HOMILY OF MSGR. DIEGO MONROY PONCE; GENERAL AND EPISCOPAL VICAR OF GUADALUPE, RECTOR OF THE SANCTUARY THE FIRST SUNDAY OF ADVENT

 

THE ROUTINE IS NOT LIFE

December 2nd of 2007

My dear brothers: the God’s mercy allows us to start a new liturgical cycle again today. In fact, the advent is the beginning of a way through which the church leads us to meditate and contemplate the mysteries of our salvation.

The advent prepares us to celebrate the coming of Jesus Christ in the history of the humanity in order to bring the salvation to us. This liturgical time has the particularity to make us experience the necessity of the Redeemer, and also to live intensely the waiting of what has been promised us. My dear brothers, the Lord came more than two thousand years ago, but also we can verify, unfortunately, that after twenty centuries, the effects of that coming are not really noticeable.

On the one hand we yearn for it in its fullness, but on the other, in the waiting of this fulfillment, we live not in a passive attitude, as if everything was depending on God. On the contrary, the Advent induces us to live dynamically and with a compromise with this waiting that it would seem that the future depends on us. 

The circumstances of the present life are so complex and difficult that with the pretext to live with fewer pressures, we let ourselves be caught by the routine, for that reason we try to live our life without many strives, but with more pleasures. We look for having everything predicted, and calculated. My brothers, the routine has the advantage to avoid the fatigue to think and to always look for the ways to do the things. Especially when we do them, automatically they allow us to take advantage of the time or of the mind to do the most important thing. 

When we always move in the routine to do everything, we lose many opportunities to live intensely life, it means, to live it with more compromise and responsibility until taking risks that make us grow and deepen in the sense of life, as an adventure that God grants us to experience.

For that reason Jesus, in the Gospel of this first Sunday of Advent, asks us, through the evangelist Saint Matthew, for vigilance, it means to be very attentive to what He is showing us through the events and very concrete situations of life, and to the light of His word. He also invites us to be prepared which means that it is the consequence of the previous attitude: consequently the vigilance takes us to be prepared.

The first and the second reading illuminate us vividly in this reflection. Thus, the prophet Isaiah, in the century VIII before Christ, made a promise from God to his contemporaries, in the line of the salvation to what all the towns will take refuge, starting by the town of Israel (Jacob) to whom the prophet invites to carry out. The Apostle, in the second reading that is taken from the letter to the Romans, after referring to the salvation as a gratuitous gift of God in Christ, and that is made in the present moment (in the “today” of Paul, and of course in the ours one), invites the Christians to be aware of this present moment of that salvation which is a work and a gift of God and that demands a responsible attitude that can be summarized in the vigilance, in the mortification, in doing the works of light, in being factors of peace and not of fights.

According to Saint Paul, it consists in that to keep us in vigilance, and to be prepared. It is to leave from the routine! It is about living according to the God’s will; it is also about living in joy, to assume freely the own responsibilities with hope and love to God and to our fellows; it is about living with the glance on our salvation which is a promise that is being fulfilled when we enter to its dynamic. To live intensely the Christian life with all its challenges, is to expect, against all hope, that God fulfills His promises because He is a faithful God that is filled with love to us. For that reason, for those that are attentive, the coming of the Lord in theirs lives will be like a friendly encounter which is expected in love and is based on a promise of love. My brothers, it destroys all kind of daily routines. Christ can not be programmed, because the vigilant waiting opens a space for Him. Only in this way we can discover his comings or encounters.

Every Sunday, when we meet to celebrate the Eucharist, we express in our praise and in our thanksgiving, and also in the pleas, the certainty that Jesus is between us to help us to walk by the paths that lead to the Father. The hope of the salvation frequently moves us to keep ourselves firm, very active, joyful, and busy with the things of this world without separating the glance from those that the Lord promises us. It means that our life passes in the History with a great compromise without forgetting the future that leads to the eternity of God, the Lord of the History, and of the eternity.

May our little girl and sweet mother, Lady of the Advent, in whose womb the Eternal one became time, accompany us to live every moment of our life in an intense way filled with faith, hope and love.

Amen.