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.