Three weeks ago, when Cardinal Bernardin died of cancer in Chicago, his death grabbed people’s attention, and made them stop and think. There were a lot of reasons for that: one was how he seemed so full of courage in the face of a painful illness, another was how many friends and admirers he seemed to have from every walk of life and every faith. But there was also simply how much he seemed to be able to accomplish in what turned out to be a very brief final act in his life. He knew that he was dying, of course, but instead of turning to privacy and withdrawing from the public eye and from his many attachments, it was as if the shortness of the time that remained to him drew him out, rather than pushed him inwards.
He reorganized his life so that he spent time on what mattered to him, on what truly needed to happen. He wrote letters to old and new friends, letters they’ll long remember, he spent time and talked on the phone with dozens of other cancer sufferers, he tried to establish a movement to reduce conflict and bitterness in the church, he wrote pastoral letters and congressional testimony.
He didn’t have very long, but he didn’t waste a minute. He seemed to live a whole lifetime in just a few weeks.
This may not seem to have much to do with Advent, because Advent is not about death, we hope, but Advent is about time, and what to do when time is short.
Advent is a short season, just four of these weekly candles there on the Advent wreath, one is already lit, and the pace only picks up as we move along, until, before you know it, our time is up. They say Advent is a season of preparation, and we know that we are preparing to celebrate life, God with us, the feast of Christmas. But we hear in these Advent scriptures — in today’s Gospel about the end of time, the Son of Man coming in the clouds — that we are preparing for the end of something as well as the beginning, Jesus’s second coming as well as his first.
If you really believed that the world was about to change totally, come to an end, for you or for all of us, that would change you, and what you do. That is where we hit the wall when it comes to thinking about Advent. Even if the world were going to be reborn — what can we possibly do? Who has the time?
I would wager that this is a parish where half the conversations in your home and mine have to do with time, and how there isn’t enough of it for all the things that need to be done. I whine a lot, at least that’s what I’m told by those who have to listen to it, and the constant theme is that there isn’t enough time for all the things we’d like to do and need to do.
Then here comes Advent, a season that is nothing if not a season of urgency. It seems to be here only to make the situation worse, and to introduce still another demand we can’t possibly meet.
Because what Advent demands that we believe is that there is something coming, something that is right there, immediately in our future, something that throws out every preconception we have about what is important in our lives. Long-term planning? Forget it. Your career five or ten years from now? Unimportant. College savings? You can wait. Instead, the imagery is simple: We are servants waiting for the master to return, and his return is any day now.
Sometimes we imagine that what we need during Advent is a time to slow down, so we can take time to recognize what’s truly important. That would be nice. Perhaps that is what you need, but it’s probably more to the point to say that Advent may never be a quiet time for you, but it is a time for the essentials. No matter what happens we’ll be very busy the next few weeks, but probably not on the things that are what we would do if we looked at these four weeks as a real summing up, a chance to make the world ready, our one chance.
You may not make the world ready for Jesus to return to in four weeks, but you don’t have to accomplish it all. The point is to be ready, as Mark’s gospel says today, to be ready for the master of the household to find you, not fearful of what happens when he returns but simply not surprised, with everything as ready as we can make it.
As always, only you know what ready means to you, your own agenda of what you could do, or want to do, or need to do. Some people think forever about a change they wish they could make in their lives, or a botched relationship that needs another breath of life, or how they keep meaning to think more about how they can notice or help the strangers who are crying out to them all around us. I will wager you already know what it is that needs to be done if you had to focus your attention and decide. We want to come to the end of these four weeks feeling as if we’ve at least made a stab at focusing our attention on clearing away the inessentials, on the real housecleaning and preparation and readiness we need and this community needs and our world needs.
You can’t get everything done in just a few weeks. But it is amazing what you can do if you believe that something truly overwhelming and truly wonderful is coming and coming soon.