Sermons for the Month
Waking Up to God's New Day
DATE: December 2, 2001
TEXT: Romans 13:11-14“To all of you Saints here this morning, grace and peace to you from God our Father, from His Son, Jesus Christ and His Holy Spirit. AMEN
"You know what time it is, how it is NOW the moment for you to wake from sleep!" Oh no, that can't be the alarm…it's not morning already! It's not even light out; it's so cozy under the covers, and as my four-year-old says, "I'm not done with my sleep yet…" Only one thing to do… roll over…hit the snooze alarm…Yesss!! There are people who leap out of bed at the crack of dawn or earlier, energized, ready to seize the day. I've never been one of them. My motivation for finally surrendering to the inevitability of the day is usually a highly-developed sense of duty. Gotta get up, gotta feed the kids, gotta go to work, gotta pay the bills. Sometimes "duty" is compounded with a sense of urgency: "Mom! I hafta have lunch money!" "Deborah, do you realize how many times you hit that snooze alarm??" Or that uniquely compelling sound of a cat coughing up a hair ball at the foot of the bed. That'll get me up every time! But sometimes there's another motivation for leaving sleep behind and greeting the day -- the anticipation and expectation that the day holds within it something exciting, something wonderful, something I can hardly wait to get ready for or to get started at. Today begins the season Christians call "Advent," and in Advent our Scripture lessons, music, and prayers have an emphasis on waking up in response to God. Advent calls us to alertness with both a sense of urgency and of anticipation. The emphasis of Advent is three-fold: First, we are eagerly anticipating Christmas; we do a bit of pretending and in our imagination join the Old Testament people of God as they watch and wait for God's Messiah, hoping that we too might hear the Good News of the baby in a manger as if we had never heard it before, fresh and powerful. Secondly, we look forward to the promise of Christ's coming again to bring to an end this world's story and to make all things new, so that as in the vision of the prophets, warriors will beat their swords into plowshares and their spears into pruning hooks, and " they shall not learn war any more." Finally, in Advent we look for the coming of Christ, the hand of God within our own lives, expecting and anticipating His Spirit at work in us and looking for the signs of His Kingdom around us. The urgency of Advent is evident in the appointed Scripture texts of the season, in which we are warned that it is entirely possible to miss the coming of Christ if we are not awake to the signs of His coming. Who knew that the baby born out back in the inn's stable on a perfectly ordinary uneventful night in the middle of the week would be the Messiah? Who knows on which day, at which moment the time will be right for God to intervene decisively in this tired and hurting world, or in our individual circumstances? Those who follow Jesus are not to worry and fret about the "when's" and "how's", we're just supposed to be alert and ready always. Now, it's possible to prod people into being awake and alert to God by appealing to our sense of duty. "Jesus wants you to do this, and you certainly owe Him one!" which is true, and works sometimes. It's also possible to motivate people by scaring them with the urgency of the situation: "If God required your soul of you tonight, do you know for certain where you would spend eternity?" or "the prophecies are all coming true, the armies of the Western world will face the armies of Islam at Armageddon, and the Final Judgment is at hand." Those approaches might work too, and who can say for certain that they're not valid? Duty and urgency get people out of bed, day after day. But I think the apostle Paul gives us a different way of looking at the Christian life in this time in between Christ's First Coming and his Final Coming, while all around us the world is still pretty dark, but "the night is far gone, and the day is near," so near that if you know where to look, you can see that it's already having an effect. Paul says, "Wake up, because salvation is nearer to us now than when we became believers," and he means that as a promise, not as a threat. If we said to one of the children, "your birthday is getting closer every day;" they would be beside themselves with excitement; they have a very different way of looking at that milestone than do many of us ex-children. I think I like their way better, with the attitude that "who knows what awesome and very cool stuff I'm finally going to be able to do when I am 5, or 9, or 16; or 37, or 62, or 88; who knows what new things I'm going to learn, what exciting new places I might go, what new friends I will make?" That's the kind of attitude Paul is suggesting here to us, of meeting each day of life in Christ looking forward to its promise, not lamenting the days that are gone or dreading the days to come. Several years ago, my husband and I were caught in one of those employment/financial crises in which we had done what we could, and had to just wait and sweat it out until something happened. Somewhere in the midst of our worrying, we came up with the philosophy that God was probably going to wait till we were down to our last dollar before he'd make something happen. One day while I was at my Kelly Girl job, my husband called. "Good news, honey!" "What is it?" "I took the car in, and now we're six hundred dollars closer to our last dollar." And wouldn't you know, it wasn't many days after that things started to move in a good direction. But the point is that WE had started moving a better direction, becoming alert and eager for something new, living in anticipation that God had the situation well in hand, instead of living in day with worry that wears us down or the tension that causes us to snap and snarl at those closest to us. God IS in control, He most certainly will do something when the timing is just right, like He did all those years ago in Bethlehem. In the meantime, there IS something we can do as we wait. We don't have to wait till we die and go to heaven to see the goodness of God, we don't have to wait for Jesus to come crashing in with trumpets and angels to clear the landscape so at last things can start happening right. All we have to do is to live as if Heaven were here and now. Recovering people in 12-step programs sometimes counsel one another to "act as if," because in this business of living sober, or living alertly, or living in God's Kingdom, one's external circumstances do not need to determine one's thoughts and feelings; and furthermore, even how you feel or think isn't nearly as important as what you DO. Fact is, when you "act as if" you already are the kind of person you want to be, eventually your thoughts and feelings and everything else will begin to fall into place. "Let us live honorably," Paul says, not in reveling and drunkenness, as if we had nothing to live for but the moment; not in debauchery and licentiousness, as if we were little more than animals and cared for no one but ourselves; not in quarreling and jealousy, as if the turf wars of this world had some great significance. All we have to do is to "put on the Lord Jesus Christ," in a sense, to wear him like a suit of clothing, so that when people look at us, that's what they see -- a humble attitude, a calm, faith-filled spirit, a warm and welcoming manner, a generous and compassionate heart, a willingness to give Himself utterly and completely for the needs of the other, for US. And when there's a couple dozen of us walking around looking like THAT -- or a couple hundred of us -- or millions of us, around the world -- then the world-to-come begins to shine into THIS one, just like the rays of the sun that can give us enough light to see by even before it comes up over the horizon itself. We're a day closer to the Kingdom of God than we were yesterday; closer in time, since we do still live in a linear progression of days and seasons and years; closer also in the sense that God has had just a bit longer to work with us, to teach us, to inspire us, to motivate us, to love us. It's WORTH waking up to see what God is going to do next! And how very awesomely cool it is that He wants to do it in partnership with us! AMEN