Keep Awake Mark 13:24-37 December 1, 2002, First Sunday of Advent Year B The Rev. William V. Livingston, Rector Church of the Resurrection, Starkville, Mississippi "Keep awake." These are words Diane often says to me. You see, I have a habit of going at a steady pace, averaging about 6 hours sleep, but when I sit calmly - such as attending a concert - I fall asleep. Diane lives in fear one day I will fall asleep at a worship service while officiating. By calling us to keep awake, the author of Mark does not call us to a state of exhaustion but to a state of alertness, an alertness that demands we understand the world as lived by Jesus as contrasted to how we normally live our lives. As you can see, we have started a new liturgical year. We have lit the first Advent candle, the Prophecy candle, a sign Christmas is just around the corner. We Anglicans struggle during Advent. How do we prayerfully and worshipfully experience Advent while the rest of the world is caught up in its consumer feeding frenzy? We struggle with the fact that our culture tells us that from Thanksgiving until Christmas we are called to spend, consume, and be consumed until Christmas day, the day on which we hope to fulfill so many personal and family expectations. But, our liturgical cycle reminds us to keep awake so that we hear Advent tell us Christ is near, and Christmas tell us Christ is here. Unlike Lent, a time of reflection, Advent is a time of remembering what God has done in the past: in Moses, in the prophets, in Jesus, and in our own lives. It is a time of being aware of the present, of allowing the light of Christ to shine into the darkest corners of our lives and of experiencing Christ in those around us: both those who nurture us and those who need our nurture. Advent is a time of preparation for the future: for some fresh coming of Christ - at this year's Christmas and in that larger future whereby we reimagine our present. Thus, Advent, if we experience it, leaves us with feelings of both anticipation and anxiety. For those of us who have been parents, this simultaneous anticipation and anxiety remind us of times just before the birth of a child, or, when our children were adolescents, the anxiety of awaiting their return when they stayed out beyond their curfew. It is the type of anxiety I feel as I watch the news and realize how close we are to war and our son as a Navy SEAL may be in harms way but he cannot even let us know where he is. It is the anticipation of each call from our daughter-in-law letting us know he is safe that day. It is the type of anxiety I imagine Charles and Jean Little have experienced as they knew Bob was undergoing medical care in Africa and they waited with anticipation each email letting them know he was doing better. It is such apprehension that we should use to understand the feelings that should be elicited by Advent. While Advent is a time of preparation, a time to get ready for Christmas, it also stands on its own. Advent tells us that the time to seek and accept God's grace to be able to cast off the works of darkness is always now. To do this we need to tell the story, placing it in our current context. Yes, we are preparing for Christmas, but not a Christmas that salvages our faltering economy, but Christmas that salvages our faltering lives through the Incarnation. If we have not come to grips with Advent, we will not have a very deep understanding of Christmas. In Advent Christians are seized by the scandal of the Incarnation - a moment of divine self-revelation as startling as the scandal of the cross. In Advent, we concentrate on what the coming of Christ means. It reminds us that our Lord came in great humility; and yet that coming has changed the world more than any other event in history. However, the deeper meaning of Advent has to do with preparing for the Second Coming of Christ and focusing on the Last Things, which are traditionally expressed in the words Death, Judgment, Heaven, and Hell. The Lessons and Collects of Advent proclaim that the Judgment Day must be faced. We need to tread lightly into the subject of the Second Coming or the end of time. Paul, and the early Christian community, believed the Second Coming was just around the corner, and that the End of Age was near. For the first several centuries of Christianity, all looked for the Second Coming in their lifetimes. Countless other millennialists right on up to Pat Robertson, and modern Adventists of our time have tried to tell us that the Second Coming is at hand. However, Advent and today's reading from Mark bring us into full contact with the tension of our faith. This tension means living faithfully in the spirit our claim of the Nicene Creed: "He will come again in glory to judge the living and the dead, and his kingdom will have no end," and to simultaneously hear Jesus' words from Mark: "about that day or hour no one knows, neither the angels in heaven, nor the Son, but only the Father." Thus, Jesus leaves us all in a state of expectant unknowing. We are to maintain a split vision: to look up for Jesus in the clouds with one eye, while keeping the other focused on the earth in Jesus' name in the now. In this sense of preparation, this sense of the Second Coming, we need to be careful that our focus is not so heavily on the end of time. Instead, our sense of preparation, our sense of living faithfully in the spirit should deal with the full sense of mortality and unpredictability of our earthly lives. Consider all the accounts we hear in which a husband's last contact with a wife or mother's last contact with a child was one in anger. Consider all who have delayed answering what they sense as a call because they assume they have so much more of their lives ahead of them only to have their lives cut far shorter than anticipated. In Advent, as we heard in today's reading from Mark, we are to hear the invitation to live out this mortal life in the light Jesus brought to us in his great humility and without the knowledge of when the end will come. Just as we will never fully understand Christmas without first coming to grips with Advent, only by living fully in the ambiguity of the present, only by letting Jesus be present, now, in the messiness of our lives, will we come to understand what it means to live in the eternity brought on by the last day. We live fully in the present when we can put into practice these words of Martin Luther King, Jr., "If a man is called to be a street sweeper, he should sweep streets even as Michelangelo painted or as Beethoven composed music. He should sweep streets so well that all the host of heaven and earth will pause and say, here lived a great street sweeper who did his job well." Only by connecting with this call to fully live in the present, only when we understand we are to simultaneously look for Jesus in the clouds and look for Jesus in the eyes of those who are hungry and thirsty and in prison, only then are we able to understand that God became incarnate to reveal to us an alternative to the sin and death of our earthly ways and rejoice in his second coming. This time of remembrance, of living in the present, and of preparation is a time to acknowledge more deeply the ways that we need God's anointed to come. It is a time for the lighting of our Advent candles to symbolize the light of Christ shining into the darkness of our lives, to allow this light to ignite an awareness that despite all the lights and noise of Christmas commerce that the world is cold and in need, to illumine God as present with us in the ambiguity of the here and the now and in the messiness of our lives and who still wants so much more for and from us. Advent says, "Not yet, not enough." Advent proclaims that the One who came in humility as a little child, and comes to us in Word and Sacrament, will come again in glorious majesty to judge both the living and the dead. This gives us the perspective we need. It reminds us that the future as well as the past and the present are in God's hands. It reminds us we do not know when the end will come, but we do know the task that has been given to us. Keep awake.