waiting in joyful hope

Homily
32nd Sunday in Ordinary Time A
St. Lawrence Catholic Campus Center at the University of Kansas
6 November 2011
Daily Readings

I've never met anyone more impatient than me.  Well, perhaps my dad.  For him, when he told us to be ready for Church at 9:40am, he really meant 9:20.  Whenever he arrives early at something, he wonders why everyone else is late.  So I get my impatience honestly.  For example, as soon as I calculate a route on my Google or Garmin navigator, I am driven to get there earlier than the calculated ETA. I'm passionate about beating the clock.

Being bad at patience makes it difficult to be a Christian.  We all know this, because most of us confess it.  We lose patience in all kinds of situations.  Mostly we lose patience with other people, which usually is a sign that we are frustrated with our own progress toward becoming saints.  The abbot at St. Meinrad where I went to seminary said holiness is the art of learning how to wait. He was right.  Anyone who has tried to 'hurry up' the road to sanctity realizes that it backfires every time.

There is one time in life where I like waiting however.  One time I get a kick out of it.  It is waiting for the bride to come down the aisle on her wedding day.  Maybe it's mischievous for me to say this, but I always tell the bride during rehearsal to wait as long as possible before coming down that aisle.  Now don't get me wrong, I'm not a priest who spends hours tinkering with the wedding liturgy, trying to get everything just right.  No, I'm one of those priests who would rather say a funeral than witness a wedding, because people are more prayerful at funerals.  I usually spend as little time as possible at a wedding rehearsal.  Yet this is one thing that I always mention.  I tell the bride to wait before coming down the aisle.  I tell her to make us wait, and to make us wait a long time.  I tell her that just when you think you can't wait anymore, to wait some more.  Make us think that perhaps you will not come, that you've changed your mind.  That is good for all of us. By this time in the wedding ceremony, I'm standing next to the groom who is waiting to receive his bride.  I want his faith and confidence tested at this moment.  He shouldn't be too overconfident going into the wedding.  What is more, the moment when his bride seems delayed gives me the occasion to tease him mercilessly.

In a modern wedding, the ceremony normally takes place in the bride's church, and waiting for the bride is the penultimate moment in the wedding ceremony, second only to the exchange of vows.  In today's first reading from the book of Wisdom, wisdom herself is personified as feminine, as a bride searching for someone to dwell with, as a bride searching for her groom.  The Gospel we have from Jesus complements this search of bride for groom, by emphasizing the other side of the equation - the groom going to meet his bride.  Unlike modern weddings, it is the journey of the groom in the Gospel, the arrival of the groom, that brings the suspense.  In Jesus' time, and thus in his story, it was the groom's duty, not the bride's, to make the final journey, and the people waited for his arrival at the doorstep of the bride.  As we hear in the Gospel, it was the role of the bridesmaids not to dote on the bride, and to get her ready, but to wait for the groom, and if he arrived at night, to light his way and show him safely through the night to his bride.  What we have in the Gospel, a time when there were no streetlights or flashlights, but only torches, is a much more dramatic scene, a bridegroom coming at night at an unexpected hour for his bride, than any drama I can create by asking the bride to wait an extra 30 seconds before coming down the aisle.

We have arrived at the point of the liturgical year when it is important for us to get better at something at which we are especially bad - waiting.  It is a specific kind of waiting that we are to foster, an expectant, joyful waiting, a dramatic waiting, rather than a passive resignation of waiting because we cannot do anything about it.  The apocalyptic readings of the end of the liturgical year will give way to Advent, and we will be challenged in both seasons to engage in active, joyful anticipation of the Lord's coming, by activating our faith, not passive, neglectful waiting characterized by the foolish virgins.  St. Paul was perhaps unlike us too ready for the Paraousia.  In his letter to the Thessalonians, he has to admit that because some Christians have fallen asleep in Christ before his second coming, that the bridegroom is apparently delayed.  Yet Paul still can't imagine that he would see death before the return of the Lord.  Where Paul is perhaps too eager, too confident in the Lord's return, we instead are too unprepared, overconfident that time is on our side. 

With the coming of the Lord at each Eucharist, his perfect coming and yet such a humble coming that without the activation of our faith, we will surely miss his coming, we have the perfect litmus test to see how wise or foolish we really are.  At the end of the Lord's prayer, the priest prays that the Church 'waits in joyful hope, for the coming of our Savior, Jesus Christ.'  Right before receiving the Eucharist we pray that our readiness for the Lord to come at the end of time, whether this be during our lifetime or not, is dependent upon how ready we are for the bridegroom's coming in the Eucharist. May we be more ready, and be found waiting in joyful hope, to activate our faith at the reception of each Eucharist, as we end this liturgical year, and turn again in Advent toward the light that scatters every darkness.  Amen.