Sunday, December 1, 2019. Rev. Jen Dunfee, preaching.Scripture Readings: Isaiah 2:1-5; Matthew 24:36-44

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SERMON TEXT

It

is human nature to organize our lives around routines and schedules, and to

feel a little out of control when we lose them.   A few weeks back I was visiting a friend

with a 3 month old who described the difficult adjustment to the

unpredictability of a baby’s eating and sleeping schedule.  Later that day I went to a rehabilitation

center where the person said something similar about the challenge of no set

schedule where each day can be an unpredictable guess as to when and how many

sessions of therapy occur.

Families with children in Fairfax County and other schools are on day 5 of no set schedule vacation, and Monday will be a tough wake up for us, as we immediately abandoned all reasonable bedtimes and organization.  I am looking forward to the return of the comfortable and secure routine of work and school, meals and homework. Not so sure about my kids!

Life is balance between the beauty of routine – cruise control days, and those things that shake it up and wake us up from it: school vacations and new babies, transitions like retirement, new jobs, difficult changes like medical events, grief, relationships ending.  In these times we are required to pay a different kind of attention on the road, where moving forward seems less straightforward; the path not clear. 

The transition to Advent from Ordinary Time is about shaking it up and waking up, about being required to pay a different kind of attention to our lives and our faith.  It may surprise you that this is the first Sunday of Advent given that when I went to buy Halloween Candy, on October 31st around 4:45 p.m., I grabbed whatever bags were left to the procrastinators in a bin next to a full-on Christmas display.  In October.  Good people can debate when it is appropriate to start celebrating the Christmas season (as my family does) but if you want to wait until Advent it will require a lot of muting the television and shielding your eyes through stores.  

And yet Advent is not Christmas.  Advent asks us to wait even a little longer by giving us scripture readings like this one that always begins Advent, a reading about the Second Coming of Jesus Christ.  Not a natural fit for the Christmas season of putting up lights, decorating trees, and drinking peppermint coffees.  That transition to Christmas doesn’t ask us to be anything more than attentive consumers to the latest sales and trends.  The transition to Advent that slams the breaks on us is the one that asks us to “Keep awake because you do not know on what day your Lord is coming.”   Waiting requires a wakeful, watchful, readiness:

Therefore

you also must be ready, for the Son of Man is coming at an unexpected

hour.  Keep Awake, Keep Watch, Be

Ready. 

The

entire church year and therefore Advent and Christmas begin with the words of Jesus

that he will return one day, note that it assumes Christmas, O Come Emanuel has

come, and he is coming back again.  That

he hasn’t in about 2,000 years makes it harder for us to feel an urgency about

this.  If we knew tonight was the night

we would stay up all night waiting and watching, but it would be impossible to

stay up all night every night.  The need

for sleep would overtake us, we would find it hard to keep the necessary

adrenaline and sense of urgency, and we would quickly return to our routines.

Yet

every year on this Sunday we ask again, How do we keep watch for the Lord?  How do we stay awake?  First, we focus attention to where the Lord

shows up in the midst of our daily living. 

The folks in Noah’s time who are described as marrying, drinking and

eating and living their lives are not doing anything wrong, they are just not

doing enough right.  The opposite of

being awake, vigilant, and watchful is to be asleep,