraments, in daily life, but especially in the Eucharist.
• Advent, like the Christian life as a whole, is fundamentally dynamic. There’s movement. Christ out of love is coming toward us and we, with love, await his coming and prepare, as we prayed at the beginning of Mass, to “run forth” to meet him and embrace him with joy. There’s a temptation sometimes to look at a new liturgical year as a humdrum and boring happening. We can approach it with the same minimal enthusiasm with which we watch re-runs of television programs or movies; we know how the story ends and therefore it makes less and less of an impression on us each time. But that’s not the way God wants it and that is not what the liturgical year is meant to be. It’s supposed to be more like the way baseball fans and players alike look forward to the start of spring training. Even though there will be 162 games the following season just like previous ones, even though the squad will for the most part face the same opponents in the same cities, even though the games will still be nine innings long and the diamond will have the same dimensions, there will be a whole new drama. The drama will involve how the team rises to meet the challenges that will come to it within the structure of the new season. Similarly, there’s meant to be a whole new drama for us in this new liturgical season in which we, with Christ’s help, run to meet the challenges he puts before us. Every liturgical cycle is supposed to be a liturgical spiral: we are not meant to repeat last year’s steps but rather to retrace their direction at a higher and more intense level. The experience of last year is meant to help us to have a better season this year. And so we begin this new year with hope, with a greater longing for Christ, with a desire to build on the growth of last year, with a hunger to learn from both our sins and our successes. Advent is meant to help ensure that, with each year, we grow in faith, rather than lose faith. We’ve all known people who have lost their first love for God; who once practiced the faith with great fervor, but who, for various reasons, have become lukewarm and then cold; who have drifted away or made a choice to stop practicing the faith; and who have begun to treat God, the Church and revelation the way people eventually treat Santa Claus, the elves and reindeer, and ‘Twas the Night Before Christmas, respectively. But the Gospel is not a fairy tale. Jesus, the God-man, really entered the world, really was born in Bethlehem, really lived, worked, preached, healed, exorcised, suffered, died and rose, and really will come again as Universal King to judge the living and the dead. Each liturgical year is meant to help us to enter more deeply into this reality.
• Today’s readings help us to focus on two attributes essential for Advent and for the whole Christian life.
• The first is longing, or desire, or, even more simply, love for God. We want God to come. With Isaiah in today’s first reading, we cry out, “Return for the sake of your servants,” and “Rend the heavens and come down.” With the Psalmist, we clamor, “O shepherd of Israel, hearken, from your throne upon the cherubim, shine forth. Rouse your power and come to save us.” We implore, “Lord, make us turn to you; let us see your face and we shall be saved.” All of this is the rich context for the de facto motto of the Church during our collective Advent awaiting Christ’s return: the whole Church cries out in this season, “Marantha! Come, Lord Jesus!” (Rev 22:20). On this first Sunday of Advent, the Church wants us to ask ourselves, “Do I really long for Jesus?” “Do I hunger for him to play a larger role in my life than he did last year?” “Do I really want him to be God in my life, the real center of my existence, the most decisive reality of who am I or what I do?”
• The second essential attribute is vigilance. In today’s Gospel, from St. Mark, who will accompany us throughout this new liturgical year, Jesus speaks to us about how we should be living between his Ascension and his Second Coming. He compares our situation to a man’s traveling abroad who “leaves home and places his servants in charge, each with his own work, and orders the gatekeeper to be on the watch.” He’s entrusted us with real responsibility, each of us with our own work, hoping we will prove to be, as we focused upon a few weeks ago, “good and trustworthy servants.” I’ll return to the phrase “each with his own work” in a few minutes. But Jesus illustrates his three similar commands, “Be watchful!,” “Be Alert!,” and “Watch!,” by telling us that we should be like porters, like door openers, waiting for his return. The opposite of the vigilance to which he calls us in Advent and beyond is, he says, for us to be found asleep. Advent is a time for us to wake up and to stay up, like a good third-shift doorman or the wise bridesmaids we met last month, ready for his arrival.
• In Manhattan, as you know, most of the large apartment complexes have professional doormen, just like hotels do throughout the country. There are three basic parts to their job. The first is always to be on the lookout for the arrival of a resident or guest. As soon as they see one arriving, they open the door; if the residents are returning from a trip or shopping, they promptly assist as needed, opening up car doors and helping transport suitcases and bags into the foyer. Their second task is to prevent those who shouldn’t be entering from doing so, something that in an age of terrorism, rioting and deranged shooters is also crucial. Their third duty is to keep the lobby clean and swept.
• With a view to his second coming, Jesus is summoning us to be spiritual doorkeepers in all three of these ways.
