Neighborhood Watch

Matthew 24:36-44

Happy new year, everybody!

Happy new church year, that is.

Today is the first Sunday of Advent and the start of an entirely new year of life together as the community of faith. Today, everywhere in the world, various expressions of the Christian church are beginning again, a whole new year, a new adventure of the life of discipleship. Perhaps you were unaware that for the past several months we’ve been slogging our way through Ordinary Time—the longest stretch of our liturgical year, unpunctuated by any of the exciting high holy days that are so familiar to us: Christmas, Epiphany, Easter, Pentecost…you know their names. Ordinary time is just that: a time of routine and everyday, where we live our days as they come and become accustomed to, well, the ordinary.

But today we begin something new…a whole new year, the season of Advent, a season of waiting and expectation hoping beyond hope that, well, that there’s something more than the ordinary.

Why?, you might ask.

Ordinary is not all that bad, after all.

Day after day with more of the same, no hectic special events, no big plans, no trying to get ready for anything. We could get used to the ordinariness of ordinary time—at least I could. I know that it might get a little tedious from time to time, but at least there’s some sense to static, of sameness, of routine, and that’s comforting, isn’t it?

But we’re not staying in Ordinary Time. We can’t. We can’t embrace the familiar or plant ourselves firmly in the rhythm of one day after another, the next the same as the last. We can’t. Why? Because we are people of faith, and seeing the world through the lens of faith changes everything. It changes everything because, though we see the world through our limited human eyes, we suspect . . . we really suspect . . . that there must be more than what we can see in the most ordinary parts of our human living.

When my children were little they were the owners of a beautiful children’s book by Ed Young called Seven Blind Mice. The book is a Caldecott award winner for its stunning illustrations, and it tells a version of a fable that appears in many cultures. Very simply, it’s the story of seven men, or seven mice as Ed Young presents them, each unable to see and finding themselves each running into a different part of an elephant. Depending on where each one found himself, hypotheses would emerge about what it was they were running into. For example, the one who bumped into an elephant leg would be sure he had run into a tree. An elephant’s ear was surely a fan, his trunk might be a snake or a spear! You’ve surely heard of some version of this story sometime…it’s a wisdom story told in various iterations to illustrate that very often we only see in part, but it could be dangerous to assume that what we see right in front of us is all there is.

And this uneasiness with what we see right in front of us is the starting point of Advent. We’re certainly happy making our way through Ordinary Time. Ordinary Time around here, of course, is never really ordinary, but it feels pretty comfortable nonetheless. The problem is that, while we can see pretty well what’s right here, we can’t rid ourselves of a little bit of nagging unease. Ordinary Time is fine, but there’s no doubt that our world is not as it should be. We can see what’s around us fairly clearly, but our identity as people of faith settles us with a bit of unease and restlessness. We suspect that there must be more. In a perfect world, there must be more than what we feel and see and know…there must be more of God’s dream for our world and for our lives. And so today we accept the invitation to start something new, to shake things up a bit, to look at our lives through a different lens, because ordinary is fine—it’s really quite okay. There’s nothing really wrong with ordinary.

But we are people who hang our lives on the hope that God is not finished with us yet; and we dream along with the divine for some healing and hope in this broken and hurting world; and we can’t live anymore in the sameness of the ordinary because we suspect that there must be more: God’s dream for a perfect world of justice.

We are people of faith. We see what’s in front of us, but we believe there IS more. Welcome to Advent.

The first day of a brand new year, at least in my mind, should be a day of celebration, right? So you may be scratching your head when you hear the gospel text the lectionary offers us for this first day of the new church year. In fact, if you overheard a collective groan earlier in the week, that would have been the masses of clergy who were handed this strange text from the gospel of Matthew as the text for this first Sunday of Advent. And not only is it a brand new church year, to make matters worse, all around us folks are gearing up for the festivities of Christmas. There’s nothing like being the biggest party-killer around by writing and delivering a sermon on one of the passages in the New Testament known as “apocalyptic texts”.

In other words, if you happened to notice, there’s nothing cheery or Christmassy or festive in the least about our Gospel text from Matthew’s Gospel today. In fact, it’s pretty gloomy; it speaks of the end of things; it has an urgency and inevitability to it that might remind you not so much of Christmas carols and gingerbread houses, but more an angry revival preacher doing his level best to scare the hell out of his listeners. Literally.

Our passage today from Matthew chapter 24 is part of what is known as the Olivet Discourse—a longer speech of Jesus’, some version of which you can find in Luke 21 and also Mark 13. He delivered this speech on the Mount of Olives, which is where it gets its name. In each of the three New Testament accounts this speech comes right before the narrative of Jesus’ passion—so we can imagine that, when he said all these things, tensions were high and Jesus knew his time was short. If they got nothing else out of Jesus’ speech that day, his disciples knew that something was up—that life as they knew it was shifting—and that however that came to be, well, things were wobbling right on the edge of change…big change.

We preacher-types have generally had quite a fun time with this passage. We find that it comes in handy when trying to scare people and also to write a whole series of books and produce several movies about the terrors of being “left behind,” as we like to say Jesus warns here. There’s no doubt these words of Jesus are serious—he clearly means to say something important, and he is not messing around. But the words can be so scary that many of us would, and often do, gladly choose another passage for the first Sunday of Advent. Or any Sunday, really.

But there’s a reason our lectionary leads us this way, and there’s something powerful and deep and revolutionary, even, about Jesus’ words. A whole three years of trying desperately to teach his disciples what he wanted them to know, of describing this new way of looking at the world…Jesus knew his time was getting short. And so, he got down to business. We may have missed it, I’m thinking, with all the “Warning: in case of rapture this car will be unmanned” bumper stickers floating around.

