First Sunday of Advent. Cycle A November 27, 2022

 First Sunday of Advent.     Cycle A    November 27, 2022

 The word "advent" means a coming, an arrival.  We are expecting and looking for something to happen, or more accurately, for someone to arrive.   It is the liturgical equivalent of being parked at the cell phone lot at ABIA, waiting for your friend or family member to land.  It is a time of patient expectation. 

          On one level we are looking forward to the celebration of Christmas.   Since before Halloween, stores and commercial enterprises have put out their Christmas decorations.  We won’t do that here in church till December 24.   For weeks Christmas music has been playing on the radio.  We won’t sing carols and Christmas hymns till the 24^th of December.  We take this period of Advent as a time of preparation and expectation, but for something very different and far richer than a commercial Christmas.  

          Advent is the first part of the word “adventure”.  I hope this Advent will be for you an adven-ture of waiting and preparing for the coming of the Christ, both at Christmas, and more importantly at the end of time.

          The end of time.   When is that?   St. Paul in our second reading plainly states: “Brothers and sisters: You know the time;”   However, in the Gospel today Jesus seems to contradict St. Paul, when Jesus declares “For you do not know on which day your Lord will come.” 

          Well, we do know the time in the sense that we have been warned.   St Paul warns us “it is hour now for you to awake from sleep.”  Getting up in the morning is NOT my favorite thing to do.  Maybe you jump up out of bed all excited to take on another day, but now being in my 70’s, I do not.  Anyway, it is now the hour for us to awake from sleep, the spiritual sleep of being dulled by routine and the comfort of the familiar. 

          It is that time in the morning just before the sun rises, when the sky is no longer black, but a dark blueish purple, hinting at the dawn to come.  We wear vestments that are blueish purple to distinguish this season from Lent, and also to allude or hint that we are far into the night, the sky is already slightly changing, the Son will soon arrive, and the new day, the day of the Lord, is coming.  “It is the hour now for you to awake from sleep.”  St Paul states “the night is advanced, the day is at hand.”    It is a new dawn.

          Being spiritually and ethically awake then, you will NOT be taken by surprise on the day your Lord will come.  The five people shot and killed at the Club Q last Saturday in Colorado, nor the four people murdered in Hennessey OK last Sunday, nor the hundreds killed in the earthquake and sunami that struck the Cianjur region in West Java, in Indonesia on Monday, nor the seven people murdered at the Walmart in Chesapeake VA, on Tuesday, nor the two people shot and killed in Houston on Thursday, did not expect to die that day. 

          As Jesus tells us in our Gospel today: “For you do not know on which day your Lord will come.”   We just don’t know.  So we need to stay spiritually awake, ready to welcome the Lord when He comes to us, at the end of our life, or at the end of time. 

          For we do know, by faith, that the Day of the Lord is coming.  A day of liberation and restoration. A day with no more war: “They shall beat their swords into plows, and their spears into pruning hooks.  On nation shall not raise the sword against another, nor shall they train for war again.”   A day of healing, a day of reconciliation, a day of wholeness and completion.  A day of Peace and Fullness. 

¡Come Lord Jesus!