Wake Up!

This sermon was given at St Peter Baptist Church in Clifford, VA, by invitation of their board of deacons. The people of St Mark’s Episcopal Church worship with the people of St Peter four times a year as we have done for over a decade.

“You know what time it is, how it is now the moment for you to wake from sleep,” Paul tells us. “The night is far gone, the day is near.” Here lately I have often found it difficult to believe that the night is far gone. The war, famine, division, poverty, and fear in this world make me feel sometimes like we are closer to midnight than to morning. It is easier, some days, to pray for Jesus to return, to put this all to rights for ever, than it is to stay present to the here and now. As I told my St Mark’s folks last week, this year has been a particularly hard one for my family, and I am looking forward to the new beginnings that a new year brings. I know that many families have had an even harder year, and that for many there is no end in sight. For so many in this world, in this community, maybe even in this room, daybreak feels impossibly far off.

I think that is one gift of these long winter nights. They are a reminder, a training ground for the kind of watchful waiting Paul invites us to. When the sky is still dark, and our bodies tell us it is night and we must go back to sleep, the clock and the birdsong insist that it is already day. The early risers among us who brave the cold dark morning are blessed to watch the sky lighten into day, a promise kept that even when the night is deep, the light is on its way. Salvation is nearer to us now than when we became believers, Paul urges. The night is far gone, the day is near. Paul, who knew the dangers of the night. Paul, who had been beaten and imprisoned time and time again for his faith. Paul, who risked rejection by his own people and by the Gentiles to whom he preached, crossing barriers of language and culture and class and gender. Paul knew how long the night could last, and still he insisted that daybreak was near. So sure, so confident was he in the promise of morning that he clothed himself in its light, and invites us to do the same. What would it mean for the world, if in this long, dark night, Christians lived as if day had already dawned? What would be revealed, if we saw one another and the world around us in the light of Christ?

I believe that Isaiah offers us a glimpse of what that world might look like, bathed in the glow of the light of the Lord. “In days to come, the mountain of the Lord’s house shall be established as the highest of the mountains, and shall be raised above the hills; all the nations shall stream to it.”   The dwelling place of God, Isaiah sees, will be placed on the highest ground, visible from every direction like a beacon. And to that beacon all the nations shall stream. The Hebrew word there implies that the people are not only coming from every direction, but they are coming against the current. The people of every language, people, and nation are being drawn to the heart of God even when it means going against the grain, against the pull of gravity, against culture and worldly values. When that new day dawns, everyone will see and be drawn to the truth of God’s ways and seek out God’s paths. And God will judge, Isaiah says. He shall judge between the nations and shall arbitrate for many peoples.

That word judge has gotten Christians into trouble, both now and in the past. We all surely know someone who insists that they don’t judge anyone, all the while pointing out the specks in everyone else’s eyes and maybe even throwing a few stones along the way. When Christians believe ourselves to be the judges and the arbitrators, we can cause tremendous harm. We must remember what Isaiah says, that God will judge, God will arbitrate. And unlike our flawed human judgment that so often leads to violence and destruction, notice what the outcome of God’s judgment is.

“They shall beat their swords into ploughshares, and their spears into pruning-hooks; nation shall not lift up sword against nation, neither shall they learn war anymore.” When God is the judge, peace is the outcome! When God is the arbitrator, the weapons of war become the tools of life, sowing seeds and reaping a harvest to fill the banquet table where all are fed in the house of God. And they do not learn war anymore. I am always so struck by that phrase. Neither shall they learn war anymore. The day of the Lord is not just a promised future in which nations will no longer raise up weapons against one another. No, it is even better than that. Neither shall they learn war anymore. In this new creation, in the resurrected life that Jesus has inaugurated for all of us, humanity will no longer learn the meaning of war. Humanity will know only ploughshares, never swords. Children will know only the tools of a harvest, never the weapons of violence that once stole the breath from their lungs. That is a future worth waking up for.

