“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 into 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 open presents on Christmas every year, we celebrate wedding anniversaries every year, we watch fireworks on the 4th of July every year: we become entwined with these little annual rituals: our lives are almost structured around them.  And it’s important.  Amid all of the uncertainty and instability that we experience, these stable little rituals in our lives give us foundation and grounding.  That’s especially true with the stable ritual cycle which governs our Worship of God, and which begins again today.  For another year, we start over.  We begin again.  We lay another foundation.  

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.”  Our Lord encourages this watchfulness often and in many ways.  It’s especially relevant in this season of Advent, during 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 when we receive his very Body and Blood in the Blessed Sacrament.  And we consider his Final Coming at the end of all things, when he will return in glory to save us from that rough beast which slouches towards Bethlehem to be born. 

His coming in the past; his coming here and now; his coming again in the future.  For all three advents, we are called to “stay awake,” “to watch!”  In this season, we wait with the Chosen People for their Messiah, in a ritual way and in a symbolic way.  We enter into their nervous anticipation, straining our eyes to see the banner of salvation coming over the hill.  Here and now, in a concrete way in our own lives, we stay awake and we watch, because God is coming to us individually also, 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.  As we look to the past for his coming into the world at Christmas, and as we think about his coming in final glory at the end of time, our hearts also learn to find him today, in everyday life, in humble things and small things, in the ordinary, in the unimpressive.  Our bishop has invited the clergy in the diocese to give some focus this Advent to the family and to the idea of the “Gift of a Child”, the gift of a child both in the context of our everyday families and of course in the context of the Christ Child Himself, who is the greatest gift to every family.  And I think this is relevant because the family is one of the most powerful ways in which Christ is present in everyday life.  Christ chose to enter the world in the context of a specific family, a simple, humble, unimpressive family.  And he spent all those years of his life, those hidden years before his public ministry started at age 30, those years that we know almost nothing about: he spent those years just being a son, being a cousin, being a friend, working in the family business, living life as we do.  And nothing Christ ever did was wasted or by accident.  The family is important.  And in the love and the sacrifice and the ordinary routines and annual rituals of the family, we experience some of the love and the presence of Christ.  And we experience Christ’s presence in a way that is almost never glamorous or dramatic.  And that’s the key point: Christ entered the world at Christmas almost entirely unheralded and unacknowledged, in the most ordinary of circumstances.  He often comes to us that way as well.  We pray that this Advent would be a time when we see that, recognize that, and rejoice in that: that Christ is coming to us now, today, in the everyday moments of our lives.