Watch!

The readings for the 1^st Sunday of Advent are here.

We begin a new liturgical year and a new liturgical season this evening.  It may seem a bit counter-intuitive.  During this late autumn season, the leaves shrivel and drop, the hours of sunlight diminish, the thermometer falls.  At best, it feels wistful; often enough, it can be a little depressing.  Also, our panic rises and our tempers get shorter as Christmas hurtles toward us like a freight train.  In the midst of this depression and anxiety the church nudges its way into our consciousness with a murmur of “Happy New Year.”  One might think the church is inviting us to take a different view of our lives.

It has taken me a long time to figure out that Advent is about time: past, present and future.  To be sure, most of the exalted seasons of the church year recall and celebrate things that happened in the past, such as the birth of the Savior, his passion, death and resurrection.  Advent has some of that character, too, as we remember episodes such as the coming of John the Baptist, and the angel appearing to Mary and to Joseph.  

But Advent, like the church year-end that come immediately before, also beckons us to look to the future. 

We humans can be distressingly pessimistic about the future.  It seems that, once one reaches and passes the milestones of early adult life – graduation, marriage, starting a career, getting a home, and so on – we stop relishing the future.  As I continue to age and my physical aptitudes and powers slowly ebb away, I can see ever more clearly why that would be.   The basic sequence of human life is that we age, our health declines, and then we die.  If that is the end, it doesn't seem much to look forward to.  And so we don't look forward to it.  Instead, we deny it, we avoid it, and when it finally confronts us such that we have no other option, we fight it.  That much always has been true of humanity.  If we add on to that the dark signs of our times –  the thin-skinned, capricious and unqualified man in the White House, the bankrupting of our retirement transfer payment programs, North Korea with a nuclear arsenal, climate change threatening our way of life –  it is no wonder people don’t feel hopeful.

It is into this pessimism that Christianity steps with a very different view of the future.   We disciples of Jesus don't believe that our lives meander without meaning toward the bleak endpoint of death.  We believe that every day brings us closer to something very definite: Jesus is coming again. We don’t only believe that Jesus walked this earth sometime in the remote past; we believe he is coming back.  Furthermore, the church advises us that his return is not something to dread, but rather an event to be anticipate with excitement and joy.  It's like the anticipation we feel about a coming wedding.  Or the expected birth of a child.  

And so, during Advent, as we celebrate mighty words and deeds from the past, and are sustained by sacramental grace during the present, we also look to the future.  In all of these segments of our lives, past, present and future, God was with us, is with us, and will continue to be with us.  As Paul says, “If we live, we live for the Lord, and if we die, we die for the Lord; so then, whether we live or die, we are the Lord’s.”  

Even our old nemesis and endpoint, death, can't stop the advent of our future with Jesus.  But our future is not something to take for granted. Nothing is easier than relinquishing our heavenly citizenship and just living an earthly existence, with its pessimistic and meaningless outlook on the future.  In Mark’s Gospel tonight, Jesus admonishes us not to let that happen.  We need to stay watchful.  We can't let the pessimism and nihilism of the kingdom of earth lull us into complacency. We need to stay awake.  Because the future will not be like the present.  He will come again.  And so we need to prepare ourselves.  Because he is coming.  We don’t know when, so the time to prepare is now, and every day.  Stay awake!  Watch!