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As we start the season of Advent, the Church gives us this Gospel with Jesus saying, “Be watchful! Be alert!” and at the end of our passage today He just re-emphasizes it, “Watch!”
I was trying to think of other times I had seen this kind of forceful, “Be watchful! Be alert!” in our world, and it hit me, baseball games. Often at baseball games it is posted around the stadium.
At Wrigley field for instance, if you go to the front row behind the dugout, there are little signs attached to the dugout wall which say, “Be alert for foul balls, bats and other objects from the field of play.”
I remember distinctly these types of signs at Principal Park in Des Moines where the Iowa Cubs play. When I lived in Des Moines I would go to those games quite often. I was at a game back about 15 years ago when a hard line drive got hit down the first base line into the crowd and I reached out and snagged it with my glove.
A girl a bit to my right side and behind me said, “thanks for saving my life!”I’m not sure if she was watching or not, but the ball probably would have hit her if I hadn’t caught it.
The point is, at a baseball game and in life, we tend to grow apathetic. As the game or life wears on, we get stuck in the same routine, three up, three down, repeat; wake up, pray, work, eat, sleep, repeat.
So we stop being alert, we stop watching, we stop praying, we focus on what we are eating or drinking, we get engrossed in our conversations and who we are with in the stands, and we take our eyes off the game.
Some people might say it’s because it is boring, the baseball game, or going to church, and yeah, I can see that, but just because it seems boring, doesn’t mean we can stop focusing on it, or just stop watching what is happening, because despite how we feel, bored, tired, apathetic to the whole thing, despite how we feel, we are still in the game!
Now this might sound silly, and maybe it is, but when I am at a game, my number one goal is to catch a baseball. I stay alert and watch because I know that there is a chance that every ball pitched, every practice ball between innings could be coming my way, and I have caught at least a dozen baseballs, if not two.
And I sit there in the stands just hoping for another one, to be “in the game” so to speak. And I listen to this first reading, this prayer from Isaiah, essentially he is saying, the people don’t feel like they are in the game, they have grown apathetic and their hearts hardened through sin. Isaiah questions God asking, “Why do you let us wander, O LORD, from your ways, and harden our hearts so that we fear you not?”
Isaiah is saying, why do you let us grow so apathetic? Why do you stay away from us? This causes us to harden our hearts which is displayed by the sin we commit. So he begs and pleads with God, “Return for the sake of your servants, the tribes of your heritage. Oh, that you would rend the heavens and come down.”
Isaiah wants God to return even more than I want that next baseball! “Rend the heavens and come down!”
But just because God doesn’t appear to us the way we want Him to doesn’t mean that He doesn’t love us, or that He hasn’t visited us before or He won’t return again.
Think about it, if we prayed “Jesus, rend the heavens and come down” and He did, He came before us right here right now, wouldn’t that scare us so much that we would live on the straight and narrow going forward? I guarantee we would be much more alert, but we would be living out of fear.
That was what Isaiah was asking, come down to visit us, so that everyone would fear God and be obedient to Him. That would kind of take away our free will and the necessity for us to have faith. But that isn’t what God wants, He doesn't want us to live out of a place of fear, He wants us to live out of a place of love!
When He came to earth on that first Christmas, He came as a baby, and who doesn’t love a baby? And then He grew up and saved us from our sins and restored us to a relationship with God, that was His mission. So we say thank you to Him for what He has done, and we live out of a place of love for what He has done, not out of fear, loving him out of our own free will.
As we prepare for Christmas, we remember why He came to earth and we have to remember that He is coming back at some point.
So when He returns, He expects us to be living holy lives, or at least trying to live holy lives, thankful for saving us and repentant from our sins, not just going along with everything our secular culture says is okay. And it is our responsibility to stay alert and watch, otherwise we will get hit when we least expect it.
The Church in her wisdom understands that we will grow apathetic if left to our own, it happened in the time of Isaiah thousands of years ago and it still happens today, so the Church gives us these times and seasons to jolt us back into watching attentively.
To that end, you could think of Advent as the Seventh Inning Stretch. Stand up, get the blood flowing again, do something different by singing a funny song or eating some cracker jacks, and start watching again if you weren’t. We don’t watch because we are fearful of getting hurt, we watch out of our love for the game, our love for God.
We are in the game even if we aren’t catching baseballs every inning, so we have to stay focused, keep praying every day, keep going to Mass (or listening to Mass for right now), keep loving God and loving our neighbor, even if God doesn’t immediately rend the heavens and come down to us like we want.
We remember that He has before, and we know He will again, so we stay alert, watchful for His presence in our lives, living out of a place of love, not fear, staying firm to the end.