First Sunday of Advent, Cycle B

Image: "End and Beginning" © Jan Richardson

When I was working at the Center for Development one of my responsibilities was visiting dioceses across the country.

I was part of a team that would administer instruments to priests.

One of these was a time competency instrument.

The almost universal problem among the priests was a lack of competency for living in the present.

Much of their time was spent either worrying about the past or worrying about the future.

They turned out to be just like most people, they found it difficult to live in the present.

How competent are we in living in the present?

It is the question the whole season of Advent poses to us.

The first reading is a lament.

Israel has returned from exile but is living in a heap of ruins, in a destroyed economy.

Beaten down, broken and abandoned, Israel is anxious and afraid for the future.

But note where the prophet Isaiah ends his lament:

AYet, O Lord, you are our father; we are the clay and you are the potter: We are all the work of your hands.@

Isaiah ends squarely in the present.

The lament concludes with a simple acknowledgment of who God is for Israel and who Israel is before God.

The people stand simply in the here and now C watching, waiting, trusting in God's power to save.

In the gospel, Jesus calls us servants.

A servant is one who is at another's beck and call, one whose life is not fully his or her own.

The master knows the way and draws the boundaries.

There is no need for the servant to be anxious or afraid.

The servant need only be faithful to the boundaries.

So the gospel calls us squarely into the present:

 Be on watch! Stay awake! Be on guard!

We are to acknowledge simply who God is for us and who we are before God.

The gospel invites us to turn the whole of the future over into the hands of God.

It invites us to stand in the here and now faithfully watching, faithfully waiting, faithfully trusting in God's power to save.

In the second reading Paul reminds us that this faithful watching, waiting and trusting in God's power to save assumes a particular shape for the Christian.

That shape is fellowship with Jesus.

Indeed, we might say that the very shape of our watching, waiting and trusting is the Eucharist.

For faithful servants, there is no time or event that pulls us more profoundly into the present than Eucharist.

And there is one moment in the Eucharist, above all others, which places us squarely in the present.

That moment is when the minister says to you, ABody of Christ@ or ABlood of Christ,@ and you respond, AAmen.@

That moment in the Eucharist plunges us into communion with God and one another

beyond past and future, beyond anxiety and fear, beyond time and space C

into the eternal present where we meet God face-to-face.

Let go of anxiety and fear God tells us, give past and future over into my hands,

embrace the eternal present offered us in communion at this table and in the coming of the Lord.

To the extent we are unable to live fully in the present, we cannot fully know God=s presence.