A Homily for the First Sunday of Advent
Readings: Jeremiah 33:14-16 1 Thessalonians 3:12—4:2 Luke 21:25-28, 34-36
Returning to a scene from childhood can be disconcerting. Why? Because remnants of a world long past arise and compete with the one we now inhabit, and no one can live in two worlds at the same time.
When you return to a childhood home or school, you see physical remnants of a world that has passed. You can follow old markers—the doors you used, the dining room where once you sat, the walls of a classroom—but you cannot, at least not at the same time, examine features that have changed. These would return you to the contemporary world, and at this reencounter, you want to peer back into the one that has passed.
I work in the primary school I once attended, but I do not reminisce at work. I do not have the time. I can only do that when I am alone in the building. People who still live in the houses or the hometowns where they grew up know something similar. Two worlds can occupy the same space, but not at the same time.
We do not normally notice the worlds in which we dwell. They appear as backdrops, the times and places in which everything else finds a moment and a spot. Worlds pass into and out of existence, but not at an announced time or place.
Only the vigilant can watch worlds pass. For example, in the weeks just before graduation or while we attend someone in hospice. Something, someone, is slipping away. We want to gather the remnants of what is fading, like those who clutch valuables in the face of a fire or flood. I must remember this; I must take it with me. Yet, even in our clenched fists, the passing world melts, as Shakespeare said it must:
Our revels now are ended. These our actors,
As I foretold you, were all spirits and
Are melted into air, into thin air;
And – like the baseless fabric of this vision –
The cloud-capped towers, the gorgeous palaces,
The solemn temples, the great globe itself,
Yea, all which it inherit, shall dissolve,
And like this insubstantial pageant faded,
Leave not a rack behind. We are such stuff
As dreams are made on, and our little life
Is rounded with a sleep (“The Tempest,” IV.1.146-158).
We do not realize how young our own Western worldview is, or how quickly it already passes. Ancient peoples did not think the world had a beginning or an end. It stretched temporally in every direction just as it did spatially: as far as the eye could see. Although everything constantly changed, it made no sense to the ancients to think of the world as having a beginning or an end. For them, transience was a property of things within the world, not of the world itself.
Consequently, the God of Plato and Aristotle was not considered to be either creator or judge. Better to say that God was the world’s inspiration, forever desired, forever distinct. People came in and out of existence. God and the world remained. One never changing; the other, never not changing.
But our faith, especially on the first Sunday of Advent, insists that this world did not have to be and will not always be. The Gospel addresses the world in which we live, for the formation of stars and galaxies has nothing to do with who we are or how we live. These are facts of science that, like Aristotle’s God, never enter the human scene.
No, the Gospel says that the world, the one we know and love, did not need to be. Nor did we. Both we and our worlds must be accounted as unwarranted graces, unrequired novelties.
That insight comes coupled with a warning. Our worlds are passing away and so are we. From the moment we are born, we are already departing. Our surrounding worlds melt away.
Grace is not a celestial moonbeam, some energy unseeable to science. No, grace is a moment of insight. It is when this world falls away to reveal something behind and beyond itself. Grace is the word we use to insist that we have truly encountered God, all the while knowing that God is not something that can be grasped by us.
Grace “happens” whenever we perceive that we did not need to be and that, save some additional action by “the love that moves the sun and other stars,” we and our worlds will cease to be (Dante’s “Paradiso,” 33:145). Grace might not be a moonbeam, but it is unexpected, unmerited and fleeting. Just as we physically cannot stare long at the sun, spiritually we can only flitter with the awareness that we, and the worlds in which we live, have an origin and destiny, neither of which we hold in our own hands.
Only the vigilant can watch worlds pass. And so today, on this first Sunday of Advent, we pray, “Please Dear Lord, make us vigilant.”