• First, he calls us to be awake and alert to welcome him whenever and from wherever he comes, to go out to meet him when he comes, to run forth to meet him in prayer as he seeks to speak to us, to be vigilant like the Shepherds and Wise Men with regard to his birth, to be attentive to the way he comes to us in the Sacraments, in the various disguises he takes in daily life — in the poor, the sick, the lonely, the imprisoned, those we might consider our enemies, those around us right now —all of which help us to be ready to meet him when he comes at the end of time or at the end of our life, whichever “second coming” comes first. In short, he calls us to be awake and alert for his presence at all times, and to open up the door whenever he comes and bid him to enter. Pope Francis said earlier today in his Angelus greeting, “Keeping watch means keeping the heart ready.” The question for us today is: Is my heart ready? Jesus tells us in the Book of Revelation, “Behold, I stand at the door knocking; if you hear my voice and open the door, I will come in and eat with you, and you with me.” We’re called to be waiting at the door and eager to meet him, like a girl waiting for her date at the prom, prompt to open as soon as she hears the rap on the door. Jesus comes knocking, but as a famous artistic depiction memorializes, the door only has one handle, and it’s on the inside. Jesus wants us to be porters with our hands on the handle, with hearts alert, eager and ready to open.
• The second task we have as spiritual porters is to lock the door to those who shouldn’t enter, who want to invade to do damage, harm and destroy. We’re supposed to lock the door to the devil, who seeks to encroach the temple of God we’re called to be and wreak havoc. Because the evil one often comes in subtle disguises, we have to be on our guard against him, against temptations to sin and against those situations and persons that lead us to sin. Some people and situations simply take us away from God and we have to be sanely on the lookout for them, like those who guard the gate at the White House are for people who don’t belong.
• The third task is to keep the entrance of our house clean and swept — and not just the entrance. That’s why we meet John the Baptist in the heart of every Advent, as we will the next two Sundays, who helps us through repentance to make straight the paths for the Lord’s arrival. Just as Jesus cleansed the Temple, so he wants to help us clean our souls. He came in time as the Lamb of God to take away the sins of the world, and St. John the Baptist points us to him, who wants to give us a saving deep clean in the Sacrament of Reconciliation. Please prepare to make this Advent not just a good confession, but a great confession, perhaps the best Confession of your life. I will have extended hours of confession throughout this holy season, including, during study period on December 12, all day confessions from 9 am to 6 pm, just to try to make it maximally convenient for you. Please make sure to live Advent well, and to get this year off to a good and holy beginning by allowing Christ to help rid your life of what doesn’t belong.
• So the two essential Advent attitudes that we’re supposed to have are eager longing and holy vigilance. But I want to return to something that Jesus said in the Gospel that we shouldn’t miss. After Jesus tells us twice to be watchful and before he gives us the analogy of the doorman, he states that, when the man goes abroad, he “leaves his home and places his servant in charge, each with his own work.” Not everyone, in other words, will be at the door, but there will be those in the kitchen, those doing maintenance, those cleaning the yard, those supervising the whole staff and more. He implies that in each of these various forms of work, we’re supposed to be alert for his arrival and hard at work. There aren’t supposed to be in his house full-time couch potatoes. There aren’t supposed to be professional nappers and gamers. There aren’t supposed what the Italians call “Mammoni,” grown adults in their 20s, 30s, and 40s who expect their moms to be still making their beds, cleaning their rooms, doing their laundry, cooking their meals, washing their dishes and allowing them to extend their infancy into adulthood. To be watchful, alert and awake is for each maturely and responsibly to be doing his or her work.
• The beginning of this new liturgical year is to ask what that work is in which we’re supposed to be preparing to meet our Savior. For students here at Columbia, part of that work is obviously study. The very word student, in Latin, comes from the verb studere, which means to be zealous, to be eager, to be on fire to learn. Christ, who identified himself as the Truth who sets us free, wants to meet you in your study, to give you a great love for knowledge and the truth, to help you grasp that all truth comes from him, to equip you to live in the truth and pass it on, and to assist you to be those who, as a spiritual work of mercy, are able to decipher and invalidate the various ideological lies of every age. But as important as study is, it’s not meant to be our only work. Just like hard working dads and moms — whether they be full-time scholars, teachers, doctors, lawyers, engineers, groundskeepers, cooks, you name it — always similarly have duties at home, so we as Catholics always have duties within our family the Church. Jesus famously said, “I came not to be served but to serve,” and so any of us who strives to run out to meet him, who seeks to imitate him, who wants to follow him, must resist any sense of entitlement that we exist in the Church to be served by others rather than to do our own work in service.
