November 28, 2010

“Wachet auf, ruft uns die Stimme. Der Waechter sehr hoch auf der Zinne. Wach auf du stadt Jerusalem.” Today is the first Sunday of Advent and for me, Advent must begin with that Bach chorale, with the words by Philip Nicolai. We will sing them at the 10:00 service today—in English, of course. It’s not simply that this is a favorite hymn of mine, or that it’s an Advent hymn. No, this is one of those cases where the hymn writer expresses beautifully one of the key themes of the season.

Wake up!

There. Now do I have your attention? I know, it’s hard to keep focused. Our texts, both the reading from Paul’s letter to the Romans, and the gospel, urge us to pay attention. It’s almost funny to think about though. What might have distracted first-century readers or hearers of this text compared to all of the distractions in our lives. The most emailed article on the NY Times in the past week appeared last Sunday and detailed the effects on teenagers’ minds of all of the technology they are using. Apparently, because brains are still developing in these years, they can become habituated to new stimuli and constantly switching tasks, and less able to pay focus on single tasks. In fact, they develop a need for constant stimulation.

It’s not just teens, of course. We all have such problems or can think of times when we’ve been doing a dozen things. I remember one time I was commuting down the interstate, happened to look over in the next lane, and saw a woman driving, with a cell phone in her hand, and she was doing her makeup. We tell ourselves we can pay attention—we can multi-task—but in fact, if we are trying to do several things at one time, all of them suffer.

The admonitions of Paul and Jesus are not directed at multi-tasking, over-stimulated teens or adults. They are not writing about the distractions of twenty-first century life. The problem is not that people have too many things that divert their attention from what really matters. The problem is that our priorities are screwed up. What we think matters most is not all that important. So, Jesus says, “For in those days, before the flood, they were eating and drinking, marrying and being taken in marriage.” The Greek has a repetitive, sing-song cadence to it, so that the language seems to put you to sleep. That’s the intended effect. They were not doing anything particularly wrong—they were doing the sorts of things people do—we eat and drink, we get married. It’s the normal rhythms of daily life. But it puts us to sleep, dulls the senses.

Wake up! Pay attention! It’s a message we may not want to hear in our current setting, we may not even think it’s a particularly edifying message. Why should we pay attention? To what? So it might be useful to look at this question from a completely different angle. The advice to pay attention isn’t unique to Christianity. It’s one of the central concepts in Buddhism, too. Mindfulness—taking the time to focus on what you are doing, what is happening to yourself and what is happening in the world around you, is one of the key themes in Buddhism. It’s one of the reason meditation is so important. Doing something as simple as paying attention to one’s breath is often the first thing a meditation teacher tells a new student.

And if you’ve ever tried it, you know how difficult that simple instruction can be. The reason it’s so hard is that there is so much to distract us; even if we are in a quiet room, sitting in a comfortable position with the little task of paying attention to our breath as we inhale or exhale, we can’t do it. We begin to notice a hum coming from somewhere. Perhaps suddenly something starts to itch, or the position we thought was going to be comfortable turns out to cause pain in a knee or muscle. And then the thoughts start flying into our mind, the list of things we have to do, the worries and anxieties we might have—no, we can’t pay attention, even to our breath, even for a little while.

Some of you no doubt are thinking—well thank goodness we’re Christians, we don’t have to do that! But then comes Advent with its messages to stay awake and pay attention. To what ought we be paying attention? Advent is the season when we look forward to Christmas and the coming of the Christ child. But it is also a season when we look forward to the Second Coming. It is exceedingly difficult, in our culture, in the midst of another holiday season, to pay attention to the incarnation of our Lord. It is even more difficult to take the time to focus our attention on the Second Coming. But that’s what our lessons are about.

The gospel reading comes from what scholars called the “Little Apocalypse.” All three synoptics, Matthew, Mark, and Luke, have Jesus preaching a message about the age that is to come. They set this speech in the context of the last week of his life. In the larger discourse, Jesus is describing two different sets of events. Some have already happened in the first century, others are still in the future. The passage we heard clearly is discussing future events. That the coming of a new age is near is absolutely certain, but when it is coming is completely uncertain.

Both are reminders to us of the worldview within which Paul and the gospel writer were living. They were expecting an imminent end of the world and reflect the pervasive apocalyptic mood of the time. We Episcopalians tend to be rather uncomfortable with talk about the Second Coming. It’s all so unseemly, isn’t it? We associate talk about the last days with conservative, fundamentalist Christians who look for signs of Jesus’ imminent return in world events or natural disaster. We’re even amused when we read about groups or individuals who predict when Jesus is coming back and make plans accordingly.

Of course, that’s what Jesus is warning against. The day of the Lord comes like a thief in the night—there’s no way to know in advance. But at the same time, most of us don’t really think Jesus is coming back at all—after all it’s been 2000 years. So even if we proclaim our faith in the second coming every time we recite the Nicene Creed, we don’t really believe it.

When faced with the biblical imagery of the last times, what we call apocalyptic, most of us tend to ignore it, or at most we think it a relic of a bygone era. But it’s important not to dismiss it. It’s not just that the biblical texts are full of this imagery, it’s because of the ideas that lie behind it. We may be uncomfortable with notions that God is going to destroy the world, that there will be a battle between angels and demons, that Jesus will come down from heaven to the sound of trumpets and in a blaze of glory. All of that imagery is trying to convey a message that we should take seriously.

There are two aspects to that message, both of them are appropriate for Advent. What apocalyptic is trying to convey, in very picturesque and powerful language are two central aspects of God—God’s judgment and God’s justice. We tend to focus on one of these two aspects, depending on our personal make-up and our theological perspective. Some of us like to think of God as the judge who will destroy the evil in the world. Others prefer to think of God as ultimately bringing justice to the universe, making all things right—punishing the wicked and rewarding the righteous. But underlying these two themes is still another—that God is ultimately in charge of the universe and of history.

Staying awake, paying attention. It’s particularly hard to do that, to pay attention to the notion that God is in charge of the universe and history in the midst of our daily, busy lives. It’s not just a matter of focus, it’s that everything seems to controvert that idea. It seems like no one is in charge, or, if someone is in charge, it’s certainly not a benevolent God. It’s hard to see evidence of God’s justice or judgment. Jesus himself said that the rain falls on the just and the unjust, and we see it all around us—people who do bad things seem to get rewarded, while the good die young.

But we need to pay attention, look for those signs of God’s justice in the midst of the world and our lives. Isaiah casts a vision of God’s justice that can grab hold of us in the midst of it all: “they shall beat their swords into plowshares and their spears into pruning hooks.” Paying attention to that vision, while we live in a chaotic world and our lives full of activity is no easy thing. This Advent, may we look for the signs of that coming vision and taking up our plowshares and pruning hooks work as well for its realization.