Is All This Really What Jesus Wants?

Sermon for Nov. 27, 2022
Matthew 22:34-46

It’s Advent – one of several times in the Church year when our activity intensifies, this time with programs and gatherings helping get us ready for the mystery of Christmas.  We do need help with that, with getting ready.  Christmas isn’t just a holiday, of course; it’s our way to capture the incredible truth that God took on our lives and came among us, defeating sin and death from the bottom up.  That theology of incarnation is a lot to wrap our minds and hearts around, so the Church comes alongside us to help guide us toward it.  And in this same season, of course, the world is offering us all kinds of holiday activity, too, calling us to shop and travel and celebrate.  The pace of this supposedly peaceful season can get downright overwhelming.  So, after a church planning meeting recently, as we’d struggled a bit to keep activities from crashing into each other on the church calendar, a staff member stood at my door and asked, “Is all this really what Jesus wants?”

I thought it was a brilliant question.  If Jesus were sitting here among us … which, of course, he is … what would he say about that?  If he were setting the parish calendar, what would Jesus schedule?  We can apply the same question to our own lives, too, looking at our personal calendars as we begin the mad dash to Christmas and New Year’s, and ask: “Is all this really what Jesus wants?”

This first Sunday of Advent is a good time to be asking such questions.  Advent isn’t just the churchy version of the pre-Christmas season, a time to get ready for a big holiday.  Advent is really quite countercultural.  In the midst of the pre-Christmas rush, Advent is all about waiting, and examination, and repentance.  It’s our time to get ready not for a holiday but for God’s action that makes all our days holy.

So, if this is a time of holy waiting, what are we waiting for?  Well, “advent” means “coming,” so it’s Jesus’ coming we’re awaiting.  And it’s a “both/and” sort of coming that’s on the horizon.  We wait to remember how God saved us us in the last way anyone expected, joining us in the muck of human life, the divine King crying in a dirty feedbox.  And we wait for God to save us in the way our Jewish ancestors anticipated, the divine King coming on the clouds of glory to complete God’s reign and rule over our lives and our world.

Well, listening to Jesus describe it in today’s Gospel reading, it sounds like there’s no way we could ever be ready for God to break into our lives.  Jesus says it will be like the days of Noah, when a deeply sinful world found itself overwhelmed by a sudden environmental disaster, wiping out life as everyone had come to know it.  He says some will be left to face judgment while others are gathered into new life.  He says it will be like a thief breaking into your house, disrupting your false sense of security and occupying what you thought was your own space – sort of like Santa, but with fewer presents and more judgment.

So, how are we supposed to get ready for that?  Jesus gives us only one instruction in this reading, and it’s this:  Keep awake.  In other words, don’t do what I do all the time, which is to go from one thing to the next without really paying attention to whether that next thing is good or helpful or holy.  It’s why that question from the person at my office door stuck with me:  “Is all this really what Jesus wants?”  It’s easy to go through life pressing the spiritual snooze button, never really hearing the alarm that God might be trying to sound.

Instead, when Jesus asks us to keep awake, I hear it as a call to practice in our own lives what we say Jesus practices with us every time we celebrate Eucharist.  We say that in the consecrated Bread and Wine is the “real presence” of Christ.  We don’t claim we can explain it – whether it’s more like transubstantiation or consubstantiation or Jesus being present to each faithful recipient.  We just believe and know that Jesus is really present with us when we receive his Body and Blood.

Well, I think he’s asking us to return the favor and be really present to him.  And Advent is a wonderful time to retrain our hearts and minds to offer what Jesus really wants.  It’s our time to rest and reflect enough to be spiritually awake, able to greet the holy thief in the night as he breaks into our hearts and our lives.

So, practically, what does that mean?  I think Advent is our time for offering both the holy “yes” and the holy “no.”  It’s a season to be judicious as we look at all the things out there that beckon us in this most overwhelming time of the year.  It’s a season when we’re called to rest enough to be able to stay spiritually awake.

As the person at my office door was implying, the Church can unwittingly contribute to our sense of being overwhelmed this time of year.  In fact, we’ll be offering you several opportunities to do things any of which would be right and good – ways to bless neighbors nearby, and bless neighbors far away, and bless our own church family, and bless your own spirit.  And, of course, that comes on top of all the other opportunities and obligations this “holiday season” will bring.

So, choose that which will restore you.  Choose that which will bring your spirit rest so that you can “stay awake” for Christ to come sit beside you.  What might you find restorative?  It might be our Thursday-evening learning opportunity about going deeper in prayer.  It might be the Advent silent retreat this Saturday.  It might be offering God the broken places in your life at the Advent healing service Dec. 15.  It might be downloading a podcast of Morning Prayer.  Or it might be simply each day sitting down, and lighting a candle, and spending a few minutes in silence, reflecting on your day and the people you love, and offering all of it to God for blessing.  

Advent is a time to think hard about what Jesus really wants.  And what I think he wants is this: for us to be as really present to him as he is to us, setting aside space for the Savior to break into our lives in ways our harried holiday hearts might miss.