Wake Up!

a sermon by Rev. Rebecca Segers
Isaiah 64.1-9

Mark 13:28-37

Those of you who read my article in the Bell Ringer know that my daughter, Grace, asked me a very interesting question recently.  She wanted to know why Jesus came when he did and not now.  She said she knew that times were bad then and saw how people could have really needed a Savior then.  But then she said, “But, mom, we really need Jesus now!”

It’s true, isn’t it?  The world really does need a Savior.  It saddens me to think that Jesus came almost 2000 years ago and we human beings have treated his message with such disrespect.  I participated in an Ecumenical Interfaith worship service on Thanksgiving Eve during which we heard the Golden Rule as stated in every possible faith tradition.  Jesus said it Matthew 7:12: “In everything do to others as you would have them do to you”, but it was also expressed in eleven other traditions.  Everything from Confusionism’s version: “Do not unto others what you do not want them to do to you” to Judaism’s: “What is hateful to you, do not do to your neighbor” to Islam’s: “Not one of you is a believer until he loves for his brother what he loves for himself”.  Yet here we are, sitting in worse shape it seems than when Jesus came the first time.

We’ve got four more Sundays until we celebrate the birth of Jesus.  Four more Sundays in which we will be encouraged by the culture in which we live to spend money we don’t have on things we don’t need, encouraged to eat too much food and then after Christmas, encouraged to join gyms and go on diets in order to look like people in the movies and on television that look that way because they are far younger than we are or have been “medically enhanced” in various ways.  We’ve got four more Sundays to clean the house and hang the lights and decorate the tree and send out the Christmas cards and attend the pageant rehearsals and go to the pageant and the Christmas concerts and the Christmas parties and buy the gifts and wrap the gifts and mail the gifts and aren’t you exhausted just listening to the list?  Do you think this was what God had in mind when he sent Jesus to earth?  I don’t…

Jesus by his own admission, came to set us free to be the people God intended and then to come back and bring us all home.  The passage we heard read today out of the gospel of Mark occurs toward the end of Jesus’ ministry on earth.  He has been asked by the disciples, specifically Peter, James, John and Andrew, about the end of days.  In the segment immediately before, another disciple has commented to Jesus on the magnificence of the temple in Jerusalem.  Jesus responds to him by telling him, “Do you see these great buildings?  Not one stone will be left here upon another; all will be thrown down.”

Now this is a pretty dramatic thing to say and Peter, James, John and Andrew are concerned.  They want to know exactly what Jesus is talking about, when the things he’s talked about will be accomplished.   Jesus answers with a long speech about the parousia, which is the Greek word for what we might call “the end of days”, the “Rapture”, or the “Last Times”.  Jesus is warning the disciples to pay attention to what is going on around them.  To be aware of false prophets and false messiahs, false signs and omens.  To maintain vigilance and watchfulness.  He doesn’t want them to go astray, but for their concerns to make them follow him even more strongly.

Fast forward two thousand years.  Here we sit in the Presbyterian Church of Sweet Hollow needing a Savior more than ever before and not really believing that one is going to come.  Oh, we know the words.  There’s the Apostles’ Creed that we say every first Sunday of the month when we take communion and then today we read the Nicene Creed:  “We believe in one God, the Father, Almighty, Maker of heaven and earth, of all that is, seen and unseen.  We believe in one Lord, Jesus Christ, the only Son of God, Eternally begotten of the Father, God from God, Light from Light, true God from true God, Begotten not made, of One Being with the Father, through Him all things were made.  For us and for our salvation He came down from heaven, was incarnate of the Holy Spirit and the Virgin Mary and became truly human.  For our sake he was crucified under Pontius Pilate; he suffered death and was buried.  On the third day he rose again in accordance with the Scriptures.  He ascended into heaven and is seated at the right hand of the Father.  He will come again in glory to judge the living and the dead, His kingdom will have no end.  We believe in the Holy Spirit, the Lord, the giver of life, who proceeds from the Father and the Son, Who with Father and the Son is worshiped and glorified, who has spoken through the prophets.  We believe in one holy catholic and apostolic Church.  We acknowledge one baptism for the forgiveness of sins.  We look for the resurrection of the dead, and the life of the world to come. Amen.”

The Apostles’ Creed was written in the first or second century and its whole point was to focus on Jesus’ humanity.  The Nicene Creed was written in 325 at the Council of Nicea and had the opposite focus.  Its purpose was to explain to people that Jesus was fully God.  During this early period of Christianity, both the leaders of the church and the common people on the ground were struggling with exactly what they believed and they came up with these statements to help unify all the different factions that were burbling around at the time.

