Isaiah 2:1-5 and Matthew 24:36-44

The other evening, finding myself unexpectedly alone and with nothing pressing to do, I was idly flipping through television channels when I happened upon a show my daughter told me I should watch sometime: House. During the moments I was watching, a young doctor agonized over his misdiagnosis of a middle aged man whom he believed had a terminal adenocarcinoma. A three month check up had revealed that the man was not sick at all: the apparent tumors were harmless lesions. When the young doctor told the good news to the man, he was aghast. But my house is under contract to sell, he shouted, I’ve made arrangements, this will cost me money. He stormed out. Feeling responsible, the young doctor wrote a personal check to the man for six thousand dollars, the penalty on the house, and called his patient back in. Six thousand dollars?!! the man exclaimed, enraged, this doesn’t begin to cover it. He tore up the check as the doctor stammered, but I don’t understand. This is all the money you lost, I’ve given it back, and besides you have your life back. I don’t understand. And the man said bitterly, no, you don’t. When you diagnosed me with terminal cancer, you gave me today. For the first time I have really lived for the present moment, believing I had nothing except now. But you have stolen that meaning from me, taken away my life . . . and now I will go on living, but my life is over.

Listen, now, for a word from God in the gospel of Matthew:

But about that day and hour no one knows, neither the angels of heaven, nor the son, but only the father. For as the days of Noah were, so will be the coming of the Son of Man. For as in those days before the flood they were eating and drinking, marrying and giving in marriage, until the day Noah entered the ark, and they knew nothing until the flood came and swept them all away, so too will be the coming of the Son of Man. Then two will be in the field; one will be taken and one will be left. Two women will be preparing food together; one will be taken and one will be left. Keep awake, therefore, for you do not know on what day your Lord is coming. But understand this : if the owner of the house had known in what part of the night the thief was coming, he would have stayed awake and would not have let his house be broken into. Therefore you also must be ready, for the Son of Man is coming at an unexpected hour.

What we know the most is: we don’t know anything. No one knows, says Matthew’s Jesus, they knew nothing. You do not know….

Matthew’s people, waiting for the return of Christ and living instead through the Roman Wars and the destruction of the 2^nd Temple, learned what they didn’t know the hard way, and so, sometimes, do we. Being God’s people was no insurance policy, then or now. We do not know the day, the hour or the way that caution or catastrophe may visit us. We do not know how God will show up at such times either.

We can’t prepare for it. We can’t predict it. If we had known at what hour the thief would break into our house, we would have been ready, but who can know such things? Even the security system isn’t foolproof. There is something impersonal in a raging wildfire; a hurricane, a diagnosis of Alzheimer’s, of cancer. Something impersonal, and unfair, and frighteningly random. It could happen to us, as easily as it happened to Sean Taylor, or a villager in Mexico and a family of four in Santa Monica. It does happen to us. Two women are working: one gets sick, the other doesn’t. Two men are walking down the same street: one has a heart attack and dies, the other lives to a ripe old age, seeing his children’s children.

Things happen, and there’s nothing we can do about it, except, maybe, to attend seriously the words of Jesus, the words that are, disconcertingly, always the first words of the Church year and the season of Advent: you do not know when the Son of Man is coming, therefore you must be ready.

Here on Advent Sunday, at this newly constructed in the beginning of the church year, I think part of our problem is that we focus too much on Christmas, as though the season of Advent were merely what the market place would have us believe: so many shopping, or even praying, days before Christmas. The fact is, the coming of Jesus at Christmas was only a beginning. Christmas is not what we are aiming ourselves toward; we who are the Christ’s followers are not at the starting line of a four week sprint towards spiritual fulfillment.

There is a reason Advent begins with a warning, and with texts that are drawn from the end of Jesus’ life and from the end of the early church’s failed expectation in the rapid return of the messiah. The reason is, we do not expect to find our meaning in the meantime, but rather, taking the long view, in the end time. At the beginning of Advent we are not beginning a headlong rush to the baby in the manger; we are attempting once again to set our feet on the path the man Jesus walked as the light of Christ: a path marked by learning, loving, and listening. A path shaped by sacrifice, sorrow, and satisfaction. A path that is at the same time solitary and crowded with communities that need our careful attention to acts of love, justice, and mercy towards others and no less, to ourselves. By entering Advent, we are setting our feet on the long road toward home.

