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Are you ready for Christmas? During the season of Advent – which annually begins on the fourth Sunday before Christmas and leads up to December 25 – followers of Jesus traditionally look for ways to prepare themselves for the coming of God’s own Son into the world. Throughout December we’ll ponder ways that we can ready ourselves to receive Jesus, once again, into our own hearts.
Two weeks ago today, Philip Rivers blew out 44 candles on his birthday cake.
He and his wife Tiffany – she was his middle school crush – have seven daughters and three sons. Last year they became grandparents.
Rivers had a storied career as an NFL quarterback. He retired five years ago, having thrown the fifth-most touchdowns in league history and passed for the fifth-most yards. He is widely regarded as the greatest quarterback never to have played in a Super Bowl.
In a move that virtually no one saw coming – including Rivers himself– he un-retired two weeks ago, returning to the Indianapolis Colts, the team with whom he played the final season of his pro career in 2020.
The Colts, having just lost their starting quarterback to injury on December 7, called Rivers at his Alabama home and asked if he wanted to present his aging body as a tackling dummy for 275-pound defensive ends who would chase him with malice aforethought.
“Dadgummit, let’s freaking do this!” he replied to the Colts brass. Dadgummit, by the way, is just about the edgiest word in Philip Rivers’ vocabulary. As a committed Catholic, he chooses not to swear – something else that sets him apart in the average locker room.
Last week, he and the Colts almost pulled off the biggest upset of the regular season, falling on the road to the NFC-leading Seattle Seahawks by two points with less than a minute to play.
Tonight they will take on another high-caliber opponent, the San Francisco 49ers, on their home field in Indy.
Win or lose in tonight’s contest, Rivers is likely, throughout the coming week, to be wearing the ballcap that is almost always on his head. It displays two Latin words: Nunc Coepi. That hat “tends to be on my head most of the time, unless I’m asleep,” he says.
Nunc Coepi (pronounced “cheppy”) is a catchphrase popularized by the Venerable Bruno Lanteri, an 18th century Catholic priest who lived in northern Italy. It comes from the Latin Vulgate translation of Psalm 77:10. It means, “Now I begin.”
Rivers made the phrase his own a number of years ago. Nunc Coepi “is a never-ending beginning. You are always beginning. Now I begin again and again and again.”
He says, “If you ask any of my children, ‘What is Dad’s favorite phrase? What is our family phrase?’ they would say it immediately. I really try to apply it to my life all the way through as a dad, as a husband, in my faith, on the football field as a quarterback, as a teammate – anything you can do, you are always beginning again.”
Having come tantalizingly close to a potentially season-defining victory last week, Rivers and his teammates are definitely beginning again.
The quarterback is not fazed.
Whether you win or lose, throw a touchdown or an interception, it’s always time to move to the next step. “We begin again,” he says. “We begin again.”
As a dad, Rivers coaches his kids to begin again whenever they struggle with their math, falter on a difficult test, confront a stack of dishes, or face a pile of laundry. “If you look at the whole big pile, it looks like a lot. But if you just begin again, begin again, and begin again, you look up and then the sink will be clean and the laundry will be folded.”
Nunc Coepi is a crucial watchword for anyone who dreams of living a faithful life.
January 1 is America’s favorite day for New Beginnings. “Starting this New Year’s, I will lose weight. I will quit smoking. I will keep a lid on my anger. I will be patient with my spouse and kids.” But so often we frame such resolutions as Win/Lose. If we blow one of those promises – and usually we’re not talking about if, but when – our resolve may collapse like a house of cards.
It can feel as if we’ve gone back to Zero. Now what do we do?
We first remember that an extraordinary proportion of everyday life is less-than-perfect. Or just flat-out failure. Our most earnest, heartfelt promises are never enough to keep us heading in the right direction.
But when it comes to pursuing God, that’s not fatal.
Have I ever personally “surrendered myself completely to Jesus”? You bet. In fact, I’ve done it several hundred times. And every single time I absolutely meant it.
You would think that at least one of those spiritual Final Decisions would have “taken.” But I’ve always found myself in need of starting over. Does that mean all my previous efforts were in vain?
It took me a long time to realize this, but each of those previous this-time-I-really-mean-it moments was used by God to bring me to this moment. And this moment matters because it’s the only moment where I can experience, in the here and now, God’s presence and power – even if I’ve faltered in the past.
The Venerable Bruno Lanteri wrote, “If I should fall even a thousand times a day, a thousand times, with peaceful repentance, I will say immediately, Nunc Coepi.” Now I begin again.
Or as the gospel song puts it: “A saint is just a sinner who fell down…and got back up.”
2026 is almost upon us. Despite our fondest wishes, it won’t turn out to be the perfect flip side of this very imperfect 2025.
But whenever we stumble, fall, or run into a roadblock of someone else’s making, we’ll know what to do.
Nunc Coepi.
Secure in the realities of God’s grace, power, and forgiveness this Christmas, we begin again.