Nov 28: Now is the Moment to Wake

Michelangelo Buonarroti: Awakening (The Slave)

First Sunday of Advent
Reading II: Rom 13:11-14

“Besides this, you know what time it is, how it is now the moment for you to wake from sleep. For salvation is nearer to us now than when we became believers (NRSV, Rom 13:11).”

Awake, Awake, Paul writes to the Church in Rome. These words, Lord God, were written almost 2000 years ago and have been read over and over again down through the centuries. Each time that they are read or proclaimed aloud, they are understood, not only as an historical appeal, applicable to a particular situation now long past, but also, Lord, as a lively challenge proper to this very moment, to here and now. It is not, Father, that these words have gone ignored over the ages. The history of your Church, the history of all religious people, indeed of all humanity, is filled with countless individuals who have responded enthusiastically to Paul’s words, even among so very many who have heard the same invitation in other ways. But somehow, even when there has been response, however serious and full of commitment, the call to awake from sleep continues to resonate and to summon in every moment of human existence.

The philosopher Plato held that all of learning is remembering. He taught that the human soul pre-exists the body and, when joined to it in this world, that the soul “forgets” all that it knew in its earlier life. The story of human existence, for Plato, is the story of gradually remembering everything that had been known before, a gradual “re-awakening.”

Lord God, I know well that, before my birth, I did not pre-exist with you in eternity. Rather I first encountered you in my mother’s womb as, in the power also received from you, I said “Yes” to the gift of human and divine life. In that gift of life I also heard you speak to me your one word that is your being. That one word, spoken once and for all, continues to be heard in the depth of my being at every moment of my life. It is this same one word that in each moment calls me forth out of my past into the freedom of the future which is my destiny with you. No matter how fully I may give myself in response to the challenge of the moment, you, Lord God, my Father, are always there ever calling me forward.

That is why, Lord, Paul’s call to awake rings true in this moment as it did when the Christians of Rome first read his letter so many centuries ago. All of human existence is not as Plato argued “remembering” but rather it is “awakening” to a word heard by every human being at the first moment of existence and continuously heard at ever moment but only gradually understood. That one word, Lord, like your very being, is inexhaustible. Hopefully, we shall all grow in it forever and ever, an awakening that will go on and on without end.

Lord God, as the Church begins this Advent season in preparation for the celebration of the birth of your Son, our Lord Jesus Christ, I pray that this holy time may be for everyone a time of continuous awakening and that all of us may ever grow in your life and power, now and throughout all eternity.

Alleluia. Amen.