A homily for the First Sunday of Advent, December 3, 2023
Is 63:16B-17, 19B; 64:2-7, 1 Cor 1:3-9, Mk 13:33-37
During the 50-some-odd years Dad practiced as a family physician, his office hours started at 8:30 a.m. and ended in the evening when his waiting room was empty. Mom never knew exactly when to put dinner on the table, but Dad’s patients always felt cared for.
I remember some afternoons that stretched into mid-evening, back when I was a pupil at St. Leo the Great School in Lincroft, just a stone’s throw from the little house/office Dad rented from the pharmacist. I’d walk over, do some homework in the room with all the filing cabinets, occasionally answer the phone and tell a patient to come right over, and peek into the waiting room to see how full the plaid couches and chairs still were.
Dad’s standing rule — which left more than a couple of his patient patients standing — was that anyone who asked to see him could see him if they arrived before 7.
Appointment times were fluid, mere suggestions, scribbles in an oft-ignored spiral-bound book. Long before emergency departments started admitting people via triage, Dad knew who could wait and who needed immediate care.
And no one minded the wait. Or if they did, they never grumbled.
Now, I’m not comparing Dr. Zapcic to God-With-Us, the celebration of whose Nativity is four weeks from tomorrow. Dad was no Emmanuel, but to the throngs who stood on their heads to drain their sinuses over half a century, he was worth the wait.
And in Advent, we wait for four weeks to once again greet our Newborn King, the Son of God who joined us in our humanity to better experience and understand what it means to eat, sleep, work, celebrate and suffer everyday life.
Who joined us in our humanity to show us The Way, The Better Way, The Way to the Kingdom of God, achievable here on Earth.
What an incredible gift from the One who gives us all things!
We are an impatient lot, we women and men and girls and boys, especially now, in 21st century America, where we have Black Friday and Cyber Monday and Christmas candy canes alongside the Halloween Kit Kats on the store shelves. No sooner did “Monster Mash” end than “The Little Drummer Boy” started playing on the Muzak at the mall (both of those still exist, right?).
We’re so impatient that, right this minute, some items of Christmas décor are already on half-price clearance sale.
So, besides checking our ugly sweater options, how are we preparing for Christmas this Advent?
Have we taken a deep breath and looked in a spiritual, emotional or psychological mirror?
Do our nights have time and room for silence and holiness and calm and brightness?
Are we waiting patiently in this season of waiting, or are we tapping our feet and fingers and hyperventilating and grumbling?
When we have to wait in long-long-long lines anywhere, for any reason, do we maintain our composure, let alone our ability to be kind to everyone else who’s waiting? To everyone who’s doing their best to keep the lines moving through the checkouts or the ticket check-ins?
When we hear about or even see people in dire straits, do we liken them to the Christ Child who slept in a barn, whose parents fled persecution and the threat of death?
With wars raging all over the world being beamed into our living rooms, do we ask the Prince of Peace for a solution? If that solution involves us, how do we react? How do we act?
Advent gives us four weeks to think about these things and so many more, so many other circumstances that scream to us that the Kingdom is not yet here.
Advent gives us four weeks of quiet time — should we choose to accept it — to let God’s Holy Spirit fill us and inspire us.
Advent gives us four weeks to think of ways we can give the gift of peace and justice to the Prince of Peace. That we can be peace and justice to all our sisters and brothers.
And God gives us our lives, our lifetimes, our minds and hearts and hands, to deliver that gift to His Son and all God’s children, on Christmas Day and every day.
Advent reminds us that some things are worth the wait. Peace and justice, though … they can’t wait.