And to do that, paradoxically, we must find a way to live in the present, in the present moment, as Jesus told his followers, paying attention and practicing being ready. To live intentionally, attentively, as though we were living in doom. One may be taken, another left behind. It may be you, it may be your next door neighbor, or your best friend. Did they make the best use of the time they had, honoring the days God gave them upon the earth? Did you learn anything from the suddenness of their passing? Wish you were living your own life differently? Wonder whether you can do better, now that you have been reminded of the fragility and the preciousness of life?

Keep awake, be ready.

The way we live, it’s far too easy to miss the Presence, the presence of God, but even our own presence in the present moment. To be with ourselves, and those we love, and those we ought to love, right now. We are not sprinting toward the manger; we are on the long road, seeking to understand where, if anywhere, the divine presence is finding room among us, and within us.

I hope that the way we have planned the Advent season here at the church this year will help you and those you love to do this. You will notice: we are not having any book studies, few meetings, no Advent mid-week nights around which to juggle your family’s schedule. We are making room, room in the inns of our lives. Today, we are presenting an Advent Alternative Gift Fair following worship. We hope you can practice love and mercy by supporting fairly traded crafts available in the SERRV shop, with alternative giving for the Light Project for the students without electricity in our partner community in Kenya, by supporting Heifer Project. If you shop here, you don’t have to buy into mall madness, and can know that your giving is supporting people in need, not the best commercial retail season in the past five years.

Next week, we are celebrating our Christmas dinner following worship, and right after, an hour of Christmas and Advent music on organ, piano, and voice. Bring your friends, and make time for community and quiet celebration through the arts.

Midway through Advent, on Saturday the 15^th, a two hour morning retreat will use prayer, fellowship, and the labyrinth to remind us that we are in God’s time, taking the long but sure road home. Sunday the choir will lead worship with the cantata “Nativity,” and we will continue to wonder at the ways the world sees the Prince of Peace through our collection of Nativities from Asia and Europe displayed throughout the sanctuary this season. And we will pause for the refreshment of the Lord’s Supper, today and again at the end of Advent, before we welcome the child on Christmas Eve.

We hope you can make time for some or most of these few and quiet Advent moments: that you can enter them as an antidote to the blaring carols, the hideous traffic, the anxious buying and partying that so easily draw us in and distract us from reflecting the Light of Christ in a darkening world.

Last year about this time, RoseMaree Curtis came to me after worship on Sunday and said, Laurie, do you think it would be wrong for me to not be in treatment this month? Not to focus on the future, having chemo and radiation and being sick and tired? Would it be okay for me to just have the Advent season, and Christmas one more time? I’m ashamed to say that it was hard for me to hear her, and that I was so fixated on what I thought could be her future, that I cajoled and pleaded with Rose that she should give up her present in the service of an unknown future. But, she was as adamant as she could be; and as many of you know, that was pretty adamant indeed. She set fear and the unknown future aside, and took her Advent, and her Christmas, and she reveled in being alive and present. And several months later, one was taken, and we were left behind, and all the time she was ready, and I was not paying attention.

There are many prayers for Advent, and more for Christmas. But the prayer in my heart this morning is for another time, and for light on the long road toward Home:

O Lord, support us all the day long, while the shadows lengthen and the evening comes, and the busy world is hushed, and the fever of life is over, and our work is done. Then in Thy mercy grant us a safe lodging, and a holy rest, and peace at the last, through Jesus Christ our Lord. Amen.

