December 1, 2013 | 9:30 and 11:00 a.m.

Waking Up

Judith L. Watt
Associate Pastor, Fourth Presbyterian Church

Romans 13:11–14
Matthew 24:36–44

It is while waiting for the coming of the reign of God, Advent after Advent, that we come to realize that its coming depends on us. What we do will either hasten or slow, sharpen or dim our own commitment to do our part to bring it.

Joan Chittister
The Liturgical Year

I suspect that for most of us, the turkey and stuffing are just barely out of our systems. But here we are, plummeted into the first Sunday of Advent, whether we are ready for it or not, whether you’ve made the turkey soup yet or not. Advent is here.

Timing is a funny thing. We spend our days trying to control it. We attempt to slow it down when life is moving too quickly, when kids are growing up too fast, when a loved one has been diagnosed with a life-threatening disease and we worry about how much time is left, or when society’s pace seems to be careening forward. Or we try to speed it up, when we are anxious for a hoped for result, when we know someone is about to announce our promotion, when we can’t wait for a change in leadership, when we are little kids waiting for Grandma or Grandpa to arrive. We try to speed time up when results aren’t coming as soon as we would hope. And then sometimes we play our own version of “Beat the Clock,” trying to conquer time and fit more into our days than is humanly possible. In so many ways, we are always dealing with time. Someone once made a statement to me that I have never forgotten: “Time is like running water. It runs through our fingers and we can’t ever grab onto it.”

The scriptures for this first Sunday of Advent both speak of time. One says, “You know what time it is.” And the other says, “You can’t possibly know the day and the hour.” Both Paul and Jesus are referencing time relative to the promised day of the fulfillment of all time—as Tom Long puts it, “the great climax of all human history and longing, when the world spinning along in ceaseless tedium, will find itself gathered into the extravagant mercy of God” (Tom Long, Matthew, Westminster Bible Companion).

Two of my colleagues can tell you that when I realized I was preaching on this first Advent Sunday, I blurted out, “I hate preaching the first Sunday of Advent texts.” For the preacher there is an inward and spiritual struggle over these texts. The scriptures want to go in a different direction, toward a different event in time, from where most of the congregation thinks it wants to be. Most of us are tilting toward December 25 in our minds, and these readings are at odds with that. They tilt us toward a different day altogether. They force us to think about another time, the fulfillment of time, an apocalyptic day in the unknown future, the day of the Lord, the day of the coming of the Son of Man—the time in which all is fulfilled and Christ comes again. Most of us don’t like to think about that time, because we are filled with so much information or misinformation about it, speculation that scares us. The texts today force us to stretch our vision beyond December 25 to a promised time we can’t predict and don’t quite know how to deal with.

That’s hard to do, when your calendar between now and Christmas is filled with a jumble of “musts.” Hard to do when we find ourselves depressed at this time of year because the lights and the glitter seem so far afield from the real meaning. Hard to think about a day promised in the future when supposedly swords will be beat into plowshares and nations will no longer be fighting and yet everything we hear in the news seems to be the exact opposite. It’s hard to keep hoping for that.

In a sermon, Mary Frances Schjonberg said, “There is much work to be done—and not just all we face these next four weeks. But you know what? Christmas always comes whether we get it all done—perfectly—or not. Will the kingdom come in a similar, inevitable way? What will we have done to hasten its coming? Will we recognize it when it comes? . . . Will we go about our pre-Christmas tasks, marking out our time, and forget about the Advent stories of God’s time?” (Mary Frances Schjonberg, “Remembering God’s Time During Our Time,” www.textweek.com, 1 Advent (A), 2013).

She doesn’t polarize the two concepts of time—our time and God’s time—but she suggests we find a way to overlay these two arcs of time, taking good care of the tasks that will make for a special holiday season and staying awake—staying awake and alert for the signs of the kingdom, God’s time, breaking into our time.

