Sermon for Sunday, November 30, 2025 || Advent 1A || Romans 13:11-14
Today marks the beginning of Advent, the four week season to prepare for Christmas, that great and joyful mystery of God’s Word becoming flesh in the person of Jesus of Nazareth. Advent is a time of preparation and anticipation, a time in which we share the story of Jesus’ earthly family getting ready for his arrival, along with the words of the Hebrew prophets who came close enough to God to imagine a world where peace and reconciliation come to pass.
So today, on this First Sunday of Advent, lets talk about preparation. But instead of talking about our immediate preparations for this particular celebration of Christmas, I’d like to zoom out and talk about how God use the raw materials of our entire lives to prepare us to become the people God dreams for us to be.
Every moment of our lives is animated by God’s creative movement. Sometimes we are present to this movement and sometimes – most of the time – we are not. When we look back over our lives and trace our stories from then to now, we can see more clearly God’s directing creativity at work. What seem like coincidences or happenstances shine anew with God’s fingerprints. The tough parts, the challenges, the hardships, and the tragedies might gain new meaning when we claim them as parts of our story and allow them to open us to new opportunities for compassion. Everything that happens to us can be preparation for our future participation in God’s mission of healing and reconciliation.
Several years ago, I told you the story of St. Augustine of Hippo, and I’d like to do so again today to illustrate the long view of preparation. Born in the year 354, Augustine hailed from what is now the northeast coast of Algeria, and by his own admission, he was not the poster child for godly living. He was a cradle Christian, but early on he abandoned the Church for a trendy religion called Manichaeism, much to his mother Monnica’s despair. During his formative years, he dabbled in hedonism and reveled in the bloodsport of the gladiatorial games. Augustine was also a master rhetorician, and he could win any argument he set his mind to, such was his debating prowess. His longsuffering mother, a saint herself, wept and prayed for her boy to turn his life around, but for many years Augustine acted like he was on a perpetual trip to Las Vegas.
Monnica’s prayers were answered when Augustine met the Christian bishop of Milan, a man named Ambrose, whose own rhetorical skill matched Augustine’s. They developed a deep friendship and Augustine regarded Ambrose as a father figure. He writes in his seminal work The Confessions, “I began to like [Ambrose], not at first as a teacher of the truth, for I had absolutely no confidence in [the] Church, but as a human being who was kind to me” (V. xiii).
At that point, Augustine didn’t care at all about the Church, but in getting to know Ambrose – in that intimate connection with a person of deep faith and abiding love – Augustine began to reevaluate his stance. It was the kindness and integrity of Ambrose, not his vaunted arguments in defense of Christianity, that began steering Augustine in a new direction.
Such steering led to a fateful day in Augustine’s life at age 31. He was visiting a friend, who had a Bible on his table. Augustine was going through some great personal stress at the time, some swirling inner turmoil. When he reached the eye of the storm, he noticed the Bible lying there. He picked it up and walked to his friend’s walled garden. And there he heard a voice – a child’s perhaps – chanting in a singsong voice, “Tolle lege, tolle lege. Pick up and read. Pick up and read.” Was it a child beyond the wall playing some game? Or was it the voice of God? Or was it both? In any case, Augustine, still in the throes of strain and strife, threw the Bible down against the base of a tree.
It fell open to Paul’s Letter to the Romans and Augustine’s eyes found the same words we read a few minutes ago. “Let us then lay aside the works of darkness and put on the armor of light; let us live honorably as in the day, not in reveling and drunkenness, not in debauchery and licentiousness, not in quarreling and jealousy. Instead, put on the Lord Jesus Christ, and make no provision for the flesh, to gratify its desires.”
They were the exact words Augustine needed to hear. They spoke to the very core of his being. They spoke to his soul. He knew somewhere deep down that his hedonistic, morally shady existence offered him so much less than the fullness of life. And here was God speaking to him through the Apostle Paul: “Let it go. Let it all go. Put on Jesus Christ as you would a garment so that his life is the first thing people see when they look at you.”
This was the moment his life was preparing him for: Monnica’s witness and love, Ambrose’s mentorship and tutelage, the Bible placed prominently in the house of a friend. The moment came, and Augustine was finally ready. He was present to God, and he realized God had always been present to him. Augustine became a priest, then a bishop, and went on to become one of the most influential thinkers and writers in Christian history.
1,616 years later, I was sitting in my dorm room during the second semester of my freshman year of college. I picked up the next book of the syllabus for my Humanities class, and I sighed. (We had a lot of reading – hundreds of pages a week.) The book was Augustine’s Confessions. I began it like any other college text: pen in hand, sticky notes, Dove chocolates nearby to reward myself for finishing chapters.
By the end of the first paragraph, however, something was stirring within me. I didn’t know what yet, but these words caught me just as Paul’s words had caught Augustine. “You have made us for yourself [Lord] and our heart is restless until it rests in you” (I.i). Like Augustine does in the Confessions, I began to look inward, to really look, to search my heart and mind. And what I found was an authentic faith in the God made known in Jesus Christ, along with a nascent calling to be an ordained witness to that faith. Unlike most college texts, I devoured St. Augustine’s Confessions. I didn’t need the chocolate to keep me reading.
This encounter with St. Augustine was one page of the story of my preparation to become the person God dreamed for me to be. Such preparation happens whether or not we are aware of it. At the same time, the more we practice our awareness, the more we participate in our preparation and the more we embrace the calls God places on our hearts.
Nineteenth century philosopher Søren Kierkegaard once said that you live your life forwards but understand it backwards. This week, I invite you to begin your Advent time contemplating your life in a backwards manner. Trace the breadcrumbs of God’s directing creativity back to those moments in your lives that you can now see were preparatory ones. As you dwell on those moments, turn them over in your heart and mind like you would a crystal. Look at them from all angles, seeking the patterns of God’s creative movement in your lives. St. Augustine pioneered this form of reflective prayer, which helped me discover my call to the priesthood. During our Advent time of preparation, join me in this reflective prayer as we grow our awareness of God’s presence.
Photo by Sixteen Miles Out on Unsplash.
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