Scripture: Psalm 122 and Isaiah 2:1-5 and Matthew 24:36-44

There’s a certain exotic comfort in imagining what it might be like to see the Second Coming of Christ, and I appreciate the opportunity the lectionary affords us each Advent to dabble in that esoterica of doomsday, Armageddon scenarios. One of our Wednesday morning bible study fellows and her sister said they have a relative like this: they say, whatever the reality of her life at the moment, she is living in doom. Garrison Keillor said last night on his radio show A Prairie Home Companion that Advent was for his family, never a time of hope and expectation connected to the cradle and the manger; but a chance to anticipate the terror and cataclysm of the Rapture (that is, rapture for ME and cataclysm for YOU) and the Last Days of the Second Coming of Christ. Many, I suspect, hold a conviction that Christ will come again…but how or why or when, is of little or no concern to the day to day business of being a person of faith in a complicated and chaotic world. Whether you believe in it or not, I will say this: the notion that the Second Coming of Christ will be a sudden, cataclysmic, and global event—whether impossible to predict or as sure as the turning of the century—lets church of Jesus Christ off the hook –freed from the responsibility for expectation implied in the teaching of Jesus in the twenty-fourth chapter of the gospel of Matthew, when he says, therefore you must also be ready, for the Son of Man is coming at an unexpected hour.

Doomsday scenarios aside, manufacturing a sense of expectation in the coming presence of God is not an easy matter, in the season of Advent or anytime. We’re used to life the way it is. God is less an unexpected visitor—or even invader—than a familiar part of our spiritual scenery, a spiritual safety net under our ordinary days, reserved for extraordinary moments of need. Advent seems less a time of spiritual preparation than the onset of a frantic season of partying and shopping, accompanied by a dull sense of dissatisfaction—that somehow we have been missing the point all along. For what are we supposed to be getting ready? And why should we bother? Yesterday morning, working on the roof of a church in Ft. Pierce with others from our congregation, I pounded nails and wondered aloud—what do you think all this might have to do with Advent. One looked up at me and said—when’s Advent? Another, more practically than I might have imagined, said: Advent is like wondering when we’re ever going to get off this roof, pulling tiles, and go have lunch. That was a new metaphoric possibility for me, and I fleshed it out, incarnate, as I continued to pull nails: Advent as a season of tedious expectation; boring, repetitive work followed by a brief, quickly digested payoff, the timing of the whole mess dictated by the whims of an obsessive, but not necessarily too attentive, pastor. Ouch. I decided it was time for Christmas—I mean, lunch.

I want you to try an experiment with me for the next few moments. Close your eyes, and, just for the next few minutes, empty your mind and spirit of any distractions.

Forget what you think you know about this passage of scripture, dismiss what you believe or don’t believe about the Second Coming of Christ, set aside what you believe it is trying to teach you, and just listen…listen with an open mind, receiving whatever images come to you as the words wash over your ears, and through your spirit. Breathe deeply, and let the wind of God flow through your body as you breathe slowly in and out. Listen:

But about that day and hour no one knows, neither the angels of heaven, nor the son, but only the father. For as the days of Noah were, so will be the coming of the Son of Man. For as in those days before the flood they were eating and drinking, marrying and giving in marriage, until the day Noah entered the ark, and they knew nothing until the flood came and swept them all away, so too will be the coming of the Son of Man. Then two will be in the field; one will be taken and one will be left. Two women will be preparing food together; one will be taken and one will be left. Keep awake, therefore, for you do not know on what day your Lord is coming. But understand this : if the owner of the house had known in what part of the night the thief was coming, he would have stayed awake and would not have let his house be broken into. Therefore you also must be ready, for the Son of Man is coming at an unexpected hour.

What did you notice? What did you feel? What images came to you? Here is what I noticed: how did Noah get into a story about the Second Coming of Christ? What are his people doing here, eating and drinking and going about their business until the flood came and washed them all away? I thought about Noah, and here is what I saw: a flood, sweeping mud and debris and raging water through the villages of Haiti, shell-shocked survivors wading through the wreckage of Gonaives. Teenagers, shot to death in their dorm room in China. Statistics in the pages of the Miami Herald earlier this week: the death tolls from hurricanes Charley, Frances, Ivan, Jeanne. You must also be ready, for the Son of Man is coming at an unexpected hour.

