Advent 1A
In the name of the God of
creativity, companionship, and inspiration.
Amen.
We all have our quirks, and one
of my quirkier quirks is about time and punctuality. It’s not that I’m never late – sometimes I
am. Once, not long after I first started
here, I was even late to the 8:00 service one Sunday – about 20 minutes
late. I just lost track of time!
But my quirk about time is around
how unreasonably anxious it makes me when I think I’m going to be late. The occasion doesn’t even have to be
particularly important. Say, for
example, I’m running later than I’d planned on going to the grocery store. No one’s waiting for me. I’m not pressing up against the store’s
closing time or some later engagement.
I’m just later than I’d planned. Even
in a situation as benign as that, I can become fussy and anxious, and even downright
cranky.
As a result of that quirk of
mine, the lessons today, and really even this whole season of Advent, have a
strange effect on me. On one hand, it’s
sort of comforting. All of this talk of
being ready, and keeping awake almost seems to validate what is, very often for
me, a point of anxiety. On the other
hand, it almost adds to my anxiety, because the implication from the Word of
God is that we aren’t ready. We are
late. And not just me, but all of us,
systemically. When I let my mind tarry
there, I almost want to come out of my skin.
But of course, at least as we
measure it, time is nothing more than a human construct. Our time keeping system probably makes sense
for us, but in a universal sense, it’s actually sort of arbitrary.
We all know a day is 24
hours. But what if we were on Mars? There, measured by our sense of time, a day
is 24 hours, 39 minutes, and 35 seconds.
Off by just enough to make things confusing. The longest day in our solar system happens
on Venus. There, a day takes 243 of our
days. And the shortest day is on
Jupiter. The sun rises there every 10
hours. Even our day isn’t really what we
say it is. It’s not 24 hours. It’s 23 hours and 56 minutes. That’s why we have to throw in an “extra” day
every four years.
So, if time is such a complete
abstraction – what does it mean to get ready, or to BE ready? How is it, as Paul says, that “now is the moment for you to wake from
sleep”? How could he know? How could any of us know? How can we ever get ready if we can’t really
know when we are, right now?
But, of course, the point of
Advent – the point of being ready and keeping awake, as Paul and Jesus instruct
us, isn’t about any particular moment.
It’s about every moment. These
four weeks at church aren’t about getting us ready for December 25th. They’re about getting us ready to look for
Christ.
In our household there’s always a
bit of debate about when Christmas prep can start. I didn’t want to begin decorating until the
day after Thanksgiving. Michael probably
would have been ready for us to start a couple of weeks ago. But this season of preparation isn’t about
that kind of preparation. I’ve served in
churches where it was adamantly declared that no decorations beyond the Advent
wreath could happen anywhere on church grounds before the close of worship on
the fourth Sunday of Advent. I’ve served
in churches where you could have wreaths on the doors outside, but only if you
put purple or blue ribbons on them until it was actually Christmas. I’ve served churches were they figured it
only mattered in terms of how and when you decorated the worship space. People can get pretty worked up about it.
The thing is, I’m pretty sure
Jesus doesn’t care. The ways we fill our
homes and our churches with the symbols of the season mean a lot to us, but I
don’t think it makes a bit of difference to God. What really matters is how we prepare our
hearts and minds. Not just how we
prepare our hearts and minds for Christmas, but about how we prepare our hearts
and minds for Christ.
Around this time of year, you’re
likely to hear people start talking once again about the “war on Christmas” –
how declarations of “Happy Holidays” are somehow an attack on Christian
values. Inevitably, we’ll start seeing
signs and billboards and bumper stickers begging us to “Keep Christ in
Christmas.” Last year, I saw a response
to all that that said, “I’d settle for keeping Christ in Christian.”
I think that’s what Advent is
about. It’s about keeping Christ in
Christian. It’s about remembering to
look for Christ all around us – even among people who don’t identify as, or
whom we would normally not see as Christian.
From the very beginning, God has been surprising us – meeting us when and
where we least expect it. And that’s
probably because we’re not good at expecting it. We get so lost in ourselves and our own needs
and desires, that we too easily look past the needs of others. And that’s where Christ always lives – in the needs of others.
So, the wisdom of Jesus is that
we should “be ready, for the Son of Man is coming at an unexpected hour.” The experience of Paul is that “Now is the
moment for you to wake from sleep. For
salvation is nearer to us now than when we became believers; the night is far
gone, the day is near.” There are
planets out there where the sun rises twice a day, but for us, the day is
always near.
Christmas is still almost a month
away, but Christ is as near as your next breath. The day is near. Thanks be to God. Amen.
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