Fr. Roger J. Landry
Conversations with Consequences Podcast
Homily for the First Sunday of Advent (A), Vigil
November 30, 2019
To listen to an audio recording of this short Sunday homily, please click below:
The following text guided the homily:
- This is Fr. Roger Landry. I hope that you have had a wonderful Thanksgiving. We give thanks today to have the chance to get ready together for the consequential conversation Jesus wants to have with us this Sunday.
- This Sunday, as you know, we will begin a new liturgical year, which is meant to give us a totally new spiritual start. The liturgical year — in which we retrace all of the events of salvation history from the long wait for a Messiah to the crowning of that crucified and risen long-awaited One as the King of the Universe — is not meant to be a liturgical cycle but a liturgical spiral, not a “same old, same old,” but something that helps us to enter into the mysteries we celebrate far more profoundly than the last time. Like re-reading a great book or watching anew a classic movie, each pass along the liturgical spiral that begins Sunday is supposed to reveal to us elements we haven’t seen before and remind us of important things that we once knew but have forgotten about the mystery of God, his love for us, and his hopes and plans for us.
- The proper attitude God wants us to have as we begin with this season of Advent the new liturgical year is given to us by St. Paul in Sunday’s second reading. “What time is it?,” we could ask. St. Paul replies: “You know what time it is, how it is now the moment for you to wake from sleep, for salvation is nearer to us now than when we became believers.”
- Advent, he tells us, is first meant to be a time of spiritual reawakening, of spiritual rebirth, as we return to what should be the proper foundation of our life — Christ himself — and build our life on him.
- Second, it’s a time of excitement. Salvation is nearer to us that when we became believers. It’s nearer to us because we’re a full-year closer to meeting Christ face-to-face. Advent is a time when we not only look to the past, to Jesus’ coming in Bethlehem; it’s not merely a time when we look toward Jesus in the present, as he comes to us to teach us by his Word, feed us with his body and blood, forgive us in the Sacrament of Penance, and guide us each day through prayer; it’s also a time when we look ahead with joy to Christ’s coming at the end of our or at the end of time, whichever comes first. And we look forward not with anti-Christian, spiritually-worldly dread, but with truly Christian hope. Salvation is nearer to us now than last first Sunday of Advent, than two years ago, than the day of our confirmation and first communion, that the day of our of our baptism, than the day when we first became believers! That’s something that should get us excited.
- Third, Advent is a time of journeying. Christ is coming — that is what the term Advent means — and we are called not to stay where we are, but to journey toward him and journey with him. In Sunday’s opening prayer, we will turn to God the Father and ask him to grant us “the resolve to run forth to meet” Christ “with righteous deeds at his coming.” Advent is the gun at the beginning of a race that gets us to begin a spiritual sprint, to go with haste, to meet Christ as he comes. Isaiah on Sunday will compare Advent to a hike: “Come, let us go up to the mountain of the Lord, to the house of the God of Jacob, that he may teach us his ways and we may walk in his paths.” Advent is a time for climbing up a mountain to meet the Lord, to learn his ways and begin to walk in them.
- So Advent is a time when we get up, get excited, and get moving. We know that none of those things just happen to us. They require our will. They demand our free choice.
- First, we got to get up. Sometimes many of us spiritually are like slumbering teenage boys! Advent is like a set of spiritual defibrillating pads meant to jolt us out of the spiritual comas into which out of weakness we can fall.
- Second, we have to get excited by stoking our love for God, for his promises, for heaven, for holiness, for happiness. This, too, requires a choice to start placing our heart more where our true treasure ought to be, making more time for prayer than shopping, more time for reading Sacred Scripture than watching television, more time for loving our neighbor — especially those in greater need of love — than we give to our hobbies and diversions.
- Third, after getting our excitement and desires right, then we need to act on those desires, and get moving to Christ where he awaits us. We need to go meet him in adoration. To go encounter him in Confession. To go receive him in the Eucharist. To go to find him in the disguise of those who are in need. And then to continue to walk in his ways by walking with him and continuing that holy, exciting adventure of faith.
- As Jesus teaches us Sunday in the Gospel, there are great stakes in whether we wake up, get excited and make that journey. Jesus describes how at the time of Noah, there were only a few alert to what was really going on and the rest perished. He said two will be in the field, one will be taken, the other left; two grinding meal, one will be taken, the other left. In St. Luke’s account, Jesus adds, “There will be two in one bed. One will be taken and the other left.” Jesus describes that two people doing the same thing at the same time will have two totally different outcomes. This doesn’t mean that the decision is going to be arbitrary, as if God is just going to flip a coin and determine who gets taken by him to eternal happiness and who gets left alienated from him forever. The ones who will go with the Lord will be those who are not asleep, not dead to what really matters, but alive. They’ll be the ones who are excited for the things of God rather than treat what God asks of us as burdens and the drama of life with him a boring imposition. The ones who are taken will be those who are seeking God, striving to grow spiritually, rather than being content with doing the minimum or even less. The ones who are taken will be those who are journeying, seeking to change in the way Christ wants to change them, who are making the effort to come to meet him, and who even when they’re working the fields, or grinding meal in the kitchen, or resting in bed are seeking to unite their whole life to God.
- Advent is a dynamic season meant to feature a double-movement: Christ’s journeying toward us and our going out of ourselves, out of comfort zones, out of our old habits, to meet him. The spiritual spiritual New Year we begin Sunday is a time of setting spiritual “New Year’s Resolutions” and responding to God’s help to keep them so that we might in fact stay alert, excited and moving. That way, no matter when the Lord comes, we’ll never find him a thief but a Friend. That way he’ll never catch us off-guard but find us ready to continue with him the journey we have been seeking to walk with him each day. This Sunday let’s begin again.
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