We would like to believe that we are ready: living buffered by the affluence of the first world, covered by insurance, secure in our gated neighborhoods, on the receiving end of a regular paycheck, surrounded by family and friends, people of faith. But the world is closer than it used to be, and it grows harder and harder to believe that we will always be safe. We do not know the day, the hour, or the way that God will visit us, or perhaps someone, or something else. We can’t prepare for it. We can’t predict it. If we had known at what hour the thief would break into our house, we would have been ready, but who can know such things? Even the security system isn’t foolproof. There is something impersonal in a hurricane, a mudslide, a volcanic eruption, a diagnosis of Alzheimer’s, or cancer. Something impersonal, and unfair, and disturbingly random. It could happen to us, as easily as it happened to a family in Haiti. It does happen to us. Two women are working: one gets sick, the other doesn’t. Two men show up every day, do their work as competent professionals: one gets laid off, the other, promoted.

We hear the words of Jesus in a new way, don’t we, surrounded by these strong and immediate images? Suddenly we can see it: this is not about the “Second Coming,” far off and apocalyptic–no, not at all. It is about life, the way life is for us and for others, and about what, if anything we can do about it. Keep awake therefore, for you do not know the day or the hour. Trying to master the formula for the End Times won’t do it. Eating broccoli and cutting down on saturated fats won’t do it. Stuff happens, and there’s nothing to do about it, except to attend seriously the words of Jesus: be ready.

What does it mean for us to be ready? To stay awake, anticipating the knock at the door, the phone call at two a.m., the breaking of glass, the roaring of wind, the doctor’s words, I’m sorry, there’s nothing more we can do.

I know my first response is truly to keep awake—that is, to lie awake at night, worrying about what might happen, wishing there was something I could do to protect myself and those I love more fully. There are times I have lain awake at night, and times that you have, as well. Maybe if I had done this—what if I tried that—if only I had known…what if… But that is not what Jesus meant. More anxiety will not make us ready. Fear is not preparation. Lying awake is not the same as keeping awake.

To live as those who are ready for the coming of the Son of Man means, in the season of Advent and in every season, to live as those who are paying attention. To live intentionally, attentively. One may be taken, another left behind. It may be you, it may be your next door neighbor, or your best friend. Did they make the best use of the time they had, honoring the days God gave them upon the earth? Was all the time you put into your work, your worrying, your exercising, your arguing, your wishing, worthwhile? Could that time have been used more happily? More usefully? Wonder whether you can do better, now that you have been reminded of the fragility and the preciousness of life? What about the time you have here, now? Keep awake, be ready.

To experience Advent is to know that the presence of God is just around the corner, and in our midst. To know that the spirit of God is available to help you live every moment with your eyes opened wide, intentionally, fully. We are not always gifted with knowing how and when. We do not always have more time to get ready. We do have right now, and that is all we have—all any of us has, really. To be an Advent people is to make now count: to be ready, to be awake, to live.

These past few weeks, I have been gifted with a rare opportunity to see what it might be like to try to pay better attention, to be ready for the ways God is trying to come to me. I have been trying to attend to the preciousness of life, attempting to stay awake in case it becomes necessary that I should be ready. There have been catastrophes and hurts and sudden endings in some of our lives. Others of us have faced bad news, and are waiting for outcomes…diagnoses, treatments, relapse, recovery. Let me tell you that you are amazing people. Honest. Faithful, in acknowledging that such things happen to some of us, to each of us, now and again: noting: I have not been unfairly singled out. Things happen, and this time, it happened to me. Resilient, and willing, for the most part, to share with the community, with this community, what is happening and what they need to get through it. Not all people “live in doom” in these ways, trusting each other, being honest with themselves and God. Witnessing these moments, I realize how much I want to be awake in every moment to the deep significance of how we live our days. I am continually amazed how they, how you, have been awake. And I have been thinking how easy it is to take our lives as baptized Christians for granted, and our families, and our God, and ourselves. When, if we are ready, if we are awake, life is an advent, an unfolding, a gift. Let us pray. O God, who yearly maketh us glad with the remembrance of thy son, so help us that, as we willingly receive him at his Advent, we may also joyfully welcome him when he shall come to be our judge. Amen