Advent is a time of waiting. Now our human experience of waiting is not usually a very positive one. We wait in the dentist's office. We wait for BART or for a bus. We wait in line at the grocery store and, need I tell you, we wait at the Pleasant Hill Post Office! And the negativity that surrounds all of this waiting is because what we are waiting for, what we're hoping for, what we're longing for, is not present.

Advent is a completely different kind of waiting because we know that what we hope for IS present, but not yet in its fullness. Christ has come. Christ IS present, but not yet in His fullness. The kingdom is, and yet is not. Now this, I know, all sounds very, very confusing. But, if you reflect a little on human experience, you see that there are certain elements here that we can relate to. For example, whatever your age right now, you have the potential of tomorrow. We are now very much what we will be tomorrow, but have not yet attained it. You know how you can meet someone that you haven't seen for years and years and years, and they will say to you, "Oh! You haven't changed a bit!" And you know very well that that's a nice, polite lie. And yet there is a certain truth to it, a certain truth to it. What we are right now we have been and we can be more. We haven't yet fully attained. We haven't reached the fullness of our potential yet. So there is that, here and not here.

Again, as Christians, we also have the already and the not yet. For example, Jesus said, "The Kingdom of God is at hand." And then what does He do? He teaches us to pray, "Thy Kingdom come..." and we pray it every day because we realize that really, the Kingdom of God, although established, has not yet reached its full potential in our own lives or in the world around us. And to see the truth of that, we have only to look at our own lives and look at the world around us. We look at out own lives and we see that we have still to struggle to live out the gospel message in its fullness. We have still to make a real effort to live up to our baptismal committments.

We open the daily newspaper and what do we find? We find struggle throughout the world, sometimes violent. We find that there's famine. We find refugees, homeless, all signs of the incompleteness of the Kingdom of God. There is, you might say, a perpetual Advent in world affairs. We look forward in expectation of better things to come while still living right here in the present. St. John wrote, in his first letter, "Beloved, we are God's children now. It does not yet appear what we shall be." That's what Advent is all about. We are God's children now, but it's not yet, we don't know yet what we shall be, but we look forward to it in hope.

The people at the time of John the Baptist were very, very practical, and they had heard all of his preaching and they asked, "What are we to do?...What are we to do?" Well, I would suggest that, first of all, we begin to live with real hope in our hearts. Now, the greatest Christian virtue, undoubtedly, is love, but I believe it builds on hope. We cannot love if we are in despair. We cannot love if we have no hope for ourselves or for other people. We cannot love if we live with a constant image of ourselves and our world as sinful and unredeemed. Advent gives us hope. Advent is saying to us, "We ARE redeemed." Advent is saying to us that we and this world of ours ARE blessed by God, are holy in God's sight. Advent is saying to us that we are made in God's image AND that Jesus was made in our image. It holds out great hope for ourselves and for our world.

What shall we do? What shall we do? John the Baptist had a few very concrete, practical suggestions for the people in his own day. And I think they are very, very relevant in our day too. He said, "First of all, take care of the needy." People with two cloaks, give one of them to a needy person. If you have food, feed the hungry. Don't know if you have noticed there, out in the parking lot, great big,big truck belonging to the St. Vincent dePaul Society. If it's still there when you are leaving, I would suggest you just take a peak into it. You will be astonished. I was. I know you will be. It's absolutely filled with food, that you, that you provided. Praise God! YOU have taken care of the needy. You do it all the time. This parish does it all the time. So here we are fulfilling the first demand of John the Baptist, "Take care of the needy."

And then he went on to say, "Be just." Be just in all of your relationship with other people, within your own family, with the neighbors, society, where you work, be just. Be just. Do what you really and truly know to be just and right and good. Be just. Treat others the way that you would want them to treat you. Be just.

And finally, John the Baptist said, "Do your job well and do it conscientiously." Do your job well. Do it conscientiously.

Now these are not some high-faluting demands on us. They are very, very practical things. Take care of the needy. Be just. Do your job well and conscientiously. Our Christian life is not just some vague dream for the future. Yes. We live in hope that the Kingdom of God will develop and grow in our world, and what is most needed is that we allow Jesus Christ to have full access to our lives and to the world that we live in, but in a very, very practical way, living every day, taking care of the needy, being just, and doing our job well and conscientiously. And that's possible for every one of us. We can all do that. And, in that way, we are truly building the Kingdom. We're not just praying about it: "Thy Kingdom come..." We are actively involved in making sure that the promises made by God WILL come to this world. Our Advent is a matter of daily living. We live in hope and in the promises of Jesus Christ, as the liturgy says today, "....hoping that the salvation promised us will be ours."