December 1, 2025
Paulist Fr. Rich Andre preached this homily on the 1st Sunday of Advent (Year A), November 30, 2025 at Old St. Mary’s Catholic Church in Chicago, IL. The homily is based on Isaiah 2:1-5; Psalm 122; Romans 13:11-14; Matthew 24:37-44.
This weekend, we begin a new liturgical year, with lots of changes in our liturgy. We switch to the color violet to indicate the season of Advent, the season of quiet waiting. As one of the very few priests in the history of the Church who has studied colorimetry at the graduate level, I insist that there is a world of difference between purple and violet. Purple is red plus blue; violet is a color in the rainbow.
We begin our 3-year lectionary cycle again. There are more than 600 sets of readings for liturgies of the Church, and today, we hear the set that is marked as #1. The first reading, from Isaiah, is one of the classic texts of Advent.
We begin a year of journeying through the gospel of Matthew, undoubtably the most influential of the four gospels in the development of Christianity. Matthew is the gospel of parables, but today, we’ll hear a bunch of similes. Matthew tells us that when Christ comes again, it will come like “a thief in the night” in the middle of a time “as in the days of Noah.” But let’s be clear, friends: we are to wait for Christ’s second coming with joyful hope, not with heavy forboding.
Violet is the last color left in the sky after sunset, but it is also the first color anticipating a new dawn. As the days grow darker this Advent, we await the rising of Jesus, the Sun of Justice and Mercy.
Advent is the season of the year when the Church seems most out of step with our secular society. For these next two weeks, as we stress the importance of waiting for the second coming of Jesus Christ at the end of time, we seem especially out of sync. We say, “Not yet!” even as Christmas decorations festoon the stores, Christmas music fills the air, and many of us have been planning Christmas parties.
And yet, Advent is the favorite season of the year for many Catholics. Why is that? Not only do we get a lot of really awesome Scripture readings – this is a great time of the year to attend daily Mass – but also we celebrate some great wisdom that our secular society doesn’t understand.
As a Church, we understand that waiting is an inevitable part of life. No matter how eagerly we anticipate the academic break, we must go to class, do our homework, and take our exams. No matter how much we may wish to get married and settle down, we have to wait to meet that special someone. No matter how worried we are about illnesses we’re facing, we have to wait for the results of medical tests before making decisions.
There are good ways to wait, and there are bad ways to wait. We all know people who complain about their current lot in life – a bad relationship, a lousy job, their medical conditions, and so on – but they don’t seem to want to do anything about their problems. It’s one thing to accept things that we cannot change… but it’s a completely different thing to not address circumstances that we can change. We can’t expect a relationship, a job, or certain ailments to work themselves out unless we take action!
Others of us fall into the other extreme of poor waiting skills. We spend hours ruminating about every future contingency. What if no one hires me when I graduate in three years? What if I never meet that special someone? What if my hair falls out during chemotherapy? We naturally spend time worrying, and that’s OK. But so many of us rev our brains, turning the information over and over in our heads. Deep down inside, we recognize that our condition won’t change by thinking about it… in these situations, we must wait for more information to be revealed.
So, what’s the healthy, holy way to wait? Reinhold Niebuhr summed it up pretty well: “God, give me grace to accept with serenity the things that cannot be changed, courage to change the things which should be changed, and the wisdom to distinguish the one from the other.” Another prayer that captures it is the embolism that we place at the end of the Our Father at Mass. I consider it to be a mini-Advent prayer that we say all year: “Graciously grant peace in our days, that, by the help of your mercy, we may be always free from sin and safe from all distress, as we await the blessed hope and the coming of our Savior, Jesus Christ.”
A lot of us feel distressed when we wait. When we hear Paul tell us to “throw off the works of darkness and put on the armor of light,” when we hear Jesus speaking that some people will be taken and others will be left, we have a tendency to panic. The Church gives us Advent to remind us that in that mix of all the feelings we have while waiting, we should strive for the predominant emotion to be joyful hope.
Back in 2013, Pope Francis created quite a stir in his first year as pope by releasing a big apostolic exhortation, Evangelii gaudium, or The Joy of the Gospel, right before Advent. In it, he challenged each of us to not to turn inward on ourselves, but to turn outward towards others, to those who are impoverished, to those who do not know the gospel. How could Francis use the word “joy” to describe sharing the gospel with such people? He wrote: “I realize of course that joy is not expressed the same way at all times in life, especially at moments of great difficulty. Joy adapts and changes, but it always endures, even as a flicker of light born of our personal certainty that, when everything is said and done, we are infinitely loved.”
Where is the joy in our Scripture readings today? Well, it’s most apparent in that glorious vision of Isaiah, when all people will stream toward the mountain of the Lord, beating their swords into plowshares and their spears into pruning hooks. But it’s also in Paul’s call for living in the light and in Jesus’ promise that we will be taken up at the coming of the Son of Man.
How are we to wait for the coming of the Lord? Not by sitting around passively, but not by ruminating about what the end of time will be like, either. God calls us to do things that can actually make a difference. Let us share the joy of the gospel with everyone we know!
Wherever we are on that final day, whether we be in the field or at the mill, wouldn’t it be truly wonderful if no one was left behind and we all went rejoicing to the house of the Lord?
Let us spread the joy of the gospel. What are we waiting for?