The first argument began because there was a group of people who didn’t believe that Jesus was truly human.  This group was called Gnostics.  I’m sure many of you have heard of them and their primary focus was on the enlightenment that could be achieved through following Jesus to God.  They didn’t believe that God would make the earth, because it was obviously evil and God couldn’t have anything to do with the fallenness of creation.  This is why the Apostles’ Creed has in the part about God as “Maker of heaven and earth”, so that it might dispute the Gnostic idea that God did not create the evil earth.  Gnostics further believed that the true nature of God was beyond our imagining and that Jesus couldn’t have been human, because God wouldn’t degrade God’s self by being in the pig-sty that was a human form.  There were various Gnostic beliefs about who Jesus was then.  Some thought that he was a good man whom the Spirit touched in baptism, but that he never was fully God; others thought that Jesus was never really a man, but a Spirit that looked like a man in order to pass on the teachings to his disciples.  No matter what his form, the focus was on the journey to enlightenment which was only available to a select few who were followers of the “true” Christ.

A hundred years later or so the debate was still raging, but this time it was about the other side of the coin – not whether Jesus was truly human, but whether Jesus was truly God.  Enter the Council of Nicea and the writing of the Nicene Creed.  The group they were particularly fighting this time was the Arians, whose leader, Arius, was a Presbyter who taught that God made Jesus and so Jesus couldn’t be fully God.  He wasn’t truly God at birth, but had the Spirit enter him at his baptism by God and as a result, was a kind of demi-god.  Jesus was inferior, sort of like a Prince to a King.

These arguments may sound ridiculous to us now, but at the time, it was big doings in the marketplace.  Absolutely everyone was arguing about the nature of Jesus and to what degree he was human and to what degree he was God – 50/50, 60/40 and so on.  As a result, we’ve got these two creedal statements that help define exactly what we believe about Jesus and why.  Now, seventeen, eighteen hundred years later, we say these words without even much of a thought.  We repeat the words easily, even by rote, feeling comforted by them as we say them.

But how much do we live them?  Because this is what Jesus is telling the disciples that they need to do in his little diatribe to them that we heard today.  He tells them: “Learn a lesson from the fig tree.  You look at it.  You see the leaves begin to peek out with new green growth and you trust, you know, you believe that summer is on its way.  Look around you and see that the same is true for the parousia.  Look around and know that you’ve got to get your house in order because the end times are coming.”

Now we could argue that Jesus was wrong.  The end times weren’t coming.  It’s been two thousand years.  How on earth are we supposed to know when they are actually coming and at this point, why should we even care, much less believe?  I’m sure many of you have heard the theories that we’re in the end times now – the world is definitely gasping for breath ecologically, we’ve been overrun with natural disasters, humankind is constantly proving that we enjoy being at war more than keeping the peace – and yet, Jesus also tells us in this scripture lesson that “about that day or hour no one knows, neither the angels in heaven, nor the son, but only the Father.”  However, he also goes on to say that our response should be to “keep awake”.

We could also argue that the end times are always coming.  That since God’s word was fulfilled in the birth of Jesus Christ, the horse has been let out of the barn, the train is heading down the track, we’re off and running, whatever metaphor you choose, but the end of days has been set in motion and it is only a matter of time.  God’s time.  Not our time.  And God’s time is incomprehensible, unknowable, beyond our understanding.

The end of the Nicene Creed says: “We look for the resurrection of the dead and the life of the world to come.”  Now you could interpret this to mean that we all look forward to dying and being with the Lord, but you could also look at it as looking forward to the second coming and to life after it is accomplished.

Do we look forward to Jesus’ return?  Here we have four Sundays in which to think about what it would be like if Jesus really were to come and we’re too busy trying to get the cards out and the baking done to even think about what the world would be like with a Savior in it.  Or how we might respond if we knew that Jesus was coming to our house this month.

Yet Jesus tells us here that we are not to be worrying about all that stuff.  That what is important is not whether or not we got the right present for Aunt Martha or the Christmas lights hung or the right brand of stuffing.  It’s not about whether our in-laws will come for Christmas dinner or the Christmas pageant will come off or the wreathes have green ribbons or red.  It’s not about battling crowds at the mall or Santa’s annual trip to our house or anything of that!  We’re worrying about the wrong stuff people!

I am just as guilty of it as the next person.  In our pre-Advent Bible Study last week, we made a chart of our own “Christmas Captivities”.  This meant putting ourselves in the center of a piece of paper and then writing around it all the things by which we are held captive this time of year.  The family traditions such as having a big breakfast before opening Christmas presents or going out and cutting down the tree yourselves.  The expectations of friends such as writing a personal note on every Christmas card or giving away batches of homemade cookies or hosting the annual Christmas party.  The cultural obligations like buying gifts for all your clients or for every member of your family even as it has gotten larger and larger and larger.  I’m sure each and every one of you has as many items on his or her list as I do on mine and not all of them are bad.  As a matter of fact, many of them are things we enjoy and are joyous expressions of the season.  But that doesn’t make them any less essential or obligatory.

