Today is the First Sunday of Advent, the day which begins the Christian year. It is a shame that the cultural noise of our American holiday season almost obliterates this beautiful four-week moment. Advent is a time of watching and waiting, a time of hope, of expectation, and self-examination. We have turned it into a frenzy of shopping and partying instead.
Not that there’s anything wrong with buying gifts or seeing friends. But the way we do it gets in the way of the wonderful if strange rhythm of this season. Taken together, the four weeks of Advent prepare us for the coming of Christ. Later in the season we will focus on the approach of Jesus’s birth in Bethlehem. Today, at the start, we look way toward the future, toward, in the words of today’s collect, “the last day, when he shall come again in his glorious majesty to judge both the living and the dead”. Advent on this first Sunday is more about last things than former things. It is about getting ready for the ultimate disposition of our souls.
When I was in seminary I studied with Krister Stendahl, a great New Testament scholar and future Archbishop of Uppsala in Sweden. When discussing today’s gospel passage, Professor Stendahl said that this day, the First Sunday of Advent, has had a curious history. Over the course of the Christian centuries, churches have used every single liturgical color—purple and blue, yes, but also white, green, red and (you guessed it) even black to represent our perception of how we ought to regard the second coming of Jesus. Over time, the church has been both powerful and weak. If Jesus’s return is good news—if we’re oppressed or suffering—we’ll use white or red. If it’s bad news—if we’re the oppressors or the inflictors of suffering—we’ll use black. When in doubt, purple or blue will do.
Stendahl also said this when asked about the seeming contradiction between God’s judgment and God’s mercy. “God acts. How we respond to it depends on where we are in relation to it. Some of us will experience God’s action as judgment, others as mercy.”
Those two gems of wisdom from seminary days come to mind in relation to the gospel passage for today [Matthew 24: 36-44]. Jesus tells his disciples about the “coming of the Son of Man”. Everything will proceed as normal, he says. Then “one will be taken and one will be left”. It is easy to see how generations of apocalyptically-minded Christians have portrayed the coming of the Son of Man as a dramatic, cosmic event. It’s also possible to read this saying as a comment on the unpredictability of how each of our lives will end. One way or another, you and I are proceeding toward a final summing up. When we encounter God and Jesus in that moment, some of us will experience that meeting as judgment, others as mercy. Probably, for all of us, a little of both.
According to Jesus, this is a final exam for which we can do little to prepare. His advice in the mean time? “Keep awake therefore, for you do not know on what day your Lord is coming.”
“Keep awake”. I have watched with some amusement and then growing alarm the recent controversy about the word “woke”. I thought it a bit self-congratulatory for the original users of the term to describe themselves as having awakened from the slumber the rest of us endure. And then I thought it entirely bogus for those who objected to the term “woke” to apply it to all who espoused even modestly progressive views. Nobody, I believe, is truly “woke”. As Henry David Thoreau says in chapter two of Walden, “I have never yet met a man who was quite awake. How could I have looked him in the face?”
When Jesus tells us to “keep awake” he is telling us neither to “get woke” nor to hop ourselves up on No-Doz. He is, rather, telling us something about an attitude toward life. We might also render his words as something like, “Pay attention”. For after all, isn’t paying attention what spirituality is really about?
You and I live in a world that is making ever-increasing demands on our attention. American work life has become so invasive as to spill over the bounds of the week and take over what used to be our leisure time. Our devices connect us both to each other and to an endless stream of ads and messages that claim supreme importance. The pervasiveness of these messages makes us behave more reactively than intentionally. They ask that we respond to everything that comes at us without thinking.
One of the reasons the church has developed the prayer practices it has is simply to hold up for us things to contemplate that we wouldn’t otherwise encounter. When we come together on Sunday, from week to week we hear an array of scripture readings that tell us things we will not get on social media or cable TV. We are asked to listen to those Bible readings because they speak to us truths that can get obscured by the cultural noise which always threatens to overwhelm us. There’s not much room for love, justice, and compassion in our shared cultural pandemonium. We’ll only hear about God’s values if we seek them out.
I was once on a panel with the late Diogenes Allen, an author who taught the philosophy of religion at Princeton. At the end of the discussion, he told us to remember one thing: “We become what we attend to.” That saying has stuck with me over the years. “We become what we attend to.” If you attend to Tik Tok videos showbiz gossip, they will form your character. If you attend to Jesus, you will over time become like him. I believe that is what Jesus means when he tells us to “keep awake”. In a world dominated by celebrity and power and all kinds of bad values, the way to follow Jesus is to attend to him. Come to church. Read the Bible. Say your prayers. It’s not hard, but it requires the desire to do it.
Keeping awake, becoming what we attend to: these are what the season of Advent is about. It’s not only, or even particularly, about getting ready for Christmas. Advent is about a stance toward life. That is what Thoreau meant when he said, “We must learn to reawaken and keep ourselves awake, not by mechanical aids, but by an infinite expectation of the dawn . . .”
My late friend and mentor George Regas used to say that someone who doesn’t feel the joy and pain of the world has “gone to sleep on life”. It is only when I am spiritually asleep that I can drive by the homeless encampments around Los Angeles and feel nothing beyond annoyance. It is only because I have gone to sleep on life that I can ignore the stories of real suffering and injustice in the news and get distracted by the gossip. It is only because I have gone to sleep on life that I can miss real moments of natural beauty or interpersonal connection because I’m distracted by the intrusive claims of my iPhone.
Thoreau also said, “To be awake is to be alive”. He might have been channeling Jesus. On this First Sunday of Advent, we hear Jesus calling us to wake up! Step out of the information glut that engulfs you and pay attention to the people and the world around you. Stop listening to pundits and start listening to Jesus, whose teaching will always point you toward a true appreciation of life in all its mystery and wonder. We have all become sleepwalkers. It is time for us to wake up.
“We become what we attend to.” As we make our way through this beautiful time of year in California, let us approach December 25 not in a slavish frenzy of consumption but in a watchful, hopeful “infinite expectation of the dawn”. God is always coming toward us. Let us prepare for God’s advent by watching, by waiting, by paying attention. If we are faithful and persistent in redirecting our gaze toward Jesus and the life he offers, we will, as Paul says, “cast off the works of darkness and put on the armor of light”.
Wake up! Jesus is coming toward you. Use this time to prepare yourself to recognize and receive him as he approaches. Amen.
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