Matthew 24:36-44
It is Christmas Eve in the late 1960s. I am lying awake in my bed beside the window, looking out into the dark night sky, hoping for a blinking red light to signal that Rudolph and Santa were on the way. I just knew that if I could stay awake long enough that I would surely see them. And it was easy to stay awake, wondering what was in all of those packages under the Christmas tree, and thinking about all the things I had asked Santa Claus to bring me, and hoping that all – or at least most – of them would be under my stocking on the fireplace. I would think and wonder and hope and stare out at the night sky trying my best to stay awake. But it was impossible, of course; sooner or later I would drop off to sleep, usually still hearing the voices of my parents and grandparents in the den, a comforting lullaby in the familiar sound. And I would wake up the next morning, realizing that I had once again missed my chance to be awake to see Santa Claus when he came down our chimney.
The gospel reading for this first Sunday in Advent is all about staying awake. It is about being ready for the day when Jesus comes again. Of course, this is complicated by the fact that – unlike Christmas Eve and Santa Claus – we don’t know when Jesus is going to be returning. In fact, Jesus said that even the angels in heaven don’t know the day or the hour of that big event; and, shockingly, Jesus himself doesn’t know. Only God the Father knows when Jesus will be coming back. And so the task for all who have faith in Jesus is to keep awake – we don’t know when the second coming of Jesus will take place, so we have to be ready at any moment. Surely Jesus will come at an hour that we least expect him.
Now I realize that thinking about the second coming of Christ is probably not at the forefront of your minds this morning. You are preoccupied with Christmas, with the hanging of greens, the decking of halls, and the trimming of the tree. And, for some of you, as Pastor Mark E. Yurs in Verona, Wisconsin points out, thinking about Jesus coming again is “enough to give more than a few of [you] the creeps.”
There are generally two reactions people have to scripture passages that talk about the return of Jesus. Professor David Bartlett, of Columbia Theological Seminary in Decatur, Georgia, describes those ways of thinking. First, some Christians believe that the emphasis on the next appearing of Jesus is “much ado about nothing, or at least much ado about nothing believable.” They don’t understand why anyone spends time thinking about this mysterious day that will happen sometime in the future. For this group, there is the possibility of becoming apathetic about the second coming of Christ. On the other hand, some Christians think the second coming is the heart of the gospel, and they anxiously search for signs that the end times have begun. But Bartlett believes that there is another way, something besides apathy or anxiety. That way of looking at things is to remember what God has done in the past and feel confident about what God will do in the future in his own time. In fact, Advent is a time when “we wait in hope because we wait in memory.”
The way of faith, according to Bartlett, is to believe that God is sovereign over all of human history, and that the God who created history at the beginning is also history’s goal at the end. History is moving towards a time when God will make all things new. While no one knows the day or the hour when Jesus is to return, it is no use to anxiously look for signs that the time is near. We have to acknowledge that there are things we just aren’t going to know, that we cannot know. We must find a way to trust in the future without controlling or even knowing the details of what is coming.
Karl Barth stated that we live “between the times.” We are living in the present age, and there will be an age to come. God’s kingdom will be realized on this earth. But that time is not yet. And so we wait. And we watch. And we make sure that we are prepared, since we don’t know when that time will arrive. Advent is a time when we are reminded of God’s promises to Israel that Immanuel would come – God with us would come in human flesh to deliver his people. And Advent calls us to anticipate the day when Immanuel will return as King of kings and Lord of lords. We have to be ready for the coming of the Lord at any time, we have to prepare. We have to make sure that we are prepared when the Lord comes again.
Of course, waiting with confidence and trust can be difficult for some people. They become so obsessed with knowing the when and the where and the how that they pore over scripture trying to figure out a timeline of the events that will lead up to the return of Jesus. Some of you might remember the book by Hal Lindsay in the 1970s, The Late, Great Planet Earth, in which he actually gave a date when he believed Jesus would come back. Of course, when the day came and went and Jesus still had not returned, he had to publish another book adjusting his predictions. Then there was the popular series of novels by Tim LaHaye and Jerry Jenkins, the Left Behind series, that came along in the 1990s.
But maybe the point of Jesus’s words here about keeping awake and being prepared is to make sure that our focus is on the present, not the future. While it is true that there is a coming day of judgement, a day when Jesus returns and establishes the kingdom of God on earth, the point of all of this is to realize that it matters what we are doing in the here and now. Being prepared is not a mental or spiritual state, at least not primarily; it is living right now the way of Christ in the present world.
I would like to suggest that the way to be prepared, to keep awake, is not about figuring out when Jesus will come back, but about figuring out how to be Jesus in the present day. In other words, to live out our faith in the here and now. Are we feeding the hungry? Are we clothing the naked? Are we standing with the oppressed and marginalized and poor? Those things are what Jesus will be looking for when he comes back.
Jesus offers up a parable to illustrate what he means by his teaching. He says that if the homeowner knew when the thief was coming to rob him, he would be prepared and he would stay awake to make sure that his house was not broken into. But I don’t imagine that the homeowner was just sitting there by his front door holding a baseball bat. I see him buying stronger locks for the door, maybe a security system with a camera at each corner of the house with real-time video feed into his computer. Perhaps he bought a dog. But whatever he did, he wasn’t just sitting around waiting for the burglar to show up. In the same way, we should be doing what we can do while we wait for Jesus to return. We aren’t just supposed to sit around and say, “I want to be ready for Jesus, so I’m going to sit here and watch.” We are supposed to be busy doing the things Jesus calls us to do – love, forgive, show hospitality and compassion and mercy, reach out to the poor and meet their needs, speak out against injustice and oppression. Jesus is coming back, yes, it’s true, but we have work to do in the meantime.
This Advent season, I pray that we will all remember to keep awake, not just during Advent, but all the time. We know that the world that we see is not the world that Jesus will bring into existence when he comes again. But we begin to transform that world while we wait for his coming. We live as if the kingdom of God were already here. Because, through you and me, it is already here.
