Romans 13:11-14
Matthew 24:36-44

In all of our divisions as Americans and as Christians, the things that unite us are the things that are practical and common. Take for example an alarm clock. Democrats, Republicans, liberals, moderates, conservatives – chances are if you work or go to school, or have to get up to take medicine at a certain time, or have appointments, you have an alarm clock.

It might sound something like this (play sample). Or this (play another sample). Or this (play a third sample). 

You might greet your morning alarm clock with delight. It’s the start of a new day. Or maybe you dread the sound of your alarm clock when it goes off, it gets grumpily put on snooze. Or maybe your alarm clock is the first unpleasant reminder that today is going to be another long day. Or maybe you wake up before your alarm clock, in which case, good for you.

The season of Advent is like the church’s alarm clock. It’s the beginning of the church’s year. The church doesn’t begin its year with the secular calendar on January first. Instead, the church begins its year four weeks before Christmas, the celebration of Christ’s birth. Advent is the Lord’s way of saying to us “wake up! Get ready! Pay attention!”

Two of our Scriptures this morning address the church’s need, our need as Christians to wake up from our spiritual sleepiness. The first is our Scripture from the apostle Paul’s letter to the Romans, “You know what time it is, how it is already the moment for you to wake from sleep. For salvation is nearer to us now than when we became believers, the night is far gone; the day is near.”

The second is our Scripture from the gospel of Matthew. These are Jesus’ words. He’s talking to his disciples, his friends and students, in the hours before his arrest and crucifixion. Jesus is preparing them for their lives as Christians when he is no longer with them in the body, but with them in spirit through the power of the Holy Spirit. “But understand this: if the owner of the house had known in what part of the night the thief was coming, he would have stayed awake and would not have let his house be broken into. Therefore, you must also be ready, for the Son of Man is coming at an hour you do not expect.”

The word from the Lord for us today is simple. It’s “wake up.” 

Our Scriptures address two different, but related issues that happen to us as people and as Christians. The first is that we can fall asleep spiritually. The second is that while we might be awake spiritually, our souls can grow tired and weary and become groggy. More on both of these conditions.

The first condition is being spiritually asleep. It’s what the apostle Paul is addressing in his letter to the Romans. What Paul means is something like what we mean when we say that someone is “asleep at the wheel.” We don’t mean that they are actually sleeping. Instead, the phrase means that you missed some important things that you should have been paying attention to.

That happens in our spiritual life as Christians, doesn’t it? We can go through times in our life when we feel close to God; when we experience the power or healing or mercy of God in a deep and personal way; or when we feel convicted and motivated to do some good work for the Lord. Those are deeply meaningful and powerful experiences. You may have heard of these times called “mountaintop times”

But there is often another side to those experiences. If feeling close to God is like a mountaintop experience, most of us spend a lot of our time in the valley. What I mean by that is that most of us Christians, if we’re honest, probably don’t feel all that close to God a lot of times. What often happens is that after a time of feeling very close to God, something comes along to distract us. The Christian life gets hard and we veer off to the world’s ways that appear easier and more pleasurable. Or, when things get hard we look back and get nostalgic for ‘the good old days’. Or we have a restless spirit within us and we chase after something else that is not of God (put another way, we sin). The effect is that we become spiritually asleep at the wheel. We aren’t aware of God’s word to us, God’s call to us, God’s will will for us.

That’s what the apostle Paul is telling the Romans to wake up from. Did you notice that he uses nighttime and daytime images? “The night is far gone; the day is near. Let us then throw off the works of darkness and put on the armor of light, let us walk decently as in the day…” 

For the apostle Paul, part of spiritually waking up involves changing behavior. For the Christian, our lives are shaped by Jesus’ life. What that means is something like if the Lord Jesus were living your life, what kinds of things would he be doing and saying. That’s what it means to be Christlike. However, we can get distracted from that. Paul lists out a bunch of vices (sins) that are signs of not walking in Christ – revelry, drunkenness, sexual misconduct, quarreling and fighting, and jealousy. The Chrisitan life in part is about resisting those things. That’s what Paul means when he says ‘throw off the works of darkness and put on the armor of light.’ It’s a military image. It’s a decision about whose side you are going to be on and what you are going to stand firm about. So, we can say that waking up spiritually is in part a moral renovation of the heart. To wake up spiritually is to be the kind of person that we already are in Jesus Christ – a moral person who honors and loves God, honors and loves others, and respects themself.

The second kind of sleepiness that can happen in the Christian life is what we’ll call spiritual groginess. It’s what Jesus is talking about in our gospel reading from Matthew. Jesus is talking with his disciples, his friends and students, about his second coming. This is where we need to think in terms of the Apostle’s Creed to understand what Jesus is talking about. The church believes that Jesus Christ, the Son of God, has come. He has died. He is risen. And, as the creed professes, “he will come again to judge the living and the dead.” 

