Feast of St. Andrew, First Apostle

He first found his brother Simon, and said to him, "We have found the Messiah"

It is interesting to me that St. Andrew is the first apostle and his feast day is the only one we celebrate during Advent. I'm not sure if that's purposeful or not, but Advent for me has always been a time of signs, coincidences, and quirks like that. In this first weekday of the first week of Advent, here we are celebrating the life of the first person whose head was turned by Christ and stayed on as one of his closest followers.

Will we recognize Christ when he is pointed out to us? Andrew didn't find Jesus hiding under the bed--tag, you're it--John the Baptist made it as clear as he could. We don't have to go searching for Christ because Christ is all around us. Our encounters with each other, every day, every mundane bit of daily life, are encounters with Christ. They are holy moments, when we thank the cashier after standing in endless holiday shopping lines, or when we walk someone out to his car with our umbrella because it's started sleeting while we were in the library. Or we just give him our umbrella because you know what, it's only an umbrella.

About four Advents ago, I was in the car with my daughter Sophia and she asked me why we celebrated Christmas. I explained as simply as I could that we remembered Jesus' birthday on Christmas. She thought about this for a moment with that look on her face that meant more questions were coming. But instead of asking me another, she nodded and said, "well, that's why we get presents at Christmas. It's Jesus' birthday and there's a part of Jesus in each of us."

Like Andrew, my four year old daughter saw Christ and believed. I was, as always, busy with the anxieties of daily life, but this sentence cut through all my Christmas preparations and, like a beacon, showed me exactly what we were doing this for. What is Christmas for? It is for us to be to each other as Christ and to recognize the divinity in all those around us. Behold the Lamb of God.

First Sunday of Advent: The Days Are Coming

The days are coming, says the LORD, when I will fulfill the promise I made to the house of Israel and Judah. Jer 33:14

The days are coming. What days are coming for me, for you? I look out at December and see a lot of days, busy days, and it's easy to get just as caught up in them as in the idea of the end days. There may not be signs of end times, of retribution and judgment this Advent, but there are days that are coming.

Advent is such a hopeful, short, precious time of the church year. Everyone knows that December slips through the fingers like so much dry snow. Caught up in the throngs of shoppers, breakfasts with Santa, school concerts, craft projects, caroling field trips, marathon baking sessions, and frantic house cleaning or packing, hark how the bells, sweet silver bells, all seem to say, throw cares away suddenly it's December 23rd and you haven't done all those little things, important things, you promised yourself you would do this year. Or maybe you suddenly stand up, head erect, and watch all the chaos around you and think, wait, I don't even have a promise to myself this year. I don't give myself the chance to fail at Advent because I didn't engage in the season at all. Gaily they ring while people sing songs of good cheer, Christmas is here. But Christmas isn't here. Not yet.

It is so easy to just go with this flow, get caught up and forget what we're really preparing for. What is coming is the incarnation. As Christians, I think most of us focus on the resurrection as the earth-moving life-is-never-the-same-again event of our faith. And it is. But what about the incarnation? Christmas isn't trees and On on they send on without end parties and what the heck am I going to wear I didn't do the Christmas picture for the cards and we still don't have an outdoor electric outlet, dear husband, how are we going to do any kind of Christmas lights, anyway? December may sometimes be this, but Christmas is more.

Christmas is God pouring divinity out into the person of Christ. What could be more giving, more amazing, more unbelievable than that? If we truly believe in the divinity of Christ, Christmas should fill us with as much wonder and amazement, confusion, faith, bewilderment, and ceaseless prayer as Easter Sunday does.

The days are coming--we all know it. December is booked solid from Thanksgiving weekend to New Year's Eve. Beware that your hearts do not become drowsy from carousing and drunkenness and the anxieties of daily life, Christ admonishes us in today's Gospel. It's almost like he's been living in my house. Like he's watched me at Christmas parties or arguments with my husband about why we're still doing a gift exchange with second cousins we never see. Watched me snap at my kids because my nerves are at their very limit. Watched me stay up way too late finishing things that really don't matter. It's like Christ has seen this all before.

Oh wait, he has.

The days are coming. Indeed, they are upon us.