Here’s what he said…something like: “Just like the folks who lived in Noah’s time, some people were just going about their business, life as usual, when a whole segment of the population was swept away to face judgment. And, just like that turn of events, there were two working in a field and suddenly one was gone…and two women grinding grain but then all of a sudden only one was left.”

The interpretation we have always heard is that Jesus is talking about when he will come again and whisk the faithful up to heaven where they are happy forever after, amen, and the poor unfortunate ones left behind…well, they are in for a terrible time. And…if you want to imagine what that might be, just pick up a “Left Behind” novel. The strange thing about how we have always heard this interpreted and how Tim LaHaye and ilk have portrayed it in multi-million dollar media, of course, is that the very worst thing you could be is left behind.

But that’s not what Jesus is saying. Not at all. Can you believe that Hollywood has misinterpreted the words of Jesus??!? If you read the passage closely you can see that it’s the people who get swept away—in the flood, or in the field, or in the process of grinding grain—those are the people who have to face God’s judgment—whatever that means. It’s the people who are left behind with whom Jesus is concerned, for whom he has set out an important challenge. They are the ones, after all, who are tasked, like Noah and his family, with building a new world, a whole new way of living and being human in this world God created.

So, Jesus wants his disciples to know: your task is to be vigilant. To watch and to wait. To watch and to wait, in fact, and to live as if Jesus has already returned and the world that Jesus came to show us is already coming to be, to live into the promise of a perfect world that God imagines for us. One commentator says: “This is what Advent is. In anticipation of Jesus arriving, we practice now how we expect to live then.”

Watch, wait, be thinking and acting all the time. A human community of justice and hope is our responsibility. To watch for our neighbors, to seek out and facilitate justice and mercy…this is the jarring realization that Advent calls us to embrace. We live with the conviction that there’s more. There’s more to imagine. There’s more to be done. And the complacency and status quo of Ordinary Time is just not going to do anymore.

Why did Jesus feel the need to have this little heart to heart with his disciples? Perhaps Jesus, who lived a human life and walked through all the pain and joy of what it means to live on this earth and be fully and totally like you and me, knew that his disciples and everyone who would seek to audaciously call themselves followers of Jesus might have occasion to be sidetracked from time to time by the shear craziness of this world in which we live.

We could, as he described, be just going about our business—working in the field or grinding grain, as Jesus said, or going to class or making dinner or riding the Metro to work or washing the dishes or any other regular thing that demands our time or attention, and we could get so sidetracked that we fail to see the needs all around us…we could, in fact, fail to notice that there is a divine agenda for our world, and it most often is not dominated by the things that you and I find so deeply and all-consumingly important at all.

This is why we need Advent. We need to be shaken out of the ordinary, to realize that all is not right with our world, and that we need something bigger than ourselves…we need God, to take us out of what has become routine and mundane and what eats up every corner of our lives, to someplace where we could never go on our own.

I had a few moments to watch the news over the Thanksgiving holiday, which is kind of unusual for me. Of course the biggest news story these days is the economy, and it seems to me that there were even more than the usually excessive number of stories about after Thanksgiving shopping and the economic indicators of retail sales in anticipation for Christmas. Yesterday morning as I was relaxing in front of the TV with my morning coffee I saw a news story that made me recoil in horror—as I am sure many of you did.

The story that caught my eye on the news yesterday was the footage of the doors of a Target store in Buffalo, NY, opening very early in the morning for Black Friday shopping. As you know if you saw it, there was a regular stampede of shoppers. Everyone pushed over and past each other to squeeze through the doors and try to get into the store to grab whatever they were shopping for.

It made me wonder what exactly I had missed in the Target flyer, frankly.

And, it made me wonder: why would all these hundreds of people want to get into a store to buy something so very badly that they would completely disregard each others’ well being and actually cause harm to the people around them?

One of the Target shoppers who was taken to the hospital (and, I guess, missed out on a deal!) said later: “I see it as a little absurd. I don’t think it’s worth standing out there all night to get trampled or trample somebody else.” You think? Perhaps…

Yes, maybe we are people who, even like the people in the time of Noah, have become so complacent and preoccupied with the things in our human lives that pull at us, that preoccupy us, that even mesmerize us from time to time. We get so taken with all of it, in fact, that we forget that there’s more. We forget that our calling and challenge is always to do justice, to love mercy, to walk humbly with God…to be discontent with the world as it is, to work to create the world as God imagines it can be, and to always, always demand nothing less.

We should never become so complacent that we accept a world in which children are starving, where power struggles and harm of neighbor are the order of the day, where we are diminished in our aggressive exploitation of those among us who are weak and vulnerable. This is not the world God imagines, but it is the ordinary, everyday world, a world to which we could easily become accustomed.

And ordinary is no longer acceptable. We have rested on our laurels long enough; we have risked the balm of complacency for far longer than is healthy or right. Advent is here, and things need to change.

So our invitation today, the first Sunday of Advent, is to watch—watch carefully and intentionally. Watch, not with the fear that the end of the world will suddenly come and we’ll be left behind…no, watch instead with the vigilance of a neighbor who knows the wellbeing of the other is critical to the health of this whole world, and is without question the mandate and direction of God for our lives.

Advent is here. Our watching and waiting and hoping and dreaming and bringing into being God’s perfect dream of a just world…well, it has now begun. Amen.