Get Ready – Jesus is Coming
Advent 1 – November 28, 2010
“Keep awake therefore, for you do not know on what day your Lord is coming,” Jesus says. “Be ready, for the Son of Man is coming at an unexpected hour.” Keep awake – be ready. Important words to hear as we enter this new church year, as we begin Advent – a season of waiting and watching and getting ready for Christ to come – not as he did a long time ago in a manger far, far away, but as our triumphant King returning to judge the world. Keep awake; be ready! Important words, because it's easy to get sleepy, to start nodding off, to get distracted when you've been waiting, to forget what you are supposed to be getting ready for.
Jesus gives the disciples these examples of normal, everyday people caught up in the normal, everyday routines of their lives, just doing what everyone does. He points to the days of Noah, when people were eating and drinking, marrying and giving in marriage. He tells of 2 men working in the field, 2 women grinding meal together– nothing special about them. There's a home owner, caught off guard by the thief who breaks into his house.
Jesus tells the disciples these as cautionary tales – not because anyone is doing anything inherently wrong. There's nothing bad or evil about eating and drinking, marrying or working. You can't exactly blame the owner of the house for not knowing the thief's schedule. No, Jesus tells these stories to remind the disciples of how easy it is to fall asleep, to lose focus, to get so caught up in the things of this world that they lose sight of what is eternal. For those first disciples, and for the early church who first read these words from Matthew's gospel, the temptation was to forget who and what they were waiting for, and how they were supposed to live in the meantime, and if they did that, it would be a good bet that they would not be ready when Jesus came. So Jesus tells them these stories to warn them too, because when Jesus comes again, there won't be a warning. (Bus story – Aunt's house vs. our house – have to be outside, ready & waiting - can't see the bus coming from where I lived; now chance to scurry around at the last minute.) Jesus will come unexpectedly, unpredictably. There won't be a chance to get ready at the last minute, so they need to stay alert, they need to prepare for whenever Jesus will arrive.
On this first Sunday of Advent, Jesus' words come calling to us too, calling to us across the centuries: “Keep awake therefore, for you do not know on what day your Lord is coming... be ready, for the Son of Man is coming at an unexpected hour.” How easy it is for us to fall asleep, and not just because of the tryptophan from all that Thanksgiving turkey. No, Jesus is talking about our spiritual sleepiness, the temptation we face in our busy lives, with our busy schedules, to forget that there is something – Someone!- beyond our day-to-day lives; something – Someone!- more important than our to-do lists. Even in this season when so much of the world & our lives remind us that Christmas is coming, it's easy to prepare for Christmas and forget about getting ready for Christ. With everything else there is for us to remember, it can be easy to forget who & what we're waiting for, or that we're even supposed to be waiting and watching at all. We forget to be on the lookout for Jesus coming into our world, here and now, forget that we're supposed to be ready whenever he comes.
So, knowing that tendency toward forgetfulness, the 1st Sunday of each Advent brings us one of these gospel stories that startles us out of that spiritual sleepiness with their mysterious talk of the end of time, that splash of cold water, chosen to jolt us awake. Here in Matthew's gospel, tales of floods & people being taken & left behind, and thieves breaking in in the night – none of them the most comforting images, but they get our attention. And we are blessed to get this reminder every year, to hear Christ's call to keep awake and be ready – because we need it! Ready or not, Jesus is coming, at an unexpected, unpredictable hour – but he is coming.
And that's good news, even though we can be scared by the underlying tone of judgment. For those first disciples in the early church, living in the midst of struggle and persecution, the promise that Jesus was coming, however unexpectedly, to judge the world and set it right was a promise filled with hope. It was a promise that God had not abandoned them, that God had not forgotten them or their world. It was a promise that God didn't enter the world once as a baby and then leave forever, but that the same Jesus would come again. It is a promise of presence. And knowing this changed everything. It filled them with anticipation, even as they went about their normal lives, as they ate and worked and married and slept. It gave them eyes to look for the extraordinary presence of God in the midst of their ordinary routines. That is what it means to keep awake, to be ready – it is to be on the lookout, to seek what Christ is already doing in the world & to join in, even as they wait for him to fulfill the promise to come again.
Jesus is coming. It is a promise for us too – and an invitation – an invitation to reorient our lives – to center them around the Coming One. And this is one way to think of what it might look like to keep awake and be ready. Waiting for Jesus' return is kind of like having a baby. Kind of, because you have a better idea of when a baby will arrive – even if you don't know the day or the hour, you know that you have about 40 weeks to prepare. And that's what you do. Andy and I spent all sorts of time getting ready – painting the room, buying & putting together furniture, picking out car seats and strollers and high chairs and toys and books and all of the many many things these tiny creatures need. We went to breastfeeding class and childbirth preparation classes. We toured the hospital – not the hospital we ended up delivering at, but still... We went to the doctor on an ever-increasing basis, we picked out names, we read the books so we would know what to expect while we were expecting. We tried to get ready at work – the closer I got to my due date, the more things I had to arrange for my time away – coverage pastors, and making sure our congregational leaders knew who to call & when, the last flurry of visits before maternity leave. And in the midst of all that, life still went on... we went to work as usual, did the laundry, shopped for groceries, did the dishes, took care of our dog and cats. Just because I was pregnant didn't mean that I sat around and only did pregnant woman things.
We can take a lesson from that. Waiting for Jesus is a lot like waiting for a baby... because it's an active waiting. There are things to be done, ways that we can be getting ready, ways that we can be a part of what Jesus is already up to in the world by reaching out to the world around us, we can keep that focus. Keeping awake and being ready doesn't mean that we have to go sit on a mountain somewhere to pray and watch the clouds and just basically suspend our normal lives. Being ready means being faithful to what God has already called us, in the places God has called us to, in our different roles – as parents and children, spouses or singletons or widows or widowers, students, workers, friends, neighbors – but to put Jesus at the heart of your life, to follow through on that commitment we talked about last week – the one where Jesus comes to have first place in everything. And we do it all with expectation, with urgency – we know the due date is getting closer; any day could be the day. As we wait for Jesus we know that any day could be the day that we meet him finally face to face. And that will not be an end, but instead, a new beginning. It could even be today. May we be ready to meet him with joy and anticipation, whenever he may come.
Amen.
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