Stay Awake, My Children: Advent Lessons on Lukewarm Hearts

A reflection occasioned by Archbishop Sample’s recent advent homily.

Advent always opens with an alarm clock, not a lullaby. The Church starts her year by talking not about babies and carols, but about an arrival that will split history open: Christ coming in glory, and Christ already at the door of our own lives.

It’s a strange kindness.

We’d rather ease into December with nostalgia and soft lights, but the liturgy stands in the doorway and says to us, to you: “Stay awake.” Advent isn’t decorative waiting for Christmas presents; it’s training for judgment—and I’m trying to help you learn how to stand there with your eyes open.

As the years pile up, that command ("Stay awake") lands differently.

There comes a moment—an age, a number, and someday a card in the mail—when you realize you have more yesterdays than tomorrows. I feel that more sharply than you do right now. You’re still at the stage of building a life, sketching plans, assuming time; I’m beginning to count what’s left and wonder what it was all for.

Either life is a slow slide toward disappearance, or it’s a long approach to a meeting. Christian dogma is blunt here: Christ will come again to judge the living and the dead. Advent is the Church helping us rehearse that line until it sounds like hope, not threat—and I want you to live so that sentence never frightens you, only sobers and steadies you.

If the danger were obvious evil, most of us would be safer. The deeper threat is always drowsiness. The New Testament speaks of “drunkenness” and “sleep,” but the more accurate translation for us might be “lukewarm.” Not cold enough to be honest, not hot enough to change anything.

It’s the spiritual equivalent of sitting in a dim room, half-watching a show you don’t love, too tired to turn it off, too restless to go to bed.

Lukewarmness promises comfort without cost; it delivers boredom without God.

That’s why Jesus says he’ll “spit it out.” Tepid love doesn’t just fail the test; it forgets there even is a test. As your father, this is one of the things I fear most for you—not that you’ll run off into spectacular sins, but that you’ll drift into a life that never quite wakes up.

Our age has found new ways to rock us to sleep.

You don’t need wine; you’ve got an endless feed. The apathy St. Paul warned about now glows in the palm of your hand. “Scrolling mindlessly” sounds trivial until you add up the hours: the short videos, the tabs, the constant drip of novelty that never becomes news for your soul. It’s not that the content is always bad. It’s that it’s always there. The glow of the screen replaces the flame of the vigil candle, and the heart slowly acclimates to distraction as its native air.

This is technicolored lukewarmness. When I nag you about your phone, this is what I’m really after—I’m not trying to steal your fun; I’m trying to guard your heart from sleep. And mine too.

Advent’s wakefulness doesn’t mean permanent anxiety, as if God wanted you sleeping with one eye open. It means remembering what time it really is. “Now is the hour to wake from sleep,” St. Paul says, “for our salvation is nearer than when we first believed.”

The image isn’t a guard pacing in fear; it’s a household getting ready before dawn because someone beloved is on the way. In the dark, you clear the table, light the lamp, put bread in the oven, because it would be unthinkable to greet the guest with a cluttered room and an empty plate. Christian watchfulness isn’t driven by terror of surprise; it’s shaped by desire not to miss the Face that’s already turned toward you.

And I want our family to be that kind of house—lights on, table set, hearts awake.

In the end, Advent isn’t God yelling from a distance, “Stay awake or else.” It’s Christ, already in the house, shaking your shoulder with nail-scarred hands and saying, “You’re closer than you think.”

The years behind me, the distractions that seduce you, the lukewarm stretches that shame all of us—none of these have the last word. The One who is coming is the same One who has already come in weakness and who comes now in the small, stubborn ways: in bread and wine, in the neighbor (Steve) who needs you, in the Word that won’t let you doze off in peace.

Wakefulness isn’t heroic intensity; it’s steady consent to being loved into eternity.

As your father, that’s what I want for you: not a perfect record, but a heart that keeps saying yes—to Christ, to the life he’s giving you, and to the future where we stand awake together before his Face.

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