First Sunday of Advent

If you should want to change the world as you know it, I mean really change it, change it in a fundamental way, to what power do you appeal? This is the question for this last Sunday of the year, the Feast of Christ the King, and for the beginning of the new year.

Journalists seek to tell us the news, the facts about things that are happening today in our world and community. To do that they often write out the facts in a particular order. You probably remember. "Who? What? When? Where? How? And sometimes Why?" The question for today is not "Who?" We already know the answer to that question. All of us, that's who.

And the question for today is not even "What?" At least not yet, not until we've answered the main question for today.

The main question for today is "When?" After all, this is the first day of the new year in the Christian calendar. The First Sunday of Advent is the beginning of our liturgical calendar and the beginning of our waiting and anticipating the coming of the Christ child. As in all beginnings, we tend to focus on the question of time, the question of when things will take place.

Since about the 4th Century Christians have been taking time to prepare for the coming of the Lord in a variety of ways. Often the preparation has to do with being prepared or being ready to receive the Lord. In one such instance, the law for a region in Spain said that everyone must attend church daily from December 17 to the Feast of the Epiphany on January 6. The law went on to say that worshipers might not attend with bare feet during this time.

You may notice some changes at Chapel of Our Saviour during this time of Advent. The Rite I service is now at 10:30, where we will hear an interesting response for the next four weeks to the Priest's call of, "The Lord be with you." It may change a bit from week to week and pew to pew, but it is essentially, "And also...Spirit." Of course at the early service we have Rite II for the season of Advent, where we will hear, "The Lord be with you. And with thy...you."

However, those are just cosmetic changes in our liturgy, not changes in anything essential to our faith or practice. Still, the cosmetic changes take us off balance and make us more aware of what is going on around us. The Prayers of the People will be different. In one service, where we are used to making responses in the Prayers of the People, the person responsible for the Prayers of the People will say the prayer instead. Where we are used to responses in the Great Thanksgiving Eucharistic prayer, there will be a prayer said by the priest.

In the other service there will be the opposite. Where we are used to hearing only one person speak, we will be saying more responses in the liturgy.

There are other changes as well. The vestments and pulpit hangings in the church are a different color. We use blue for Advent. We will light a new candle on the Advent wreath every Sunday, saving the white candle for Christmas. All of this has to do with changes and working up to something.

If you have been listening and trying to keep up with the point that I said was our main question today, you may be wondering what all of this has to do with the question "When?" It's simple really. One of the most common responses I hear to change... change of any kind, change in families, change in jobs, change in housing, change in the liturgy, even change in the weather, and especially the kind of change we have been dealing with in our new state of war and terrorism... one of the most common responses I hear is, "When is this all going to get back to normal?"

When indeed. "When?" is the question for Advent, but it is an entirely different question than the one we usually ask. We ask, "When is life going to get back to the way I'm used to?" Or, "When is life going to be normal again?" The Scriptures ask, "When are we going to be ready for the coming of the Lord?" God doesn't ask, "When will things get back to normal?" because God doesn't want anything to get back to the way it was. God wants us to move forward.

The point of view or perspective for the question is different. One looks to the past, the other to the future. When we ask for things to get back to normal we are asking for things to get back to a state of stasis, to a state where we know and expect things to happen in a particular way. We are trying to go backwards in time and re-create a past we believe was better than the present. Often it is better because of a particular failing of human nature. We are not very accurate historians. We easily remember the good things we liked about the past and conveniently forget the parts of the past that we worked so hard to change.

We remember that great little hot rod we drove, how easy it was to repair, how fast it went. We forget that it got 3 miles to a gallon of gas, polluted the air more than 15 of today's cars and had such poor traction on the snow that it wouldn't go up the driveway. And the "airbag" in the front seat of that little hot rod? Well, lets just say that it didn't mean the same thing.

We forget that the past did not hold all of the answers either. We forget that people had to sit in a seat according to their color. We forget that people had to work in particular professions because of their gender. We forget that only those who could pass a literacy test could vote, and that the test was given and sometimes changed according to race or ethnicity.