“But about that day and hour no one knows, neither the angels of heaven, nor the Son, but only the Father.” This is the hard part, I think. This is the part that challenges our human need for certainty. Since the very beginning, since Jesus came among us the first time, people have been asking when he will come again, when will the new day finally dawn. Jesus knew there would always be people trying to predict the end, and so he prepared his disciples not to be distracted by the false certainty of countdown clocks and mathematical gymnastics. Jesus said to his disciples that no one knows the day or the hour, not even Jesus himself.

This is a moment of immense meaning, this admission of unknowing. Jesus, God made human, is admitting that he does not know when the final judgment will come. He is acknowledging the magnitude of his own vulnerability, the weakness God consented to inhabit in order to be truly with us. The word for this, as Paul uses in his letter to the Philippians, is kenosis, self-emptying. God in the incarnation emptied Godself in order to dwell with us as one of us, a true human as we were meant to be. The ignorance of the end, our inability to fully comprehend the cosmos as only its creator can, is so fundamental to who we are that God could not be fully human without embracing the same. To be human is to not know everything, try as we might, and so to be human Jesus knows not the day or the hour, only that it will come. Jesus chose uncertainty, so that we could experience faith.

If Jesus the Son of God does not know when he will return, how on earth could we ever predict it? How could we ever prepare?

By waking up, even while it is still dark. We are so easily lulled to sleep by the false certainty offered to us by the world. It is so easy to go with the flow of the current, even when we know that God’s promised land is upstream. It is easy to get caught up in the competitive consumption, convincing ourselves that the next big sale or the perfect decorations will secure our blessedness and prove our belovedness. We become so certain of our righteousness that we put leaders and celebrities and politicians in the place of God and trust that they will build heaven for us. We become so certain of our own understanding that we convince ourselves that God stopped speaking when the final words of the Bible were written down. We imagine the Holy Spirit impotent, insisting that our own works and our own power are the only forces of change in the world. The world is very much asleep, and while we slumber atrocities are committed in the name of the unholy bottom line. Like the people who scoffed at Noah before the flood, we ignore the prophets at our peril.

The depiction of two people working in the field or at the mill, one taken and one left, is an unfortunately familiar one. Just as today the sudden disappearance of individuals from their homes, their jobs, their doctor’s offices and their children’s schools is deeply distressing and violent, so too was the kind of disappearance that took place in the occupied nations of the Roman Empire. If someone suddenly disappeared in Jesus’s community, they often turned up in prison, or enslaved, or on a cross. Jesus himself was taken, after all, and his disciples were the ones left. For the early Christians hearing the Gospel of Matthew in its original context, to disappear often meant martyrdom was coming, leaving behind a grieving and terrified community of believers. For Paul, disappearance meant separation from community. When Paul disappeared from wherever he was preaching it almost always meant imprisonment, usually isolation, and sometimes violence. Jesus is describing the very real lived experiences of his disciples in the decades and centuries following his death. The promised kingdom that comes near in Jesus is a place where the taken and the left are reunited, and the tools of terror that haunted them are melted down into garden tools, their original purpose unlearned forever.

It is that kingdom that comes when morning dawns, and while we may not know the day or the hour, we know that it is nearer to us now than ever before. We know that the dawn grows nearer every moment. Even as our nights grow longer and colder, we are marching toward the coming of the light. This is what it means to prepare for Christmas, for that first birth and the promised second coming. It means waking up and staying watchful, trusting that the light of the world is on his way. As Mary watched and waited with expectation to meet her son, so we too watch and wait, not passively but in preparation. As Mary prepared her home, we must prepare our hearts through prayer and study and good works. We must lay aside the works of darkness that forge weapons and teach war to new generations. In their place, let us pick up tools of cultivation and growth, planting the seeds of an abundant harvest. As we prepare for the coming of the new day, let us put on armor of light, and together illuminate the fading night. Wake up, be ready. The night is long, but the day is near.