Keep Awake!

Advent 1B, 11/30/14
Mark 13:24-37; Isaiah 64:1-9

Prepare us for the day of your coming, O God. When your people must drink tears, strengthen and restore and save us. Make us blameless in your sight and bring us into fellowship with you and with all the faithful. Amen.

There is some serious disconnect going on in our world this time of the year.

Last Thursday we celebrated the Thanksgiving holiday, a celebration of gratitude for all the blessings in our lives… but at the same time we were inundated with marketing messages telling us how important it was to go shopping that very day to buy more stuff, because what we already have is not enough.

Today is the first day of the season of Advent, when we prepare for the coming of Christmas. It’s a time that most of us associate with a baby and family and presents and joy – but the Bible readings we heard in worship today paint a picture of the end of the world.

The season that promotes peace on earth and goodwill toward all people begins this year in the shadow of protests and violence in the aftermath of last week’s decision of the grand jury in the case of the shooting of Michael Brown.  

All of this disconnect is enough to drive a person crazy – or at least enough to drive a person towards an extra glass of the adults-only eggnog at the next holiday party.

How do we deal with all the conflicting messages that are coming at us from society, from our culture, and even from the church?

The answer Jesus gives us in the Gospel of Mark is this: Keep awake.

Be on your guard.

Jesus doesn’t mean we should sit around doing nothing, staring sleeplessly at the ceiling wishing for the night to end.

Keep awake here means to be attentive, to get ready, to prepare yourself for what is going to come.

About a week ago, I had one of those sleepless nights.

You know what those are like, right?

Even though I didn’t feel sleepy, I went to bed at the usual time, and I lay there trying to convince myself that I was tired, and so eventually I finally fell asleep… but 3 hours later I woke up to use the bathroom. After that, there was no hope of going back to sleep.

So I got up. In the middle of the night, I decided it was time to do some housework. Mike and I were expecting overnight guests in a few days, so I made up the bed in the guest room. I changed the towels in the bathroom.

Even though our guests were my college roommate and her husband, and they’ve seen my home when it was a mess… and vice versa… for some reason I felt the need to make the house look good for them. So I organized some of my things in the third bedroom of our house, which we are working on setting up as an office. I started to do the laundry. I watered the plants that were starting to look a little droopy.

Keep watch, for you do not know when something might change!

Unexpected things are right around the corner.

Keep awake.

Be attentive.

Get ready.

At first glance, this Gospel lesson seems to point us toward the future.

         Pay attention and be aware, because change is on the horizon!

But this passage is also an encouragement to live in the present.

Keep awake! Don’t worry about being tired tomorrow… stay up now and do those things that will help you live in the moment!

When I had that sleepless night a while back, I was looking forward to the future. But I was also enjoying myself in the moment. It felt good to organize the office and change the towels and finally water that drooping plant.

It made me happy to put the Star Wars sheets on the guest bed, because I knew that my friend’s husband would be inordinately excited about sleeping on them.

During the season of Advent, we are asked to anticipate something that’s coming in the future, while still being excited about living in the present.

We are asked to look forward to being told a story that we’ve heard many times before and could probably recite from memory.

We are expected to honor centuries-old traditions as a way to celebrate God’s arrival in our lives anew.

There’s a theological concept that can be described as already and not yet.

That’s what Advent is all about.

We are already living in the presence of God in our daily lives – Jesus was born over 2000 years ago… but we have not yet experienced the complete presence of God, because we believe in the promise that Jesus will come into our world again, at the end of time.

Jesus founded the kingdom of God during his earthly ministry. Sometimes in our lives, we see what the kingdom of God can be like – when a child demonstrates their innocent, unconditional love – or when a stranger helps you get out of a tough situation – or when a person who was wrongly imprisoned is exonerated.

We get glimpses of the kingdom of God in our world, because it is already here to some degree – we know how the kingdom of God is supposed to be.

But we also know that the kingdom of God is not completely realized because powerful men still use their influence to take advantage of women. We know that the kingdom of God has not yet arrived because children still go hungry and live in poverty and die from preventable diseases. We know that the world we live in is not perfect, so we aren’t yet living in the eternal presence of God.

         The kingdom of God is already present… but it’s also not yet present.

During the season of Advent, we know that Jesus has already come. He was born over 2000 years ago. Some of us love this season precisely because of its familiarity, because of the beloved traditions and the memories they evoke.

But the whole premise of the season is to await the birth of Jesus, and then to celebrate it.       

Jesus came already.

But Jesus isn’t here yet.

It’s a disconnect – to use the favorite word of my seminary professor, it’s a juxtaposition of what is already here and what is yet to come.

Advent is a disconnect.

But this is how we live our lives.

Advent represents how we can enjoy living in the present, while we still hope for something better to come.

We get mixed messages from the church and the world this time of the year.

But that isn’t necessarily a bad thing.

Christianity is not supposed to be easy. Our faith is supposed to push us outside of our comfort zones.

So we live with the tension.

When we turn on the radio on November second and find three all-Christmas music stations, we live with the tension of hearing Sleigh Ride before we’ve had our first accumulation of snow.

We figure out how to live with the tension of a holiday that was intended to be a day to celebrate our blessings becoming commercialized and focused on consumerism.

We deal with our neighbors who have had their Christmas trees up for a month, and those who haven’t yet taken down their Halloween decorations.

We live with more serious juxtapositions in our world.

We try to understand how a man who has sworn to serve and protect the people of his city can shoot and kill a young unarmed resident… and we try to understand why that same man feels the need to resign from the police force because he was getting raked across the coals for doing his duty.

Christians live with the tension.

There are no simple, black-and-white answers to the problems in our world.

There are no simple, good-and-evil answers to our questions of faith.

Jesus has already come.

But the kingdom of God is not yet here.

And so, during the darkest time of the year, we get ready for the light of the world to come to us.

We stay awake through long nights as we prepare ourselves for the coming of the Messiah.

The savior of the world will arrive as a baby to an unmarried teenage mother.

The greatest leader we can imagine will come out of a small town in the country.

The king of kings will reign over no earthly kingdom in his life, and he will be part of a people who only ever had three kings of their own before succumbing to division and sinfulness.  

Keep awake, Jesus says!

You don’t know what’s coming or when, but you do know that the world around you is not the best it can possibly be.

So get ready. Prepare yourself to welcome the kingdom of God when it finally does arrive.

As we live in the tension of Advent, we offer our prayers with Isaiah: tear open the heavens, Lord God, and come down. (Isaiah 64:1)

Form us as a potter forms clay, into the people you created us to be.

Amen.