Sermon — November 29, 2020
The Rev. Greg Johnston
“Beware, keep alert; for you do not know when the time will come.” (Mark 13:33)
On Christmas Eve, most American children will be so excited they’ll hardly be able to sleep. Full of cookies and hot chocolate, with the promise of presents coming just hours away, they’ll finally crash into bed, leaving their parents just hours to finish decorating and wrapping, with even less time for Santa Claus to come and eat the proverbial cookies left out by the fire. And then come four or five in the morning, the kids will be up, bright-eyed and bushy-tailed, ready to check whether Santa came this year; and their parents will share another bleary-eyed Christmas morning, exhausted but (hopefully) happy.
Now, Germans have a slightly different way of exhausting the family on Christmas Eve. My mother’s side of the family are all German-American, and we inherited some traditions from the old country, including the tradition of exchanging presents on Christmas Eve, not Christmas Day. So for years as kids, my mother and aunt would spend hours and hours of Advent creating a list; not a list of presents they wanted, but a list of activities to pass the day. They’d wake up in the morning and start checking items off the list. Ride our bikes around the neighborhood: check. Go swing on the swing sets: check. Play a few hand of gin rummy: check. By the time they’d finished off the whole list, it would be… only 10 a.m., with eight agonizing hours to wait. By the end of the evening they’d climb into bed tired out from playing and from waiting, well-fed, and worn out with the joy of their new gifts. And their parents would get a good night’s sleep.
Waiting itself is exhausting. No doubt. It’s a remarkable thing, but anxious alertness really does wear you out, even if you’re doing literally nothing other than waiting; in fact, especially if you’re doing nothing other than waiting. When you’re waiting for something exciting or frightening, your sympathetic nervous system gets your body ready to go. Like a driver warming up a car, it ignites all your systems, getting ready to drive at the drop: your heart beats faster, your blood pumps at a higher pressure, your muscles tense, and this all takes more work than just sitting around, relaxing. And so ironically, the longer we’re waiting anxiously for something to come, the less ready we are to face it; when it finally arrives, we’re exhausted, not prepared—especially if we haven’t managed to come up with any good distractions.
In Advent, we wait and we watch. We live in the moment between two different realities. We’re suspended between what the Collect for the Day calls “this mortal life” and “the last day,” the world of human history “in which your Son Jesus Christ came to visit us in great humility” and the world of “glorious majesty,” “when he shall come again…to judge both the living and the dead.” We hope and we pray and we wait for our Savior to be born, a new light shining in the world in the darkest days of the year. And we hope and we pray and we wait for our Savior to return, in his own mysterious way, and to dispel the darkness once and for all.
This Advent, more than ever, we live suspended between two realities. We live in hope, with the joyful news of multiple vaccines more effective than the scientists had dreamed, coming, just around the corner. And we live in fear and anxiety, as the virus spreads, as the days get colder and our world grows darker. We remember the love and the care that people have shown for one another in the last nine months; and we acknowledge how exhausted we are by everything we’ve had to do—and not do.
“Beware,” Jesus says, “keep alert… Keep awake—for you do not know when the master of the house will come, in the evening, or at midnight, or at cockcrow, or at dawn,or else he may find you asleep when he comes suddenly.And what I say to you I say to all: Keep awake.” (Mark 13:33–37) If we take it literally, it’s not the best advice. This kind of constant vigilance, this unsleeping alertness, might work for one night. If you’re young enough, you might even recover by the next day. But day after day, waiting, watching, not just for a week or a month or a year but for generation after generation and century after century, waiting two thousand years and more for the master of the house to return? It’s impossible; the human body can’t take it. “Keep awake” on this two-thousand-year, Final-Day-of-Judgment scale simply cannot be what Jesus literally means.
But there’s a smaller scale of alertness that we sometimes miss in our focus on bigger things. Over and over again this year, I’ve been praying that same prayer Isaiah prays: “O that you would tear open the heavens and come down!” (Isaiah 64:1) You may have prayed similar things. Come down, God; do the awesome deeds that we expect. Come down and heal the sick; hide your face from us no more. Come down and heal our nation; reshape us like clay into a better form. Come down and make your name known—for we are your people! “O that you would tear open the heavens and come down!” I’ve had enough of 2020. Make it stop.
But in all our anxiety For All This To Be Over, though, I think we miss all the ways in which God has torn open the heavens and come down, the ways in which God walks among us even now. In our exhaustion and our despair, in our anxiety and alertness, we so wear ourselves out that we’re too tired to notice the presence of God right before our eyes. In our anxiety to get to the great joy of our Christmas-Eve presents, we miss out on all the little joys of our Christmas-Eve activities: the hard work of pedaling around the block, the exhilaration of swinging high into the air, the satisfaction of beating our big sister at cards.
This is the level where Paul’s prayer for the Corinthians operates. It’s not an exhortation to stay awake and alert; it’s not a prayer to God to come down, soon; it’s a prayer of thanksgiving. Paul gives thanks for the grace that the church has received from God, the grace that strengthens them and sustains them as they wait for the coming of Christ. Paul has no anxiety about whether God will come again; “God is faithful,” after all, he writes. (1 Cor. 1:9) Paul simply gives thanks for all those gifts of the Spirit that the members of the church receive each day, the million little gifts that give them strength enough to make it to the end.
From time to time over the last nine months, I’ve had a few moments when I’ve been alert enough to be grateful for the gifts in front of me: for the excuseto say no to a meeting because I need to be with my child, for the necessity of coming up with no places and ways to play, for the sheer joy of even a few strange Sundays together in church. More often than not these days, I’m resentful, not grateful, but it’s that shift I want to cultivate: from “when will this be over, God?” to “help me to see you here and now, God.”
My mother’s Christmas-Eve list of activities never lasted through the day, but it was a good start. So what’s on your Advent list? How are you going to make it through the next few months? What will give you the spiritual strength to appreciate those parts of this time that are good, and to the rest? How will you rest enough to stay awake to God’s presence already in our midst? “For you do not know when the time[s] will come” when you will see him; not just one big time on Christmas or on Judgment Day, but a dozen little times every day.
Amen.