First Sunday of Advent

Happy Thanksgiving weekend! You’ve celebrated with your family and friends, or maybe you’re about to. Either way, welcome! The “holiday season” is starting.  Everything in here looks lovely, with the return of the Advent array. Things feel festive. Even the imagery from the readings is familiar: beating swords into ploughshares, peace between nations, putting on the armor of light….

...Until I read that passage from Matthew. That’s about the most unexpected, un-holiday, un-festive, un-Christmassy Gospel reading ever.

We're told the Lord draws near and will come suddenly like a flood, like a thief. We’re warned to stay awake. But the coming of the little Lord Jesus asleep in the hay isn't what we’re looking for, though. Oh, no no. We are warned to keep awake for the coming again of Christ as Lord and Judge of the earth, the one who will come suddenly and turn the world upside down in a rain of fire, and it’s the end of the world as we know it.

That does not make me feel like getting all cozy and in the holiday spirit. But it does jolt me out of the predictable sentiment of the season, into an awareness that Jesus is more than a ceramic statue in the nativity scene, or a benevolent guy who gives us stuff that we ask for.  

It’s a sobering reality that Christ will come again to our earth, as we are busy, busy, busy with our lives, just like the flood swept away everyone in Noah’s time. They were busy with their lives. Sure, they knew God, and maybe they said they worshipped him, but they just really didn’t worry about him. He had very little to do with their lives, until, of course, the flood came.

You’ve got four weeks to get ready. Not with shopping lists and cooking. No-- these four weeks of Advent are provided as a wake-up call to you. An alarm clock that jolts you out of your drowsy state. A buzzer that goes off to kick your spirit out of the bed it is sleeping in. A bell ringing insistently that tells your sleep-fogged brain that you’d better get up. It’s the phone call in the middle of the night. It’s your Mom yelling at you to get up in the morning.

Except it’s bigger than all those things. We are sinful, messed up people, with sinful messed up families, We are people walking in darkness who need rescued. And that, ultimately, is what Advent is all about. Waking up to the realization that Jesus is our light in the darkness. That our world desperately needs a Savior. That we are messed up people—and a lot of it our own fault-- and Jesus is the only one who can get us right again. At our world’s darkest, comes the annual celebration of the Light. The light which shines in the darkness, the darkness that cannot overcome it.

That light is Jesus. Jesus, who came as a baby to save the world from death. Jesus, who will come again in glory and power as the king of the universe. And Jesus, who comes to us in a word of hope and mercy, a bit of bread and wine for forgiveness, a splash of water that wakes the sleeper and raises the dead.

It’s easy, in this Advent time, for our holiday crazies to overshadow the Advent call of wake up, repent, prepare! It’s easy for us to get caught up in the to do list of Christmas, or everything else that’s going on in our lives and in our world, so that we lose completely the discipline of looking for the Savior.

It’s easy to ignore the larger truth of Christ coming again in power and glory,  and let the anxiety and grief and mess of our lives and our world overwhelm us to the point where the light of Christ seems imaginary—made up, something people talk about in a church somewhere, but that’s not really real.

Except it is real. Real as a baby in a manger who is King. Real as a dead man suddenly living again. Real as this piece of bread and this sip of wine which is the body and blood of God. God come to you. In your hands, in your mouth. God come to raise you up, to steal you away to his kingdom, to the mountain of the Lord, where you will lay down your weapons and learn war no more, and you will walk in the Light of the Lord.

Sleepers, awake. The night is far gone; the day is near.  The Lord is coming. He is coming into your lives and your hearts, as surely as he came on that Bethlehem night long ago, and as certainly as he will come again. He comes to rescue you from the old sin, from your old ways. He comes to save—save even you. No one is beyond his mercy. Be watching and waiting, ready to receive him, ready to open the door to light and life, and love. Amen.