Advent 1a 2025; 30 Nov.
Isa. 2:1-5; Ps. 122; Rom 13:11-14
Matt. 24:36-44; Jack Hardaway
SLEEPLESS
I used to wake up at night and walk around the house in the darkness. I’d check on the children, look out the windows, walk outside and just listen to the night sounds, watch the long shadows from the street lights, watch for possum and deer walking around.
Sleepless. Watching the darkness. Looking for light.
That is Advent.
Insomnia, in the darkness, waiting for the dawn.
A little different from the holiday festivals and the commercial Christmas that consume most of the air we breathe.
Today we step out of rhythm with pretty much everyone.
Today we begin Advent, the beginning of the Christian year.
And we walk out of step until Easter really.
It is a penitential season.
Not to the same degree as Lent, but it is penitential in a different way.
We are penitent in Lent as we face our own death, and our complicity in the power of death at work in the world. We tell the truth and face the truth as we prepare to meet our maker.
Advent has a different feel, in Advent we clean house because the Judge and Redeemer of the Universe is coming over for a visit. It is exciting and terrifying. It is full of hope and longing and watchfulness.
Oh and did we say we don’t really know when he’ll pop by for a visit?
Keep an eye out. It will be like a flood in the middle of the night, when we least expect it, so stay awake. Advent keeps us up at night.
It feels a lot like being a child on Christmas Eve watching for Santa, afraid and hopeful for the accounting we will wake up to, the disappointments and the surprises, falling asleep with one eye propped open.
The theologian Fleming Rutledge writes that the season of Advent, “when properly understood, does not flinch from the darkness that stalks us all in this world.
Advent begins in the dark and moves toward the light—but the season should not move too quickly or too glibly, lest we fail to acknowledge the depth of the darkness. …
Advent bids us take a fearless inventory of the darkness: the darkness without and the darkness within.”
The fearless inventory of the darkness, walking the house at night, watching the shadows.
There was this famous old hermit in Egypt in the 4th century, Abba Bessarion, when he was on his death bed he said, “The monk ought to be as the Cherubim and the Seraphim, all eye.”
As you remember the Seraphim in the Books of Ezekiel and Revelation are celestial creatures with many wings and many eyes.
Watch for God’s Kingdom flooding into this world, into this life, become all eye, design your life around this, live accordingly.
A holy insomnia, full of painful longing and hope, facing the darkness without and within, watching for sunrise.
I pray this Advent keeps us awake.