When I was a kid, one of my favorite TV shows was a science fiction show called The Time Tunnel. If you remember it, please come see me after mass and we can reminisce. The premise of the show was pretty simple, as I recall it. Some inventors had come up with a way to travel in time, but once they’d started traveling they couldn’t control the machine very well, so for each week’s episode they were randomly landed in the past or the future, one week on board the Titanic, one week in the future space age, then the next week all the way back to the dinosaurs. So constantly, the time travelers had to adjust from trying to fit into one era of time, and then changing everything about themselves to fit into another one.
I thought of this show because Advent is intended to be a Time Tunnel for us. Advent’s readings are all about time, about the past and the present and the future, and it’s trying to remind us that how we live our lives depends on what we think about all three. In a way, it’s way beyond the Time Tunnel, because Advent is trying to tell us that all three of them are here right now. Before you decide that this homily is going to be too much confusing science fiction and not enough reality, let me give you some concrete examples.
Take that first reading that we heard, the famous reading from the prophet Isaiah where he sees a dramatic vision for his people and really for all people. Swords will be beaten into ploughshares, conflict between nations will be over. What do you think when you hear that? Do you think that’s a beautiful thought, but really that it’s a dream of the future, some very unspecified time in the future, that it will never happen without some kind of divine intervention that doesn’t exactly seem to be in very great supply right now? Do you put it in a “that’d be nice if that ever happens” category, along with winning the lottery?
Well, that isn’t what Isaiah thought. He felt that transformation beginning to happen right then, not off in the future, and that’s why everything he wrote he wrote with such urgency. He said later on in this book, “Behold, God is doing a new thing, can you not see it?” This transformation for him was happening right then, so he wanted justice now, not in the future, he saw an end to war now, not in the future. Seeing the future as way off in an unpredictable and far-distant region means that you miss awareness of how what you do now matters.
And of course for another example, there is today’s gospel reading, when Jesus predicts that he will come a second time, and that at that time we will all be held accountable for our actions. So, same question as with Isaiah: If you believe that Jesus is coming again in some far-off future, do you think that in the present, the in-between time, that he isn’t really here in the same way? That he’s a little more “absent” now than he is going to be then?
If we think that, then like the people in this gospel reading who don’t see the future when it’s right on top of them, we’ll feel like people who may as well go about our business, since we’re unlucky enough to be living in a time when Jesus isn’t around much. We find other things to occupy our time, since all the love and redemption is a long way off somewhere else, where we may never even live to see it.
Advent is sometimes called a season of waiting, but what it really is, is a season of working to recognize the future that has already arrived. That’s why we spend Advent singing “Come, Lord Jesus,” the way we did at the beginning of this mass, not because Jesus is not here, but because we need to know and see and feel that he is.
Without that sense that Jesus is with us now, all those inspiring visions about ending war and freeing prisoners become pretty easy to put aside for later. And so we think maybe someday we’ll dedicate our lives to something we truly care about, someday we’ll commit ourselves to reconciling our relationships, or taking a risk to help someone we don’t even know. Someday we’ll feel more redeemed and forgiven than we do now. What we are trying to do during these next four weeks, is to take that someday that seems so vague, that future where everything will be clear to us, and see it here, now. How would you live, what would you do, if you knew that this world wasn’t in some kind of holding pattern, but something where the story is quickly coming to its climax tomorrow? Answering that question, what would we do, that is our Advent assignment.
There’s a story that they once asked Pope John XXIII what he would tell people in the Vatican if he found out that Jesus was arriving for the second coming. His answer was: “Look busy.” But we can do even better than that. For Advent, don’t just look busy. What you have been waiting for is already here. Get busy.