“Stay awake!  Watch!  For you do not know on which day your Lord will come.”  With these words of today’s Gospel, Holy Mother Church inaugurates another year of grace and favor.  This is New Year’s Day for the Church: the First Sunday of Advent is the start once again of another cycle through the Mystery of Our Salvation.  We enter again our great annual ritual of worship and remembrance and hope.  We human beings are people of ritual; and especially, I think, people of annual ritual.  We like and we gravitate towards yearly celebrations.  We celebrate Thanksgiving every year, we celebrate our birthdays every year, we have a Super Bowl party every year, we watch fireworks on the 4^th of July every year: our lives become entwined with these little annual rituals: we’re almost governed and defined by them.  And it’s important.  Amid all of the uncertainty and instability that we all experience, these stable little rituals in our lives give us foundation and grounding and stability.  That’s especially true with the stable ritual which governs our Worship of God, and which begins again today.  

For yet another year, we start the cycle over.  We begin again.  We lay another foundation.  And among the very first words that we start with, are: “Stay awake!  Watch!  For you do not know on which day your Lord will come.”  This is an idea Our Lord expresses often and in many ways.  It’s especially relevant in this season of Advent, in which we focus on the Advent of the Lord: the word “Advent” means “The Coming,” and more precisely “The Coming Towards:” his coming towards the world, his coming towards us.  And in this great season, we consider several different ways in which the Lord comes towards us: of course most obviously we think about his coming into the World as a little child on the Feast of Christmas, now very fast approaching.  We also consider his Coming into our own lives here and now: he has come to each one of us in a very special and personal way in our baptism; and he comes to us again in this Holy Mass, as he does week in and week out, especially in his very Body and Blood in the Blessed Sacrament.  Finally, we consider his Final Coming at the end of all things, when he will return in glory to complete the work of our salvation.  

His coming in the past; his coming here and now; his coming again in the future.  For all three comings, we are called to “stay awake!  To watch!  For we do not know on which day our Lord will come.”  In this season, we wait with the Chosen People for their Messiah, in a ritual way and a symbolic way.  We enter into their nervous anticipation, straining our eyes to see the banner of salvation coming over the hill.  With our ancestors, we stay alert, we watch, as the Sun of our salvation dawns.  Here and now, in our own lives, we stay awake and we watch, because God is coming to us so often and in so many ways: and too frequently we miss him.  Because we’re not watching.  His grace is at work so often, if we would only open our eyes to see.  So often we don’t know that it is the day and the hour, right now, when he is touching our lives.  This season helps us to open our eyes.  Finally, and in some ways most importantly, he’s coming back.  So we need to stay awake and watch.  Because we don’t know the day or the hour: it could be before the end of Mass.  It could be tomorrow.  It could be in a thousand years.  And honestly, and I’m sorry to be a little morbid here, but the truth is, life is short, and for each one of us: he’s coming pretty soon: not before the end of the Mass I hope, but before too long.  So we have to get ready: one way or the other, whether he comes soon for all of us, or over time individually for each of us, we don’t want to miss him.  He’s coming in glory, but if we don’t know what glory is, we might miss him. It’s the kind of glory we talked about last week when we considered just what kind of a King he is.  His glory is the glory of the poor, the glory of humility, the glory of quiet steady gentleness, the glory of sacrifice.  So watch.  Watch for that.  Train your heart to love those things.  Train your mind to look for those things.  And Our Lord will help you do it.  That’s why this season is such a gift.  As we watch in the past for his coming into the world at Christmas, our hearts learn to find him in humility and in smallness.  As we watch for him in our own lives, our hearts learn to find him in the ordinary, in the unimpressive.  As we watch for him to come again, at the end, we learn to long for him and we start to recognize him.  In fact we start to act like him; we start to look like him.  So much so that, if we have stayed awake, if we have watched, if we have gotten ready, if we have allowed him to convert our hearts and our minds, then on that day when comes again for us, he will present us to his Father, and the Father will look at us with love, and say, “You look just like my Son.”