Keep Awake!

The Reverend Paul Roberts Abernathy, Rector

It’s the most wonderful time of the year.

With the kids jingle-belling

And everyone telling you,

“Be of good cheer.”

It’s the most wonderful time of the year.[1]

Whoa! I’m getting ahead, way ahead of myself!

Yes, Christmas is near. Less than a month away. And, yes, many of us have begun our yuletide preparations, purchasing tickets to travel to visit loved ones, sprucing up the house to welcome those who will visit. And, yes, the cycle of Christmas parties soon will begin. And, yes, the appeals for us to “spend, spend, spend” began in earnest following Halloween (the commercial tradition of waiting until the Friday after Thanksgiving Day sacrificed on the altar of a struggling economy).

Still, this is Advent. From the Latin, adventus, meaning “coming”, that season of preparation for our celebration of Christ’s nativity. Yet, note how Advent begins, how Advent summons us to prepare. Not with the cheery optimism of “the most wonderful time of the year”, but rather with Isaiah,[2] who, on behalf of a despairing people, cries out to God for divine intervention: “O that you would tear open the heavens and come down!”

The prophet speaks for us, we who live in this tragically broken world of the unpardonable and highly protestable growing disparity between rich and poor, of the institutional abuse of the innocent where responsible officials often do what they are supposed to do, which just as often fails the test of doing what is most ethical, of malfeasance and misconduct in the public square regarding money or sex, the perpetrators often defending the indefensible with the flimsiest dismissals and feeblest denials.[3]

The prophet, who also comes before God with an honest confession of the people’s sins (“our iniquities, like the wind, take us away!”), speaks to us, clamoring to catch our attention, rudely interrupting our holiday planning to remind us that this is our troubled world; one still (we still) in need of redemption.

Would that we could turn to Jesus for a hopeful word, but no. The disciples had asked him about the end of time, provoking a discourse on the destruction of the Temple and their coming persecution,[4] then saying, “In those days, after that suffering.”[5] One would expect things would get better, but no again! Jesus launches into a description of the disintegration of the cosmos: “The sun will darken, the moon give no light, stars will fall from heaven, the powers of which will be shaken.”

C’mon, Jesus! “Gospel” means “good news”! Got any for us today?

Yes, says Jesus, who then speaks of “the coming of the Son of Man…with power and glory”. Jesus, having come once in his birth that we celebrate at Christmas will come again, according to centuries of Christian theology and tradition, to set things right, to inaugurate a time, to paraphrase Julian of Norwich, when “all manner of things will be made well.”[6]

However, there’s a catch. No one knows when he’s coming. Not the numerologists and ardent religionists who, waiting with fervent though misplaced hope, make periodic predictions of the day and time and place. Not even Jesus himself, though he promised, “Truly I tell you, this generation will not pass away until all has taken place.”

Well, just as truly I tell you that many generations have come and gone and nothing of this prophetic word has been fulfilled. Perhaps those who first heard it were enduring the sort of persecution of which Jesus speaks, thus for them this was a message of comfort, advising them to “keep awake”, to wait with hope, for divine help, swift and sure, was on the way. However, for us, centuries later, many of us fairly comfortable with life as we live it, thus, not longing to see the capsizing of the cosmos and the upheaval of the world’s order, “keep awake” must mean something else.

Keep awake is our Advent call of how to prepare for Christmas and every day after. Keep awake is a cry for us not to be complacent about the work that we, the church, in this, our generation, which has not yet passed away, are to do. Keep awake is a command that we renew our care for the poor, that we revive our concern for our sisters and brothers who dwell in great want and grave need, that we, with refreshed vision and mission, do something tantamount to tearing open the heavens, something akin, to paraphrase today’s Collect, “to casting away the works of darkness” that those who live in life’s shadows might see light.

Keeping awake is precisely the aim of the community engagement aspect not only of our capital campaign, but our life as a parish community. We have challenged ourselves through a Vestry resolution, the culmination of years of discernment and the hard work of Sally Garr Brodhead, Jane Rutherford, members of our Outreach Board, and many others, to recommit ourselves to reaching out in fellowship with our neediest neighbors here in this city and sharing in partnership with those already engaged in service.

            All of this, in some real sense, is connected to my call to us to engage “the other” that has been been at the heart of my preaching and teaching for the past nearly five years since my return from sabbatical…

            And that sabbatical, which aimed at opening the doors of our then fabled insularity, opening our hands and hearts to the world around us, was directly related to what I saw and see us already doing within our community of St. Mark’s – being present with one another, even amid our differences, yet without condemnation and with mutual respect.

As we, in our generation, keep awake in our service for and with our neediest sisters and brothers who are no longer are “the other” around us, but rather others among us, I can think of no better Advent preparation for Christmas or any other season.