Advent I

The First Sunday of Advent

Isaiah 2:1-5; Psalm 122; Romans 13:11-14; Matthew 24:37-44

Liao Chung Lun is twenty-four-years-old; a graduate student of environmental studies. He has just completed his mandatory military training. Like most young people he feels thoroughly Taiwanese and has almost no connection to China. Asked whether he is worried about Taiwan’s future in the light of Xi Jinping abandoning any pretense about invading Taiwan and bringing it into China, he shrugs. “We’ve been hearing this for years – that the Chinese are going to invade,” he says. For much of Liao’s generation, the fear of invasion has simply lasted too long to feel urgent; it has faded to background noise.

So it is with us Christians. Any urgency in regard to the Second Coming of Christ has long faded from our consciousness and no longer marks our actions. There is no sense in our lives of an expectation or anticipation of Jesus even though every liturgy reminds us that “we await the blessed hope, the coming of our Saviour, Jesus Christ”.

There are two kinds of waiting. There’s the kind when you are expecting something new or even strange. And there’s the kind of waiting [when] you keep looking out into the distance even though you know the view is never going to change._{[Lyric from the Broadway show, The Band’s Visit]} Isn’t the second kind of waiting, that the view is never going to change, what we are today living in our society and Church. Consider the two mass shootings this past week within days of each other at an LGBTQ nightclub in Colorado Springs and a Walmart in Chesapeake, Virginia. We shrug our shoulders. There is no expectation of anything changing, of something new.

In our culture we primarily live in and for the present. We garner no wisdom from the past; it has nothing to teach us, nor do we have hope in the future. We will not abide anyone telling us what do to or judging our actions. Tomorrow may not come. We might miss out on something. We’ve got to experience everything. Is this a self-indulgent way of living not devoid of the sacredness of life? It results in the Holy Week of overindulgence: Thanksgiving Day’s overeating spills over into Black Friday, Small Business Saturday and Cyber Monday. It results in sex without commitment and constraints. It results in mass shootings rooted in hate and anger.

Advent is about futures. Nothing will spiritually change within us and we will have nothing to offer our culture until we reclaim that Advent has to do with a future of hope. And that will not happen until we reinterpret Advent not as a preparation for Christmas but a looking forward to the future reality of eternal life rooted in our present actions that make a difference in the future.

There are 53+ million people in our country who experience food insufficiency. That’s a veiled way of saying 53 million people go hungry. Consider the abundance and wastefulness of food in our society and the unhealthy obesity of people and ask, why fasting no longer marks the lives of Christians as a spiritual practice? See, fasting puts a constraint on eating. If we are only living for today and not a future, constraints are unthinkable.

Sex has been reduced to a self-indulgent pleasure, a way of meeting people and then discarding them. There is nothing sacred about sex.  It is about the moment severed from relationship. How many Catholic parents, if they speak to the children about sexuality, only talk about contraceptives, presuming their children will be sexually active? Why are pornographic sites the most visited on the web? It has absolutely taken me back how many people over the years have said that my business is my business presuming if I do not keep my promise of celibacy it’s OK as long as…it is not found out? And even then the constraint is unthinkable. Why do we no longer cultivate or expect deep relationships? To cultivate deep friendships and marriages means putting constraints on ourselves.

We are exhausted by the violence, the incivility and anger in our society with seemingly no solutions. The solutions are rooted in constraints on society and on ourselves but we are free to do what we want guaranteed by the Constitution. The dictates and the wisdom of God never enter the discussion.

Overindulgence and the discarding of constraints is a sign of a people that have no future.

It may surprise us that Paul’s invitation to discard overindulgence and drunkenness, promiscuity and lust, and our rivalries and jealousies interestingly are so rooted in our present worldly situation. The present having such sublime future implications, the coming of Jesus Christ.

This is so because Paul is addressing the virtue of integrity; our personal integrity. The British writer, C. S. Lewis, defined integrity as “doing the right thing, even when no one is watching.” Personal integrity is not like the faded background noise of China invading Taiwan. Integrity is about putting on, clothing ourselves, in Christ Jesus when no one is looking in the present moment because we believe in a future.

I don’t believe most people today believe in a future with hope. Our actions and our acceptance and expectations of the actions of others reveal that emptiness.

Martin Luther was once asked, “What would you do if you knew tomorrow was the end of the world?” Luther responded assuredly, “plant a tree”. Planting a tree is about a future filled with hope; a tomorrow. An Advent of futures challenges us on getting rid of attitudes and practices that constitute the moral darkness of our lives.

Are we people of integrity even when no one is looking?