How to keep spiritually awake.

Matthew 24.36-44

Advent is about keeping awake.

Jesus tells the story the man who was burgled. He tells us that if the man had known when the burglar was coming, he would have stayed awake.

Jesus is saying to us, in pretty dramatic terms, that we need to stay awake because there will be a day when the Son of Man comes with great power and glory.

We speak of it as the second coming.

The first coming was when Jesus the Messiah was born in Bethlehem. This is his second coming. It will be the end of space and time as we know it. It will be God closing the books on history.

Of course it is hard to imagine. We can only think in categories of space and time, and this event goes beyond those categories. So all we have is picture language.

But we need to stay awake because nobody knows when that second coming will be, not even the main character! Jesus says that only the Father knows.

So don’t get misled by people who tell you when they think the end of the world is coming! They just don’t know. It could be tomorrow morning. It could be in 2 million years.

I think it was Luther who said, ‘Live each day as if it is the last, and plant an acorn’.

And I would like to suggest three ways that we can stay awake.

1.      Don’t forget your mortality

Jesus reminds his listeners of the people of Noah’s time. They were getting on with life - eating, drinking, giving in marriage and marrying. They were living in the present and thinking of how they could secure their life.

The Animals Going into the Ark from 'The Story of the Family of Seth'. Engraving Jan Sadeler, 1586. Notice the townsfolk in the background.

But they had not looked beyond.

A couple of months ago we visited Herculaneum. There was a museum which displayed some jewellery that had been found. Some of those pieces could have been found in one of jewellery shops today. The people there were really just like us or the people of Noah’s time. They were getting on with life - and suddenly destruction struck. There were the skeletons of people who had run to the beach hoping against hope to be saved, and had taken shelter in the boathouses built into the rock. But there was no escape from the boiling gas.

We are very good at pushing the idea of death away.

In the past the bodies of our loved ones would have been there in the front room. Then we took them to chapels of rest, where those who wish could view them. Now we have so-called direct cremations, where the body is taken from the morgue to the cemetery. That may be convenient, but it is not spiritually healthy or particularly helpful to those left behind.

Many of the ancient monasteries in the east have an ossuary room, where the skulls of former monks are kept. It is a place to both remember our mortality but also the resurrection.

Abba Poemen was asked by a brother, ‘Why do I fall into sin so easily?’ The old man said to him, ‘Because you do not keep your mind on your death. Whoever keeps remembrance of death before him cannot sin’.

Or Amma Syncletica says, ‘We must live as though we were to die tomorrow, yet treat our body as though we were to live many years.’

I feel a bit of a party pooper. But I am not encouraging us to be morbid. I am simply suggesting that one way of keeping awake is to remember that this is not all that there is. We will die. It really does help us to put things into perspective.

2.      To stay awake, we need to recognise our accountability.

These verses speak of judgement. Some Advent services are structured around the idea of the “four last things”: death, judgement, hell, and heaven. Jesus speaks of the judgement that fell in the days of Noah, and of the separation that will come: one taken, one left.

There is judgement because we are accountable - responsible for the choices that we make.

Dolphins are amazing animals. They are social, can communicate, and are highly intelligent. In the Hitchhikers Guide to the Galaxy they are the second most intelligent creature on earth - after mice! But there is a difference between human beings and dolphins. If the dolphins are wiped out, we are responsible. If human beings are wiped out, the dolphins are not responsible.

It is that responsibility which is our dignity and our burden - and it is also the basis for our accountability.

God gives us the freedom to make choices. But those choices mean that we are responsible before God for our lives, for the lives of the others who are our neighbours, and for this creation.

We are responsible for our actions and words: the little words that shape others. Whether we welcome or ignore someone, whether we offer a small kindness or not, whether we speak words of blessing or cursing.

Stay awake. We have the astonishing dignity of being able to make real choices. We really can consciously choose what we do with our money or our time or our lives. That gives us responsibility, but it also makes us accountable to God.

This is a bit of a scary passage. Jesus speaks of a devastating flood and of separation.

3.      But stay awake: Don’t forget God’s love and mercy.

We are about to remember the first coming of Jesus into the world.

Jesus did not then come as a judge, but as a baby. He did not come in power but in vulnerability. He did not come to bring God’s punishment onto us. He came to identify himself with us and take that punishment onto himself.

He did not come into this world in order to condemn us for the wrong choices we have made. He came to save us, to bring forgiveness, to give us hope, to give us the possibility of a new life, of eternal life with him.

He came to bring forgiveness and the hope of change to self-centred, fear controlled, lust driven people like me. He came to show us love and draw us into love and make us love.

So this Advent - as we prepare for the first coming of Jesus, we also bear in mind a second coming. We keep awake. We remember our mortality, our accountability and the love of God.