Both Paul and Jesus speak words of watchfulness in the midst of dealing with time. They call us to be watchful. To be mindful. Macrina Wiederkehr says, “Living mindfully is the art of living awake and ready to embrace the gift of the present moment” (Seven Sacred Pauses, p. 2). John Shea says that the coming of the Son of Man or the day of the Lord can be understood as God’s invitation into the fullness of human life through Christ (Matthew, Year A: On Earth As It Is in Heaven, p. 27).

I saw the movie Gravity this past week, which stars Sandra Bullock as an astronaut on a space mission. She ends up being the sole survivor of a mission that has gone very bad. It becomes clear in the movie that Sandra Bullock’s character has endured a horrific tragedy in her personal life. Being in space was comforting to her. She loved the silence. While talking to her commanding officer, while they deal with a crisis in space, she reveals that when she’s back at home she gets up every morning and just drives—drives to work, drives home. Whether in space or on earth, she was living half awake, tolerating what T.S. Eliot called “living and partly living.” The viewer watches her wake up in the movie as she meets head on the possibility of the end of her life.

Advent calls us to be aware of when we are numbing ourselves, to stop living and only partly living, and instead to be watchful. Watchful for the signs of the kingdom of God breaking into our world—even now.

We are called to be aware and awake because our story of life, as David Bartlett puts it, “is told by a strong and sovereign God.” It is, he says, a “tale of both judgment and grace, and it moves toward the time when God will make all things new.” The themes of Advent, including today’s, remind us that “we are God’s people, and that the history in which we live is God’s story” (David L. Bartlett, Feasting on the Word, Year A, vol. 1, p. 22).

John Shea speaks of smuggling spiritual exercises into the world of work. He writes about a Jewish doctor who says a Hebrew prayer of purification every time she washes her hands before seeing a patient. She explains that the prayer is not meant to purify but to remind her that the people she is treating are more than their disease. He cites another man who pauses before a Christmas tree in the building where he works, to bring to mind the connection between heaven and earth and to spend a moment pondering the truth of faith that creation is grounded in God. Shea quotes this man, who says, as long as he holds onto this truth, his day goes better: “I’m more patient, and respectful. The awareness of Spirit brings pleasure, passion, and purpose” (John Shea, Matthew, Year A: On Earth As It Is in Heaven, p. 29).

On Friday night, we watched a Barbra Streisand concert on PBS. At the end of her performance, I could have sworn she had been reading these texts. She said to the audience, “As I’ve grown older, as we grow older, we move into a different stage of life, and it’s important to keep moving, physically, mentally, spiritually. We have to toast every minute and make it count, to appreciate the now and the fullness and aliveness of each moment.” Her next song began “I still believe in chasing dreams and placing bets.”

She finished that song and then continued her sermon with a reference to a Greek proverb that says “A society grows when old men plant trees whose shade they know they will never sit in.” “I like that proverb,” she said, “because it doesn’t speak of instant gratification but speaks to a concern for the generations to come.”

The texts today are a gift to us as we begin this Advent season. They assure us that we can’t know the time and the hour of the coming again of the Son of Man, nor can we control time as we would like. They remind us of our lack of control. We are reminded to be watchful, to be awake, to choose life. The Romans passage tells us to put on the armor of light, to put on the Lord Jesus Christ. Maybe each one of us will decide on some particular way we can be more watchful this season of Advent for the breaking in of God’s kingdom. And maybe each of us will decide how we might hasten its coming.

“Every morning when you wake up,” writes Barbara Brown Taylor, “decide to live the life God has given you to live right now. Refuse to live yesterday over and over again. Resist the temptation to save your best self for tomorrow. Live a caught-up life, not a put-off life, so that wherever you are, you are ready for God. Ours may be the generation that finally sees him ride in on the clouds, or we may meet him the same way generations before us have—one by one, as each of us closes our eyes for the last time. Either way, our lives are in God’s hands (Barbara Brown Taylor, “On the Clouds of Heaven,” The Seeds of Heaven: Sermons on the Gospel of Matthew).

I wish you an Advent journey of waking up, of seeing your story as part of God’s story, of figuring out how you might help to hasten the coming of the reign of God to this world.