God isn't fooled. God knows that there is no time in the past when we have led perfect lives or when our society attuned itself to the needs of the downtrodden. God knows that we need to turn around and face a different direction, one that we have never faced in the past. God asks us when will we change our hearts, when will we change our lives? But that means changing the way we do things so that they are different from the way in which they were done in the past. It means more change, not less, for our harried lives.

When will we beat our swords into plowshares, our spears into pruning hooks and our bombs into power plants? When will nation not rise up against nation and when will we cease to learn the art of war? It doesn't look like it's going to be today. If not today, when?

I can't change next week. I don't have time. It's not in my schedule. I don't know about you but I've not even begun to get everything done for Christmas that I need to have done. Just thinking about everything that I need to have done before Christmas and the end of the year makes me cringe. How many days until Christmas? Twenty-three?

When is the Lord coming? With any luck, maybe it will be before Christmas. Don't let my daughters hear me say that. When I was a student, I used to pray that the Lord would come before finals week and papers were due. You see how far I've come?

The Gospel, however, is not a message of despair. It is one of hope. Whether we are reading from Jeremiah the prophet in the Old Testament or John the Gospel writer in the New Testament, we read of hope. Our lessons today offer us hope that ONE DAY, perhaps not today, but ONE DAY, God's reign will be made clear to all - and all nations and peoples will come streaming to God because they will recognize that God offers what they have been looking for.

Isaiah says that people will come to God "that he may teach us his ways and we may walk in his paths." He goes on to describe what those ways are, ways of peace and justice for all peoples. Oddly, though, we are not the ones to work out the justice or make it come into being completely. That seems to be God's job. Paul tells us in Romans that if we would just love our neighbor as we love ourselves then we would be following the commandments and fulfilling the law. To put it another way, if we love our neighbor as we love ourselves we would be walking in God's path, the very same path that Isaiah talked about.

Those are messages of hope, messages that look to the future and know that with God all things are possible, even when I don't have time in my schedule to change the world. What I can do is my part. I can love the people I work with, play with, and live with. I can choose to love them as I love myself. I can also stay awake.

Jesus tells us just to stay awake because we don't know at what time the Lord is coming, and if we are awake then we will be paying attention to how we are treating those around us. Jesus believes we are cognizant of wanting to do right as long as we are alert and not fogged by other concerns. When we are alert, we are in touch with God and in touch with the path God has for our lives. When we are awake to God, we are awake to loving one another.

You remember that Jesus asked the disciples what people were saying about him. "Who do the people say that I am?" Buddha also asked his followers what people said about him. His followers said a variety of things that followers should say and Buddha replied to them, "I am awake." Perhaps he was awake and attuned to God as well as he could be in his own time and place. It is interesting that Jesus tells us to be awake, to watch, and that in doing so we will be doing enough. God will do the rest.

Jesus hasn't come for 2000 years. Why expect him now? Perhaps it's not a matter of worrying about his coming today or even before Christmas. Perhaps it is simply a matter of being awake and watchful in my life because of how that wakefulness will change my life, scheduled or not. Perhaps wakefulness is a state that allows me to anticipate change rather than run from it. Perhaps wakefulness shows me how I will live in the future if I am following God's path for my life.

Wakefulness is like fitness or readiness to run a race or plant a crop. We don't know when the race will begin so we have to stay in shape and be ready whenever the whistle blows. We don't know when the rain will stop but we have to have the seed and machinery ready to go out when it does. To put it in more modern terms, we don't know when the stock market will go forward but we have to be ready and paying attention when it does so that we can benefit by investing appropriately.

It does no good to say that I will get prepared later for the race, the planting or the stock market. It does no good to say that I will plan my will next year, or say my prayers next week or read the Bible tomorrow. It does no good to say that I will help my neighbor next week, or tell someone that I love them - tomorrow. None of us knows when the Lord will come either for us or for the whole of creation. What we do know is that it will happen. And if we are awake and watching, then we will be as ready as God can ask us to be. +