Staying Awake

The Rev. Seth Dietrich December 1, 2019 – Advent I 

Staying Awake 

It is good to be with you a few days after Thanksgiving. I hope you enjoyed your turkey or tofurkey or Chinese buffet or whatever food is your tradition. And I hope you were able to take a few moments to give thanks, to focus on what is good and true and beautiful in your life and in the world. 

This year, I offered special thanks for our new Associate Rector, Fr. Oswald Bwechwa and his wife Rosemarie, and their two boys Derrick and Mugi. I’ve had the chance to connect with Oswald many times over the last 12 years, and I’ve always come away from him thinking, “Here is a human being who is very much alive: joyful, faithful, grateful.” He also seems to enjoy connecting with people. Last week I told him, “You know if you are not preaching you do not HAVE to come to the 8am service.” And he said, “On no, I want to greet them, too.” I encourage you to read his bio. It is a story full of grace. 

Like so many years, the first Sunday after Thanksgiving, is also the first Sunday in this new liturgical season of Advent. The liturgical year is a complex set of symbols that seek to remind us that underneath our regular sense of time, underneath all the ways we mark time by falling leaves and birthday songs and kindergarten graduations, there are these deeper rhythms of time. Rhythms of grace and redemption. Deeper spiritual rhythms about what it means to be human, what it means to be in relationship to the cosmos and to God. 

And as if to draw a contrast right away between our normal sense of time and this larger, deeper sense of time, the season of Advent always begins with talk about the end of the world. Which is always a bit of a jolt, at least for me. Today’s passage comes from near the end of Matthew’s gospel. Jesus is speaking about what it will be like when everything we know will come to an end. We all know the end is out there, we just have no idea when or how. Maybe the sun blows up and the earth is consumed. Maybe the universe eventually stops expanding and then begins to contract, like many astrophysicists believe, falling back to a single point - the big bang in reverse. All things come to an end but we have no idea how. 

Jesus, says he does not know the how/when/where of the end either. But about that day and hour no one knows, neither the angels of heaven, nor the Son, but only the Father. Only God knows. In the next couple chapters of Matthew, Jesus paints this complex, sometimes contradictory picture of what the end will be like. It’s sort of like when Jesus is says the kingdom of God is like THIS and then uses 8 different images and stories for the kingdom of God because no one single image is enough to describe the whole kingdom. 

In the gospel of Matthew alone, Jesus says the end of the world is like this: a Master who gathers his servants and asks them how they have invested their talents. The end of the world is like this: a king who separates people into saved and doomed based on whether they have fed the hungry and clothed the naked and given water to those who thirst. 

In this passage, Jesus says the end of the world is like this: swift and utter disaster that emerges from nowhere, sparing some and consuming others. Just days after so many of us were lying around full and content in the midst of blissful food comas, Jesus says, the end will be like in the times of Noah when people were completely unsuspecting: they were eating, drinking and marrying, and then floods came and they were all swept away. 

We know that utter destruction can come quickly and without warning. The day after Christmas, fifteen years ago, when we were all feeling full and content, these pictures emerged of the tsunami in northern Sumatra, Indonesia. A sudden undersea earthquake generated a 100-foot wall of water that moved at 500 mph and killed 100,000 people almost instantly. It is so eerie to watch the footage of that day from the video cameras of the tourists. Blue sky. A calm sea. People drinking and laughing on the hotel balcony. 

We probably all have a friend or family member who can tell the story of sitting on that crinkly paper in a doctor’s office, the most normal day in the world, and the doctor comes back in with a furrowed brow, and she pulls her chair up close and when she opens her mouth, her words about a diagnosis pour out like the waters of a flood overturning everything and everyone that just seconds ago felt so anchored and secure. I know it has happened to some of us here. 

Here in the very beginning of the church year, the first words we encounter from the gospel say to us, “Put away the notions that life just progresses along these smooth, linear, predictable lines. Put away the idea that if you are good, if you live reasonably, and believe in the right things, you will be insulated and protected.” Here right up front, we are met with the fragility of life; we confront the fact that we have so little control over so much. 

And so if we cannot make ourselves secure, are we supposed to cower in terror, full of dread and fear, one ear on the ground always listening for the next earthquake? No, Jesus says, your job is simple. Stay alert. Stay awake. Look for the coming of the Son of Man. Be watchful for the presence of God, the goodness of God, the truth of God, breaking into your midst. 

This idea of paying attention is so critical. Simone Weil, the French philosopher and mystic said, “Attention, taken to its highest degree, is the same thing as prayer.” There is that wonderful, simple phrase, “What you pay attention to, grows.” The phrase is backed up by all this brain science that says our brains are not these fixed structures, but our brains actually have plasticity, they are moldable. We are always creating new neural pathways in our brains. If you have CNN or Fox NEWS on all the time, and the bad news is pouring in so fast that they have to switch to a smaller font to squeeze in all the scrolling headlines, you are not just taking in the news, you are reinforcing pathways of fear and dread and threat. The same can happen on our phones, except on our phones, there are highly sophisticated algorithms helping to make those new pathways stronger and thicker. 

But we can choose. We can stay awake and alert not just to what produces fear, but also to what produces faith, hope and love. 

Here at the beginning of a new liturgical year, perhaps you can give yourself permission to begin some new habits, some new practices. If you are used to talk radio or political podcasts, try asking Alexa or Spotify or whoever you talk to, to play some calming and uplifting sacred music like Taize or gospel. Maybe begin or return to a practice of prayer or reading or meditation for a few minutes each morning. We have these Advent devotional books which are also available online. Maybe find a way to get outside of yourself through service. 

We’ve re-tooled the Wednesday morning service. A simple liturgy, 35 minutes, time for silence, you can stay and discuss the gospel for the coming Sunday. Fr. Scott Stoner and I are co-leading a quiet day at a Benedicitine monastery in Madison this Saturday. 

Over time, I have discovered the most important spiritual practice in my life is paying attention to my own interior landscape. I have learned that my mind creates so much distortion, the ways that I am just having a normal morning, blue sky, eating and drinking and then a thought or emotion comes and instead of letting it go like a cloud that floats past a mountain, I feed this whole internal dialogue about the thought or emotion. I spin a whole story about why I think this or why I feel this, and soon, it can be like I am swirling in the waters of a storm. But none of it is real. And if I stay awake, if I stay alert, I can notice this process happening and I can simply be present to it, I can offer a prayer such as Be Still. And what is amazing is that without trying to get rid of the flood of thoughts, without trying to divert them, or agonize about why it happens, the thoughts and emotions simply wash through. And then I am connected to again to what is real, what is solid, what is of God. 

Stay awake. Stay alert. For God’s reign of beauty, truth and goodness is breaking into the world in us and around us and through us. Let us go forth in the name of this God, Father, Son and Holy Spirit.