Awake
Isaiah 64:1-9; Mark 13:24-37

November 27, 2005

All these dire Biblical commands to stay awake and alert have never sounded easy to me. Sleep has always seemed an appropriate and desirable option. A few years back, however, I experienced the difficulties of being awake and alert when I would rather not have been. In order to earn some money as a stranger in a strange land in graduate school, I signed up regularly to be the night porter at my college on weekends.

That meant on Saturday and Sunday nights to spend the hours of 11:00 p.m. until 7 or 8:00 a.m. in the porter’s station in the lodge. Fortunately, not all the time was spent in the lodge. I now know why monks in the monastery have such a structured schedule as they arise for various liturgies and worship services throughout the night and into the day. When it is a struggle to stay awake, it is easier to have a precise schedule of things to do and places to go. Our college’s domestic bursar set out a rather regimented list of gates to lock, doors and boilers to check to make sure they were locked and didn’t blow up. The toughest job was making sure the college pub had shut down right after 1:00 a.m. Then there was one more round of checking a different set of doors, making certain all was well at 3:30 a.m. That was a dark, lonely walk.

Researchers have reported the disturbing news that people who do these midnight shift jobs routinely have a spell around 4:00 a.m. when they do not function well, even sort of black out. They are right. Don’t fly into an airport at 4 a.m. I could do well until the 4 o’clock hour, and then all systems seemed to shut down.

One weekend it was almost 5:00 a.m. and a student simply appeared at the window of the lodge. If I wasn’t awake, I was now. This is why I was supposed to be on duty. He hadn’t slept for a couple of nights probably due to food poisoning at a dinner two nights before and he had not been able to keep anything down. He didn’t look good at all. There was a protocol for us night porters: I called the college doctor on duty. Mrs. Livingstone sleepily answered the phone and made the contact with him at the hospital. I usually went to the other college doctor and had never met him. A car pulled up front and a man in a suit got out. I thought about it, but never said it, “Doctor Livingstone, I presume!” Just as well that I didn’t, for Dr. Livingstone was all business, went off to the student’s apartment, gave him a shot, and all was well. I had been awake when the thief had come in the night. Maybe thief is overstating it.

So there are two dilemmas facing us. How do we stay awake when our humanness catches up to us and tires us out? And then what is it - usually who is it - that we are waiting for? And, are we waiting for the right one at the right time?

As the years accumulate, I really like the idea of Advent. Advent proclaims in a moderate voice that we Christians possess a culture that is different from the surrounding cultures. We do things oddly and are not apologetic about it.

Advent resists the pressures of our society to do something useful. Advent is useless: nothing happens during it, there are no events. All we do is wait and get ready to wait some more. Most of us already know the answer through a sort of back door experience. Long ago you and I became aware of Christmas and the event of Bethlehem, most of us before we had heard or understood about Advent, so we assume that Advent is waiting for the Christ Child. Yet, nobody wants to wait. Most assume Christmas is the name and topic of the November and December season. It’s just that Christmas hasn’t happened yet.

I believe the idea is to start all over. The year ended last week, today begins a new year, and it should be a clean slate. The future is always open and unwritten, deeply influenced by its past, naturally, but never decided. Advent is the empty, yet expectant time of waiting for something God is bringing, but we can’t assume we know - or decide - what God is thinking.

It would be easy and probably a little flippant to say then that since the future is open Christ may not come this year at Christmas, that somebody or something else may come in his place - or even that this may be a sabbatical year for God and no one will come. I sincerely doubt that will be the case, but if we are to take God seriously and not assume that we call the shots, it would do us well to consider just such a Christ-less Christmas.

Instead, we are waiting with no real clue for a Christ we do not suspect. We’ve narrowed Christ down to an infant, cute and marvelous, but Christ has appeared in many other shapes and sizes, genders and moods. Can you wait for someone about whom you really have no idea what he or she looks like? It depends upon how good you can wait, how awake and alert you can remain.

There is a critical distinction between being awake and being ready. A lot of people and institutions believe that they can prepare for any eventuality, and there are many organizations that are rather thorough and creative in imagining possible scenarios and developing a strategy that they then train their professionals in how to respond - airline and combat pilots, for example. Yet, as finite human beings, the infinite combinations of this world are beyond our ability to control. Who was really prepared for September 11th? Our imagination could not comprehend or foresee how evil would strike. The bombing of the London Underground in July demonstrated sadly that we were only prepared to deal with what happened afterwards, not preventing the bombing. The tsunami in South Asia, the earthquake in Pakistan, and the devastation of Hurricane Katrina, all were predictable to a degree, but like a thief in the night there are limits to knowing when these events would happen.

We cannot be absolutely prepared, but we can be absolutely awake and have the wherewithal to know what we have to do now. Isaiah is praying to God for the Israelites who have returned home to Jerusalem following their liberation from the exile in Babylonia, but they have found only a destroyed city, a burned out temple of the way they used to be religious. New Orleans and its residents know a lot of what the Jerusalemites knew and felt.

Mark 13 is called “the Little Apocalypse,” a foretelling of the destruction, once again, of Jerusalem, nearly 600 years later. It is not a happy chapter, and many want to eliminate it from the category of Good News. Others delight in its dire predictions and want to make it the chapter that interprets the rest of the Gospel. Nowhere does Jesus imply we can be prepared and prevent all of this, but we can be fully awake and alert. No one knows when it will happen, not even the angels or Jesus himself - though many keep trying to predict the exact date.

You always have to be awake to see the good and the Good News in everything that happens in the world. Those desperate oracles of Isaiah and Jesus were not denying how bad things were and what part we had in creating them, but both of them were trying to tell us how we can continue, despite the 9/11’s and the Katrinas. You can’t dwell on the bad stuff and the tragedies of these events, wallowing in the evil of our enemies or the incompetence of our leaders, as if blaming someone is going to heal someone or give them back their home. Evil wants you to do exactly that - just go to it and get overwhelmed and paralyzed by the absurdities and tragedies of life and get really into blaming somebody. There’s an endless supply of blamable people, and you can really feel self-righteous, but you’re still stuck at Ground Zero.

Stay awake and look for the good amidst the tragic, the kind among the cruel, the redemptive opportunities rather than the destroyed remains. Stay awake and look at the mess with creative imagination to figure out how you are going to keep on. When Mark wrote his Gospel, things were bad as any September 11 for God’s people: a foreign government controlling the territory, impoverishing the people and robbing them of every good resource they possessed, and now the imminence of a revolt and war that could only lead to destruction and murder. And it did happen: the Temple was burned down again and the structure of Jewish faith was decimated. But the Gospel is not the chronicle of a dead people and a fallen civilization. At the worst moment, Jesus calls out to us to wake up. New Life is about to erupt into our vision - if only we have the eyes to see the presence of God at work amidst what others have determined to be hopeless.

We begin a new year, waiting for the unexpected event from our God, a surprising Word that changes what we are looking for. A clue: we are not staying awake looking for some thing, a possession, hitting the lottery, or becoming famous. We are looking for Some One, some one who will alter the way we approach life, the basic decisions we make, and how we assess what is truly worthwhile, good, and beautiful in the world. Could be an infant, could be an old man, could be a premier or a teenager. No one knows the time or the season or the face, but if you are awake, God knows what you will see.

Preached by Robert Kitchen
Knox-Metropolitan United Church
Regina, Saskatchewan