After we wrote down all the items we could think of, we were to rate them: with a + sign for something we were looking forward to, a – sign for something that detracts or takes away from the meaning of Christ’s birth, circling the ones that we felt trapped by and putting a question mark by those we were willing to eliminate or change.  Do you know I wasn’t willing to eliminate or change anything!  Not even those items that I didn’t feel were particularly Spirit-filled or that I felt extremely trapped by.  The fact of the matter is, I’ve become captive to Christmas rather than liberated by Jesus’ birth.

There’s a story about a Sunday School teacher who once asked her class what they must do before they could expect forgiveness of sin.

Before she had a chance to take a breath, little Tommy shouted out, “First, we’ve got to sin!”

Unfortunately for us, that’s the easy part.  The apostle Paul told us that we are to be “in the world, not of the world”, but the world we live in today is simply chock full of opportunities to forget about our true purpose.  The good news is: Jesus tells us that we are not beholden to the society in which we live, not even to the trappings that have been built up around supposedly celebrating him.  Instead he tells us to let go of all of that and be focused on what is real.

“It is like a man going on a journey, when he leaves home and puts his slaves in charge, each with his work, and commands the doorkeeper to be on the watch.  Therefore, keep awake – for you do not know when the master of the house will come, in the evening, or at midnight, or at cockcrow, or at dawn, or else he may find you asleep when he comes suddenly.  And what I say to you, I say to all: Keep awake.”

Keep awake…keep awake!  We can’t keep awake.  I tell you, we’ve already fallen asleep.  We are not even aware of what the real meaning of Christmas is anymore.  We watch TV shows that convince us it is about the “Joy of Giving” or “Loving Your Neighbor” or it’s a “Season of Sharing”.  All of those are wonderful and amazing things and I don’t want to denigrate any of them.  But that is not what Christmas is about!

Christmas is about the birth of a Savior who is Christ the Lord.  God in the person of a man who came to free us from the ravages of sin and death that we may no longer be the people we were before, but instead the people that God intends us to be.  That we might, through our faithfulness and our steadfast love, herald the coming of the kingdom.

I tell you, folks, wake up!  Wake up to who you are and to who you can be!  Wake up so that you might not remain captive to the obligations of our society and the lies that it tells you about what is important, but instead you might shine the light of God’s truth and love to all with whom you come in contact.

Wake up to the truth that this time on earth is fleeting and there are far more important things to be doing than having anxiety attacks about how you can possibly afford the electronic gizmos and gadgets that your kids all want.  They will benefit far more from your presence and your love than they will from owning another computer toy.

Wake up to the reality that we live a short time: lives that are filled with sorrow and sadness and pain and confusion.  Lives filled with hopes and expectations and wants and desires.  Lives focused on physical survival, material desires and possessions.  We live lives that have their meaning and intent in the here, the now, the tangible, substantial, bodily world and we forget that while this world is filled with pleasures and temptations, love and hurt, pain and joy, that that is not the whole of everything.

Wake up, be aware, watch out!  This is how Jesus ends the scripture lesson today.  He says that no one knows when the man is coming home.  It could be in the evening, it could be at midnight, or cockcrow or in the morning.  He lists every single watch of the night that was acknowledged by the Roman system.  It could be anytime and here we are thinking that we’ve no time at all and that we’ve got all the time in the world.

Because in reality, we’re not thinking about Jesus at all during the Christmas season.  Oh, maybe we remember that there is going to be a baby born in a few weeks and that we are to celebrate it, but we absolutely don’t remember that the baby has been born, has lived, has taught, has preached, has died, been resurrected and is coming again in glory.

I have a challenge for you this Advent season.  Starting today, I challenge you to read one chapter of the gospel of Matthew every night before you go to bed.  Matthew has 28 chapters.  If you do this, you will be traveling the life of Jesus day by day throughout the season.  Santa Claus will not be your primary focus, but instead the teachings of Jesus will be filling your mind.  And on Christmas Eve, you will not be at the beginning with Jesus’ birth, but you will be reading of Jesus’ resurrection.  Jesus’ rebirth.

Wake up, people!  Jesus the Christ is coming, has come and will come again!  Let us ponder and wonder and wait and study and consider and celebrate and be surprised by joy this season in ways that we have never experienced before.  Let us experience the birth of Jesus the Christ this year in ways that we never have before.  Let us remember the true “reason for the season” each and every day of Advent.  Let us focus on Jesus our Lord and Savior and fill our days with his presence, his light, his love.  Let us have God in Jesus Christ at the center of our Christmas season rather than on the peripheral edges.  Let this be the year that we come to know and to see and to enjoy and to share Jesus the Messiah, the Lord of Love, the Prince of Peace, the Wonderful Counselor, the Shoot of Jesse, the Rose of Sharon, the Everlasting Father, the King of Kings, Emmanuel, God With Us, not just on Christmas Eve, but every day of the journey toward it.  Amen.