Advent 1

Readings: Isaiah 2:1-5; Romans 13:11-14; Matthew 24:37-44

VIDEO

As we embark upon this season of Advent,
St. Paul exhorts us: “You know the time;
it is the hour now for you to awake from sleep.”
Paul's words suggest that our lives 
are a kind of fantasy, a waking dream,
anesthetized by sensual pleasures
and worldly ambitions:
orgies and drunkenness,
promiscuity and lust,
rivalry and jealousy.
Even if we refrain 
from orgies and drunkenness,
can we really pretend we are free
from rivalry and jealousy?
But now it is time to wake up
and to clothe ourselves in Christ.

This passage from Paul
played a key role in the conversion
of the great theologian Augustine of Hippo.
Augustine had been a smart 
and ambitious young man
from North Africa, 
the hinterlands of the Roman empire,
who had made his way to Italy
and found his footing in the center of power.
But his restless heart kept telling him
that there must be more to life,
even as his lusts and ambitions
pushed him up the ladder of success.
 
He had become convinced 
of the truth of Christianity,
but found himself unable to break free
from those lusts and ambitions;
he knew what he should do,
but was unable to will himself to do it.
He describes his situation as being
“like the efforts of those 
who would like to get up 
but are overcome by deep sleep 
and sink back again.” 
We say, “Just a little longer please,”
but, Augustine notes, 
“‘Just a little longer, please’ went on and on 
for a long while” (Conf. 8.5.12).

One day, praying in anguish in a garden, 
he hears the distant voice of a child,
saying in a sing-song chant,
tolle lege, “take up and read.”
He goes and gets a copy of Paul’s letters
and, opening them at random,
reads the passage that we have just heard:
“put on the Lord Jesus Christ,
and make no provision 
for the desires of the flesh.”
Augustine tells us,
“I neither wished nor needed to read further. 
At once, with the last words of this sentence, 
it was as if a light of relief from all anxiety 
flooded into my heart. 
All the shadows of doubt 
were dispelled” (Conf. 8.12.29).
 
I tell the story of St. Augustine in some detail
not to suggest that reading a magic Bible passage
can make all our doubts and hesitations vanish,
can rouse us from our spiritual dream state,
but because the message that woke Augustine up
is a message that we need to hear today:
“put on the Lord Jesus Christ,
and make no provision for the desires of the flesh.”
We, no less than Augustine 
and the Roman Christians to whom Paul wrote,
seek to indulge our desires—
to satisfy not only our bodily appetites,
but also our appetites 
for power and control and security.
We, no less than they,
drowsily respond to the call of God’s Spirit,
“Just a little longer please.”
Please let me linger just a little longer 
in this waking dream that I call my life,
in which I believe myself 
to stand stable and secure.
Leave me to my lust and my rivalries,
my self-indulgence and my petty ambitions.
Leave me in my old way of life.
We, no less than they,
have let “Just a little longer please”
go on and on for a long time.
 
But today Christ calls to us 
to wake up and to stay awake,
for the day of the Son of Man
will come like a thief in the night—
the day of judgment,
when the desires of this world 
on which we have spent our lives
will fade away like a dream, 
a dream that seemed 
so real as we slumbered
but which we 
cannot quite remember
in the bright light of day.
Those things that loom 
so large as we dream—
plans and programs, 
ambitions and awards,
grudges and gambits—
all will fade away
with the dawning of that day.

And what will remain?
What of this life can endure
the bright light of day?
Jesus Christ, 
in whom we have been clothed
through the saving waters of Baptism,
on whom we have fed
in the sacrificial banquet of the Eucharist,
through whom we have become 
friends of the living God.
He alone will remain,
who came among us in great humility
so many centuries ago,
who comes to us still 
in the guise of the needy stranger,
who will come in power and glory
to judge the living and the dead,
who reigns for all eternity
as the victorious lamb
giving light to the city of God.

The Church gives to us
these precious weeks of Advent
to let God’s Spirit wake us up,
so that we might not live a waking dream
but see the light of Jesus Christ,
the light that endures in God’s eternal kingdom.
Let us not spend these days drowsily murmuring
“Just a little longer please.”
For the time is now.
“Come, let us walk in the light of the Lord!”

