Homily for Advent
1
November 27, 2016
About Time
Recently
I’ve been reading a great spiritual classic by St. Alphonsus Liguori called,
“Preparation For Death”. Not exactly light reading, one might say! But a
sobering thought and reminder for all of us.
One
point that he draws out quite a bit is that at the end of our lives, if we have
lived life poorly, we will be begging for more time. If the point of this life
is to become transformed into Christ through faith and grace, and we have yet
to learn to love like Him, then we will be begging God for more time! Our
greatest regret at the end of our life will be all the time we have wasted on
unimportant things, while we should have been seeking Him instead.
Our
Scriptures are filled with urgency today. “Now is the time! Our salvation is
close at hand!” Compared with eternity, our lives are so short, just like a
blip on a radar screen…so we must use our lives well to prepare for eternity.
And yet
we waste so much time! Consider the amount of time we spend surfing the
internet or watching TV compared to the amount of time we spend praying or
reading Scripture. Instead of spending time talking to members of our own
families, we waste it playing games on our iPhones. I ask teens in the high
school if they pray, and they tell me they say an Our Father and a Hail Mary
before they go to bed. That takes all of 20 seconds – yet they think nothing of
spending 2 hours playing Call of Duty!
Time is
the one gift of God that He has given to all equally. All men may have different
talents and abilities, different bank accounts and jobs – but everyone has 24
hours in the day, and it is up to decide how we wish to fill those hours. Every
day is a blank slate – will we use this day to become more like Christ, or will
we waste it away on frivolous things?
Back in
1985, Neil Postman wrote a famous book called “Amusing Ourselves to Death” –
making the case that our world had become so obsessed with entertainment that
we lost the ability to have rational discourse. I can only imagine what he
would say if he wrote it in 2016! We might want to rename the book, “Amusing
Ourselves to Spiritual Death” because wasting time on frivolous amusements
prevents us from spiritual growth. One might even say that wasting time is
sinful, since it is a waste of one of God’s most precious gifts, a gift given
to us so that we can become holy.
Of
course, we are allowed to enjoy recreation and down-time – not every waking
moment needs to be filled with work. But recreation is precisely that:
re-creation, becoming refreshed so that we can grow even deeper in our faith
and in our love for our neighbor. That is a far cry from the vast amounts of
time-wasting activities we engage in, such as overconsumption of TV or
internet.
The fact
is, we will have to give an account to the Lord of how we have used our time.
Perhaps He wanted to make us a saint, but we frittered our lives away with “The
Walking Dead”. Perhaps He wanted to do great works through us, but we were too
busy on Facebook.
Already
when I look back at my life, my greatest grief is all of the time I wasted
while I could have been loving God and my neighbor, being a friend and a good
son and brother, finding ways to bless and serve others. I pray that I may make
better use of my time, because there is an urgency to our life – TODAY is the
day to start seeking the Lord! NOW is the time to turn our lives over to Him!
Do not procrastinate or waste time, for the days we waste, we will never get
back. “Our salvation is nearer now than when we first believed – the night is
far gone, the day draw nears!” as St. Paul reminds us.
We only
have today – let us begin.
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