Keep Awake: God is Coming Near

One of my favorite things about this time of year is the Holiday Nap. You know what I’m talking about. It’s that nap you are powerless to resist after inevitably eating too much at a relatives’ house. It’s the nap that just can’t be helped when stomachs are full of turkey and potatoes in a house full of warmth and good cheer.

Folks, there are few greater luxuries in this world than taking a very long nap on someone else’s couch.

Now, some people can’t abide a nap longer than a half hour, but for me, I don’t see the point of a Holiday Nap that isn’t at least an hour and a half. Because a long nap almost always ensures that feeling you get when you wake up in someone else’s house and for a moment feel completely lost and disoriented.

This isn’t always a good thing, of course. Once, at a Thanksgiving during my college years, I sneaked off to a spare bedroom in my grandmother’s house. Now, at the time, my Grandmother was an avid doll collector, but exhausted from the feast, I didn’t much pay attention to the rows of dolls in room as I crashed in a post-turkey heap.

But when I woke, slightly disoriented and unsure of where I was, imagine the startling sight of dozens of glassy, unblinking eyes and pale porcelain faces staring at me from all directions. I almost fell out of the bed trying to scramble to the door. It was not the best way to wake up.

But real awakenings in our lives are like that. They can be troubling and disorienting. They take everyday life and rearrange everything in it. And suddenly, in the experience of waking up, everything looks different. What once seemed innocuous or not even worth noticing now seems startling, and you wonder how in the world you didn’t notice how troubling the rooms of our lives really are.

Like, how did I not notice how creepy and unnerving it was to sleep in room with an audience of two hundred dolls watching me from all sides?

It’s the stuff of nightmares and horror stories!

Mark’s gospel from this past Sunday speaks to the kind of awakenings that come from nightmarish circumstances and horrible experiences. The text is sometimes called the “Little Apocalypse,” but we aren’t talking about the fictional apocalypse of the Left Behind series. Rather we are talking about the kind of apocalypse that destroys life as we know it, that rearranges everything, and turns our world upside down.

For Mark, this little apocalypse refers to and predicts the horrifying destruction of the Temple in Jerusalem. And he describes that turned upside-down world like many Hebrew prophets did in their own days, in terms of stars falling from the heavens, the sun and moon darkening, and the end of the world.

But the gospel writer reminds us of two things: that in the midst of these little apocalypses, Christ is coming near to us, and that we should Keep Awake so that we might bear witness and meet Christ in the midst of it.

So Advent not only bears witness to what troubles, darkens and shakes the world, but it also promises us the hope that we will not face it alone and life will go on after it.

See, contrary to what popular culture tells us, apocalypse doesn’t really mean “the end of the world.” Instead, it refers to a “revealing” or an “uncovering.”

An apocalypse is an awakening.

We’ve probably all had apocalypses like this, awakenings in which our worlds fall apart in order to be rearranged. When one moment, life seems so normal, and so natural, and so comfortable, and then in a flash of war, of hunger, of a bullet, of a loss, of injustice, of a death, everything we’ve ever known is turned upside-down.

Suddenly we know we must, above all, stay alert and keep awake. Because God is in our midst, revealing, uncovering, and coming near, because if not, we’re lost and without hope.

In my experience, these awakenings almost always take us by surprise and come from unexpected places. As with most awakenings, it’s hard to explain exactly what takes place, but we know that we are changed. In the religious world, we call it a transformation, a conversion even.

Maybe Advent is, if nothing else, a call to do just that — to open ourselves up to the apocalypses occurring in our world on a daily basis through poverty, oppression, hunger, and violence, and to allow them to shake the foundations of our lives, to rearrange our worlds, and wake us up from our complacency.

David Henson is an Episcopal priest and blogs at Edges of Faith. This post is excerpted from his blog.