32nd Sunday in Ordinary Time

Readings: 2 Maccabees 7:1-2, 9-14; 2 Thessalonians 2:16-3:5; Luke 20:27-38

VIDEO

In this month of November—
adorned with falling leaves,
and begun with the commemorations 
of All Saints and All Souls—
the Church turns our attention 
to the passing away of this world
and our hope for the world to come.
But what is it that we hope for?
Certainly, we hope that 
whatever has given life in this world 
meaning and joy
will be somehow continued 
beyond this world,
that the things and people 
in whom we have delighted in this life
will continue to delight us in the next.

But in today’s Gospel 
Jesus seems to throw cold water on those hopes.
Asked whether those 
who will be raised from the dead
will still be married,
Jesus responds, “those who are deemed worthy 
to attain to the coming age
and to the resurrection of the dead
neither marry nor are given in marriage.
They can no longer die,
for they are like angels.”
Jesus seems to suggest that marriage
is a temporary provision 
necessitated by the fact that we all die, 
and if we did not procreate 
the human race would die with us.
His words also suggest that all those relationships
that are so important to our life in this world
are perhaps simply temporary provisions 
and will no longer be relevant in the life to come.

Maybe to think that God’s kingdom 

involves having husbands or wives
or parents or children or friends
is simply a failure of imagination
and an inability to grasp 
how different eternal life will be,
where we will no longer die, 
and will be like the angels,
who know and love God 
in a direct and unmediated way.
Perhaps to mourn the passing of those loves
is to be, as the philosopher Eleonore Stump suggests,
“like a child who reacts with dismay when he is told 
that he won’t be sucking his thumb when he grows up.”

Is it simply the case 
that the loves forged in this life
vanish into the love of God—
are something that we, as it were, outgrow?
Do we forget the personal histories
by which we became who we are,
in which spouses and parents 
and children and friends
played vital, irreplaceable roles? 
Is all of this simply swallowed up 
when God becomes all in all?

Maybe this is not the whole picture.
If our Gospel suggests that the life of the world to come
is radically different from our life in this world,
our first reading suggests that even in this radical difference
there remain threads of continuity 
between this life and the next.
We hear in this reading a part of the story 
of the torture and execution
of seven brothers and their mother 
during the Greek persecution of the Jews 
who remained faithful to the Law of Moses. 
Our lectionary spares us 
the gruesome details of their dismemberment,
but we do hear the words of the third brother,
who, as he extends his tongue and hands to be cut off,
says to his tormentors,
“It was from Heaven that I received these;
for the sake of his laws I disdain them;
from him I hope to receive them again.”

This story gives us an example 
not simply of faith and courage,
but of hope as well. 
Read alongside Jesus’s words in the Gospel,
it suggests that the life from God for which we hope
is somehow in continuity with the life
that we have already received from God,
and yet it is unimaginably more;
it is a blessedness toward which 
the blessings of this life gesture,
but which they ultimately cannot express.

In the case of the blessing of marriage,
St. Paul tells us in the letter to the Ephesians
that the love of husband and wife
is not only for the sake of procreation,
but is also a sign of the love 
between Christ and the Church.
Even amid struggle and misunderstanding,
the sorrow and the loss,
that seem to mark all our loves in this life,
our faithfulness to the bond of marriage 
gestures to the ultimate union with Christ in love
that we hope for in God’s kingdom come.
But in the blessedness of God’s kingdom
we will no longer need signs,
we will no longer need to gesture,
because we will possess that love in its fullness. 

And yet, while the sign of the marriage bond will pass away,
surely the love that forged that bond will not.
In this life, the bond of love between spouses,
always faltering and imperfect,
is a sign by which we orient ourselves in hope
toward the unimaginable love of God;
when we possess that divine love in its fullness,
surely we will find encompassed within it
the love had by spouses in this life,
no longer marked by struggle and misunderstanding,
no longer afflicted by sorrow and loss,
no longer faltering and imperfect,
but gloriously transfigured by the light of Christ.

And so too with all our loves forged in this life:
the love of parent and of child and of friend.
Our hope is that they too 
will be present in the life to come,
no longer as signs and gestures 
that dimly hint at the love of God
but healed, perfected, and transformed by the light 
that streams forth upon them from the very heart of God.

Jesus tells us in the Gospel that our God
“is not God of the dead, but of the living,
for to him all are alive.”
So as our minds turn,

amid November’s falling leaves
and remembrances of the dead, 
to the passing away of this world,
let our hope be renewed 
that the loves with which God has blessed us in this life
will not finally pass away but be restored to us,
for these loves are eternally alive 
in the God of love who is their source,
from whom we have received them,
and in whom we shall possess them in eternity.