Romans 13:11-12
Matthew 24:42-44

Hey, It’s Advent!

Can you believe you’re wearing your winter coats today and the Christmas tree is up? Neither do I! As this advent season started, I found myself caught off-guard. Between the church’s regular to do list, travels, conferences, exams and personal life, I got to the beginning of this week when I had to plan the worship program and fussed as I realized that I was not ready. Not ready to talk about Christmas, not ready to slow down, to calm my soul and receive Jesus.

Thank God there is a whole season of preparation for Christmas, because as I suspect, some of you, like me, found yourselves wondering how did we just leap from the end of summer into Dec 1st?!

Advent is this season of transition; it is about expecting, waiting, and anticipating. And at this time in the history of our church, we are learning quite a deal about waiting and anticipation. We are looking with uncertainty yet with hope towards the things to come. But friends it is very easy in times like these to miss God and messages God might be sending to us, even in our occupation with work that we do for the church and for the good of the community.

After going full-speed non-stop for the last couple of months, I ultimately got sick. I caught the flu and was forced to lay in bed and cancel most items on my agenda. At first, I thought the universe would collapse, but it didn’t. Anyway, I met earlier last week with my spiritual director, and I went on telling her about my busyness, all that’s been going on in my ministry and my eventual sickness, and after I was done she looked at me and said: “well, I think that God is trying to get your attention.”

It kind of hit me! “God is trying to get my attention, while I rush around my everyday doing things “for God,” but then, I forget to pause and actually experience God and reflect on where God might be talking to me in those persons I meet and those tasks I do. And it isn’t hard to assume that you are like me, rushing through your everyday and sometimes not taking the time to break and breathe; so I want to tell you today: God is trying to get your attention.

Both our biblical readings for this morning speak with such urgency and try to get their readers’ attention. They speak of times approaching, of waiting periods coming to an end, and of the need to be awake and alert. “You know what time it is,” says Paul, “how it is now the moment for you to wake from sleep.” “Keep awake” adds Jesus “you must be ready, for the Son of Man is coming at an unexpected hour.”

Both Jesus and Paul speak of the unknown. Though they take somewhat different directions: while Paul says the time is now, Jesus says no one knows the time, and while Paul urges his listeners to go to work, Jesus urges his to stay alert and wait, but they both agree on the urgency of the moment, that something needs to be done and it needs to be done now. They both send out alerts to watch and be vigilant.

In our Presbyterian circles, or in the more liberal part of the church, we talk a lot and preach a lot about what we can do for others, for the poor, for the environment, and the way our faith invites us to fight injustice. All of these actions are great, and our faith would be dead if it wasn’t for our deeds. In the very next chapter in Matthew is Jesus’s most famous “whatever you do for one of my siblings, you do for me,” so I am in no way undermining the importance of living out our faith, but Advent invites us at thi time to also live in our faith.

This season is an invitation to search our inner selves and focus our attention on our connection with the Source of our lives, the One in whom we live and move and breathe. As they say in aviation, you need to put your Oxygen mask first before helping others in need of help. Friends, when was the last time we paused to check on our spiritual health? And I start with myself; I told you frankly that I had been disregarding my spiritual wellbeing –for very good reasons. Today, the gospel of preparation invites me and you to rework our priorities.

In my last quarter teaching at the SESL, I was teaching my students to use the present continuous tense. There was an exercise in which they had to rearrange words to form a sentence. One of the students wrote: “The chicken are eating crystal and Ronaldo on their break.”

One of my Teaching Assistants insisted that technically, the sentence is not wrong. For more than 5 minutes we discussed that, grammatically, and in keeping with the purpose of the exercise, the sentence could work, however I had to proceed to teach my student and obviously my TA another valuable lesson: it isn’t enough to do grammar but we need to make meaning.

We tend to do the same in our lives. At times, rearranging priorities does not result in the best and most meaningful outcome. It might seem like it works, but at the risk of compromised value. When we are forced to, we shift priorities and change orders, but we seldom move our spiritual wellbeing to the top of the list.

Friends, this is not a new message, this is an old message, forever resounding from Isaiah, to John, to Jesus, to Paul: “Be awake and be alert.“

There are so many things competing over our time, there are so many responsibilities we need to take care of, there are tasks that we have to do, there are duties that need to be accomplished, I understand that, and God does too. But amidst all of these, God keeps trying to get our attention.

In this season of preparation and busyness, God is trying to get your attention. How do you plan to meet God this Advent?