That’s the setting for Jesus’ instructions to his disciples. What does he say? “But about that day no one knows.” Not the angels. Not the greatest Christian in the world. Not even the Son himself. God the Father knows. Think about what this means for us. Every couple of years, a news story breaks out about some religious leader or some group claiming that they’ve solved the secret for the end times. Everyone gets all riled up. But we should just shake our heads at that, read Matthew 24, and move on with our day. The Lord is clear, “about that day, no one knows.”

Jesus’ point to the disciples about no one knowing the day of the Lord’s coming is actually motivational. It’s human nature to slack off. We all do it in some area of our life. I might be really motivated to do a good job at my work, but I’m not as motivated to be present for my family. Or, I might be really motivated to be a good and devoted sports fan, but my prayers and bible reading slack off. Jesus knew that human nature is to grow sluggish when the trials and tribulations and suffering and boredom that come as part of being a human being, we can become spiritually lackadaisical and unmotivated. The earliest disciples were the same way. So in the time after his death and resurrection when he will not be with the church physically, but spiritually through the Holy Spirit, his message to them is “Stay awake…you do not know on what day your Lord is coming.”

I had planned to end the sermon here with a conclusion. However, I realized that something important was missing. For most of us, an alarm clock is not a welcome sound. It’s not a pleasant noise. So if we hear the Lord’s message to wake up as an alarm clock that leads to some work or responsibility we have, it will be bad news and we’ll miss the good news, the gospel in it. You see, the Lord’s call to wake up, to shake us from our sleep is an invitation. I was reminded of that in my reading this week. Here’s part of a story from Anthony Robinson, a U.C.C. minister whose writings I often read:

Several years ago I was invited to speak at a famous church in New York City. Plymouth Church of the Pilgrims, in Brooklyn, New York. It is well known because for many years it had a very famous preacher, Dr. Henry Ward Beecher. The name may sound familiar. Beecher’s sister, Harriet, wrote Uncle Tom’s Cabin. Dr. Beecher, and his sister, were leaders in the movement to abolish slavery. The church was known as “The Grand Central Station” of the Underground Railway. People came from all over New York City, and the country, to hear Dr. Beecher preach.

I arrived early for my talk and was met by the church’s Moderator, the lay leader of the congregation. He welcomed me and said, “Since we have a little time, maybe you’d like to take a tour of the church.” “Sure.”

As we walked through the huge complex of buildings, I noticed quite a few memorials to Dr. Beecher. There were paintings, a statue, plaques. In all thirty such memorials dotted the church’s hallways and alcoves. I thought to myself, “Wow, it would be tough to be the pastor here. That’s a pretty long shadow.”

My guide took me into the sanctuary, a grand space, seating two thousand. He said that a decade ago he had been worried about the future of his church. There were only about 100, mostly elderly, people on a Sunday in that grand sanctuary. “I really thought that by now we would have closed our doors.”

“But,” he said, “something has happened. A renewal, a revival. These days we have nearly 500 on a Sunday, with a good mix of ages.”

“Wow, how did that happen?” “What led to the growth, the new life?”

“Well,” he said, “it wasn’t all our new minister, though she has been a big part of it. Among other things, she got us studying the Bible again. She gives a great Bible Study. In fact,” he said, “our minister can summarize the entire message of the Bible in just seven words.”

“Really?” I said. “Gosh, that’s amazing. Say, what are those seven words that summarize the entire message of the Bible?”

His smile broadened . . . “The seven words that summarize the Bible’s message? ‘I am God and you are not.’ Yes,” he continued, “we were so focused on our past greatness as a church, our important place in history, that we sort of got lost. We thought it was all about us, all on us. It became a terrible burden, a lot of pressure. We felt we had failed to live up to that greatness, that reputation.”

My guide continued, “Our new minister said, ‘Listen, you are a wonderful church, but it’s not really about you, not about me either. It’s about God. It’s about what God has done, what God is doing, and what God has promised.”

So, he said, “we began to focus more on that, on what God was doing, how God forgives the charges against us and opens up a future where we hadn’t been able to see one. We lifted up God’s grace and mercy, God’s power to make a way when we didn’t see a way.

“Wake up.” That is the Lord’s call to us this morning. Wake up from your spiritual slumber. Wake up to what the Lord Jesus Christ is doing for you and for us and in us and among us. Wake up to his forgiveness for your sins, his calling you by name to be one his disciples, his drawing near to you.

Amen. 

Work Cited

Robinson, Anthony. “Advent Rest: A Sermon for the First Sunday in Advent.” What’s Tony Thinking, Substack, https://anthonybrobinson747.substack.com/p/advent-rest.