• Matthew Kelly, a business consultant turned founder of Dynamic Catholic, published research in a 2012 book that said that in typical Catholic parishes, only 7 percent of parishioners give 80 percent of the time and treasure of a parish and 93 percent combined give less than 20. He set out to study what made the 7 percent different from the other 93 percent. They were, after all, both Catholics who received formation in the faith. They both came to Mass. But their response to the faith was different. His analysis showed that there were 264 behaviors that distinguished the 7 from the 93 percent. Sifting through the data he saw that those 264 traits fell into four distinct habits: the 7 percent have a daily commitment to prayer; are continuous learners of the faith; are intentionally and continuously generous with their time, talents, money and with their whole life; and regularly invite others to grow spiritually by sharing the love of God with them. And he set out to try to help learn how to help those in the 93 percent switch over to the 7 percent, in order to enrich their Catholic life, strengthen their parish and lift up the whole Church.
• Here at Columbia Catholic Ministry, would you characterize yourself in the 7 percent or the 93 percent? When a request goes out to volunteer to help out at one of our family social dinners, or sing in our choir, or help in homeless outreach, or to come together to pray for an important cause, do you generally step forward or do you allow others to do so? What role does God play in your extra-curriculars? Are you more eager to step forward to join and serve in leadership in campus clubs and other non-religious extra-curriculars than to help strengthen our joint campus mission here on campus, so that we may help others see the light in Christ’s light?
• On Friday all Columbia Catholics received an email from our two CCM co-Presidents, Joel and Christopher, encouraging them to pray about applying to serve as CCM officers for calendar year 2024. We are praying that each one of you take that invitation seriously.
• For two years I was assigned to a parish on Cape Cod. The main church was St. Francis Xavier in Hyannis, the famous Church where the first Catholic President, John F. Kennedy, used to attend when he was home in Hyannisport. There was also a tiny mission chapel in Yarmouthport for which we were responsible. Every week, some Sacred Heart Chapel parishioners would put stuff on the bulletin board in the Church without permission and one of our duties on Saturdays was just to give the bulletin board a look to see if what they put up was at least minimally compatible with the faith. One Saturday I found a flier there that must have been put by one of the hard working seniors, doubtless trying to get some of the younger parishioners and summer visitors to consider getting more involved. It was straight out of the creativity of the famous Abbot and Costello sketches. It read: “Once upon a time, there were four people named Everybody, Somebody, Nobody and Anybody. When there was an important job, Everybody was sure that Somebody would do it. Anybody could have done it, but Nobody did. Everybody got angry because it was Somebody’s job. Everybody thought Somebody would do it, but Nobody realized that nobody would do it. So it ended up that Everybody blamed Somebody when Nobody did what Anybody could have done in the first place.” As Matthew Kelly’s research shows, many parishes can be like that. Sometimes even campus chaplaincies can be full of “Everybodies” who are sure that “Somebody” will do it. What’s needed for the Church to thrive is for “Anybody” and “Somebody,” and indeed “Everybody” to step forward. Great things are happening here for Catholics at Columbia with the investment of extremely generous alumni to build our first fully-dedicated Catholic Center in Columbia’s 270 years. Cardinal Dolan is super supportive and has gotten personally involved. But for our work to grow and make a greater difference in the lives of Catholics here, and eventually in the lives of many others whom God loves and for whom Christ came into the world to save, what’s needed is for people to step forward to serve, for each person to do his or her work as today’s Gospel points out. We can never outgive God. If we’re generous with him, he will definitely bless us. Our hope is that for you here, and for Catholics in future years, you will be able to say that among your greatest memories at Columbia will be the way you grew in knowledge and love of God, in your living out and sharing the treasure of the faith with others. As this new liturgical year begins, I’d urge you to make a resolution to upgrade your involvement in Catholic life. Perhaps you don’t have the time to serve as a CCM officer, but how could you use the time and the gifts you do have to strengthen Catholic life? But be open to the possibility that the Lord may be asking you at the beginning of this liturgical year to reassess your priorities to see whether he would like to develop the many talents he’s given you through service of him and of your fellow Catholics in leadership positions.
• As we begin this new liturgical year, Jesus wants to help us to grow in our longing, vigilance, and hardworking stewardship. He wants to give us a fresh start. He wants to help us on what’s meant to be the spiral of Christian life. The Advent wreath we’ve blessed and lit is meant to symbolize, first God’s evergreen love for us, and second, our increasing hunger for him and his kingdom with every newly lit candle. As we prepare now for Christ’s advent on this altar in just a few minutes, we cry out to him, “O Come, O Come, Emmanuel,” “O Come Divine Messiah!,” “O Come, thou long expected Jesus, born to set thy people free. From our fears and sins release us, let us find our rest in thee.” Let us respond to the help he wants to give us today to make this new year the best spiritual year of our life, a true year of the Lord. O come, Lord Jesus!

The readings for today’s Mass were: 

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