First Sunday of Advent

Lectionary: 1

You know the time;

it is the hour now for you to awake from sleep.

For our salvation is nearer now than when we first believed;

the night is advanced, the day is at hand.

Let us then throw off the works of darkness

and put on the armor of light;

Has Pete Seeger's song Turn, Turn, Turn,​ (sung by the Byrds) ​​​faded from our collective memory by now? I understand it is played at funerals for Boomers. It has a timeless quality, a suggestion of cycles that return endlessly, with hints of hope and sad regret. "I swear it's not too late," they sing, and you know it is.

Advent begins today, a season of soul-searching with a promise: we should prepare. Were the changing season to bring only an ominous word of doom, we would not get ready for anything. But this is the hour of salvation. We throw off the works of darkness like blankets of slumber, and put on the armor of light.

"You know the time!" Saint Paul said. He could not have imagined how time-conscious we are in the twenty-first century. Disciplined, we live by the clock from morning to night, and often check it during the night. We know the time of day, the day of the week, the day of the month, and the month of the year. Politically, in the United States, we count the days by a four year cycle.

"Time is money!" we say, and often regret that we have more money than time. We've created machines to measure our time; and we live by these machines. We sometimes wonder if we have become machines also, synchronized to our clocks.

Yes, we know the time!

But time means nothing unless we're going some place, unless it has purpose. Without the the Birth of God in time, it only "creeps in this petty pace from day to day to the last syllable of recorded time.

And so we celebrate Advent as a time and season of the year within Salvation History. Our tradition records seven epochs, or "dispensations," in Salvation History: 1) before the Fall; 2) after the fall till Abraham; 3) from Abraham to Moses; 4) Moses to Jesus; 5) the apostolic age from Jesus' birth to the death of the last apostle, 6) the present time; and 7) the End Time.

Advent recalls those four dispensations before Christ. We remember catastrophes: the murder of Abel, the Deluge, Babel, and Sodom and Gomorrah. They continue in our time with world wars, genocides, and climate change. We remember God's selection of Abraham and his descendants, and then the gift of the Law to Moses. These catastrophes and Laws, along with the Histories, the scolding Prophets, the reassuring Psalms, and the guiding Wisdom literature prepare the way of the Lord.

Finally, we remember Mary, the flower of her race. As the Immaculate Conception, she received all the virtue and blessedness of her Jewish ancestors; and then described her calling as "the handmaid of the Lord."

Advent is like a Gothic cathedral that appears in our neighborhood; it is rich with history and tradition, familiar, beautiful, and very quiet. Many will pass by, never entering its portal in their rush to what they believe is Christmas. The Christian stops, pulls at Advent's heavy doors, and enters the hushed interior to pray, wait, and expect.