First Sunday of Advent (November 27, 2022)

Advent begins this year with Jesus’ admonition in Matthew 24:36-44 to “keep awake,” and “be ready.”

For what? For change, evidently. Sudden, massive, even calamitous change. Change that sweeps away all that is routine and familiar. Change on the scale of the Genesis flood, or Jerusalem’s destruction, or the “coming of the Son of Man” on a day known only to God. Nobody nods off in the middle of such calamities. But the run-ups to them often invite complacency and inattention. “Don’t be caught unaware or unprepared,” Jesus is telling his disciples (and us). “Be alert. Be prepared.”

But hypervigilance is the last thing I want to practice right now. All I want to do is make it to the end of the semester, sit through winter commencement in my professor’s robe and funny hat, file my grades, and coast into winter break, when I can sleep in, fix lazy breakfasts, lounge around the house, and worry about nothing more vexing than what to get my wife for Christmas. Maybe I’ll fiddle with that coding package I’ve been wanting to figure out. Amy wants to go to a light display in Nashville. Some movies are coming out that we want to see. We’ll drive home, of course, then drive back – things as routine today as the agricultural routines Jesus alluded to then. By the time the spring semester starts, I may actually feel bored.

My holiday torpor stems more from a perceived than actual lull in what is going on around me, though. As I do most semesters these days, I showed my students just a few weeks ago how to map tract-level poverty and food insecurity rates for Rutherford County, and I noted how the county’s struggling households tend to cluster in neighborhoods right around campus and along the I-24 corridor that runs though Smyrna and LaVergne toward the Davidson County border. The problems the people in those neighborhoods face won’t disappear over the holiday break. If anything, they will intensify, as heating bills rise, children go hungry without weekday school lunches, and family stresses mount. I know of people staring down their first Christmas since losing a loved one. I know of places where people will sleep outside tonight. Perhaps my willful obliviousness to the ever-present, always-unfinished work at hand is part of what Jesus is warning about.

I think there’s at least one other part, though, and naming it gets at why this scene, lifted from the Olivet Discourse toward the end of the Gospel story, makes a fitting a reading for the kickoff of an Advent two millennia after the story of Jesus’ birth, death and resurrection played out. During this time in between Jesus’s ascension and return, the struggle to stay watchful can be a struggle see that anything at all is happening. Here on the boundary between 2022 and 2023, God’s redemption of humanity can seem like a story paused on the last frame of the last Gospel. After a while, the pause can feel more like an end, and the story, increasingly irrelevant. It doesn’t help that all the action seems to be happening elsewhere, in places where superstars strut and pose, politicians wrangle for power, and the best things in life are just a few dollars out of reach. And whatever happened all those centuries ago, in a since-destroyed capital of a since-destroyed nation subjugated by a since-collapsed empire, it often doesn’t seem to have made things any better. Wars come and go, but keep coming. The greedy still exploit the vulnerable. Diseases still bring suffering and death. This vaunted redemption looks a lot like plain, old neglect. Or perhaps nothing more than a myth.

Thus, Advent isn’t merely a call to retell the story. It’s a call to believe that the story is still unfolding, to see that there was no pause, and to understand that being wakeful and ready means watching for our cues and performing our parts. It’s OK to rest by the manger and wonder at the love of a God who would put on our wounded flesh to save us. But can you see God, too, in all the improbable places? Can you meet God in them, and join in whatever God is up to there? All by yourself, you can’t. But I don’t see Jesus ever so much as hinting that we would have to do these things alone. Weren’t we remembering, just a few weeks ago, what he said on his way into the sky? He would be with us always, he said. Even to the end of the world.