Watch! Be alert! Homily for the First Sunday of Advent, December 3, 2023

The word watch has at least, I think, three meanings. One can be watch as I do something. I can show you how to do something, and you can learn how to do it by watching me. Sometimes the word watch can be to point out something dramatic and wonderful, and it's awe-inspiring.

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Today is the First Sunday of Advent. Isaiah the prophet is both challenging and consoling. In the gospel Jesus tells us to watch and be alert. For what? For Him, of course.

Watch!

This week, although I have to say that I was not ready to go out and take a look at them, particularly in a heavily lighted urban area, but if you were attentive in many parts of Minnesota, you could see the northern lights, something I have in fact seen before, and they are worth seeing.

Though many of the pictures came from the middle of the night, and I think it was just as easy to rely on my memories of the northern lights than to have lamented the fact that at, I don’t know, three or four in the morning, I was not awake.

But today’s readings give us the sense of watch that is much more about being on guard, much more like the sense of watch out. There’s something quite risky. Be careful. Keep your eyes open. There’s a sense that in the readings today, we are in some sense of danger if we’re not careful, if we’re not watchful, that we need to look carefully because if we don’t, we could be in real difficulty.

The first reading from the book of the prophet Isaiah is really about a time when Isaiah is sent forth to warn people that if they continue to live the way that they live, things will not end well. His book is traditionally divided into two parts. There are multiple parts, but for one way of dividing it, there is the book of woe, which believe it or not, was not what we heard today, and the book of consolation.

It is the book of woe that reminds the people again and again and again, these are the bad things that will happen if you don’t change your life. And the book of consolation is, and here is what God will do for you if you allow him to do so.

That’s where the first reading comes from. The words are harsh. The words are challenging because they remind us that we have not always been faithful. And they do so actually in pretty dramatic and powerful ways. They really have harsh, harsh language for the people.

Listen again. Behold, you are angry, and we are sinful;
all of us have become like unclean people,
all our good deeds are like polluted rags;
we have all withered like leaves,
and our guilt carries us away like the wind.
There is none who calls upon your name,
who rouses himself to cling to you;
for you have hidden your face from us
and have delivered us up to our guilt.

Not easy words to hear as a description of the people. And if the reading were to stop there, we would be quite sad indeed. But fortunately for us, it does not.

Yet, O LORD, you are our father;
we are the clay and you the potter:
we are all the work of your hands.

Yet, O Lord, you are our Father. We are the clay and you are the potter. We are all the work of your hands. And there in is the consolation that God doesn’t leave us in our sinfulness. God forms us and shapes us into the persons we were made to be. And that is wonderful indeed.

One very Dominican phrase, and I hear when I was at the SEEK Conference last year in St. Louis with thousands and thousands of young people, Sister Miriam James said this over and over again, and I thought it was such a good, good line.

She said this. It is good that you exist. And God says that to each one of us. It is good that we exist. It is good that we hold out hope for who we can become when we turn our lives over to Jesus and allow Jesus to turn us into the people that He has made us to be. And that’s phenomenally good news.

And all we need to do is to pay attention to the words of Jesus. Watch. Watch what God is going to do. And God is going to do great things. Watch because God is awesome. God is marvelous and tremendous.

And watch because even though we live in a world that can be filled with danger and difficulty, where there are times when we can do horrible things to one another, watch because when we are attentive to God, we can change our lives through His grace. God can give us the help and the power to do the things that we need to do to be open to see when He is present.

And that’s what the season of Advent is all about. It is a time of waiting and watching. It is a time of being ready for the ways in which Jesus comes into our life. And there are really three things that we are called to be attentive to.

One, of course, is the way in which Jesus comes to us daily into our own lives. There is the coming of Jesus at the end of time when we will have to give an account of our lives at the final judgment. And there’s the commemoration of the great and loving gift of God when He becomes one of us.

There are a number of things that we can do to focus on the ways in which Jesus comes into our hearts. But perhaps the best as a way of beginning is simply to find ways to be watchful, to find ways to be alert, and to take a little bit of time for silent prayer so that we can say from the depths of our being, Come, Lord Jesus.

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