Homily for the First Sunday of Advent

Mass of Dedication and Blessing of New Altar

November 29, 2025
St. Teresa of Calcutta Catholic Church
Roanoke, Texas

Isaiah 2:1-5
Psalm 122:1-2, 3-4, 4-5, 6-7, 8-9
Romans 13:11-14
Matthew 24:37-44

This present moment is most precious in the life of your parish, in the life of the Diocese of Fort Worth, and in the life of the entire Church. This present moment marks the blessing of this new space and dedication of the altar for your liturgical worship as a parish and for your catechetical and fellowship needs as a parish and community of faith. This present moment begins the new liturgical year on this first Sunday of Advent, when begin our preparation for the coming of Christ.

At this present moment in your life as a parish, God affords us all the opportunity to look back to your founding as a parish and to the years of wandering in the desert of temporary spaces for encountering the Lord in Sunday Mass. Likewise, God affords us all the present moment of looking forward in anticipation to that moment in the future when your parish will arrive at a permanent church structure for the celebration of the Mass whereby you will worship God as He desires to be worshipped and receive the grace of full parish life. God affords us this grace of looking back from where He has brought us and His grace of looking forward to where we are going, by giving us the Grace of encountering Him in the present moment of where we are currently in this beautiful space for worship and for parish ministerial life.

Therefore, it is especially poignant that we are given this moment at the start of the liturgical year and even more poignantly at the beginning of Advent because we begin Advent by recognizing the urgent need for our preparation for His second coming when He will come to judge us with the inestimable accountability of His justice and mercy, at that unknown moment “when one will be taken and one will be left.” We end Advent by looking back gratefully towards His birth in a stable as more than a sentimental story that secular society would have serve only as a catalyst for shopping online.

There are three comings of Christ that we consider throughout Advent. Christ has first come to us born in Bethlehem. Christ will come again at the end of the world to judge us. We can only truly understand the first and final comings of Christ here at Mass where we celebrate, encounter, and receive Him in His present coming in the mystery of the Eucharist. The coming of Christ in this present moment is marked at every celebration of the Mass by His first coming at Bethlehem received gratefully and His second coming anticipated in hope. Your parish patroness, Saint Teresa of Calcutta, captured this with her beautiful simplicity when she counseled, “Yesterday is gone. Tomorrow has not yet come. We have only today. Let us begin.”

Saint Bernard of Clairvaux summarizes the meaning of Advent in his fifth Advent Sermon, “In the first coming He was seen on earth, dwelling among men; He Himself testifies that they saw Him and hated Him. In the final coming all flesh will see the salvation of our God, and they will look on Him whom they pierced. The intermediate coming is a hidden one; in it only the elect see the Lord within their own selves, and they are saved.”

We stand attentively in the present moment at this newly consecrated altar that serves also as the Eucharistic banquet table, the place where God transforms us into His Church. It is here where your parish will be awakened to God’s turning toward us “to instruct us in His ways that we may walk in His paths.” It is here in the present moment of the Eucharist that in your parish you will become what you receive and recognize within yourselves and each other the Lord who has come for you and the Lord who will come again.

It is here in the present moment and in this space where you truly understand from where you have traveled and to where we are all going together as the Church in the community of your parish family under the patronage of Saint Teresa of Calcutta. It is here in this present moment and in this space where you, His called and elected disciples, will receive the Source of love and learn to love each other as Christ loves you and then carry that love outward into the world especially among the poor.

It is here in this present moment and in this space where you will be prepared for the final coming of Christ and to receive His judgment about which Saint Teresa of Calcutta once said, “I am not sure exactly what heaven will be like, but I know that when we die and it comes time for God to judge us, He will not ask, ‘How many good things have you done in your life?’ Rather He will ask, ‘How much love did you put into what you did?’” So, with confidence, “Let us go rejoicing into the House of the Lord.”