November 30, 2025
Advent 1
Besides
this, you know what time it is, how it is already the moment for you to wake
from sleep. For salvation is nearer to us now than when we became
believers; the night is far gone; the day is
near. Let us then throw off the works of darkness and put on the armor of
light; let us walk decently as in the
day, not in reveling and drunkenness, not in illicit sex and licentiousness,
not in quarreling and jealousy. Instead, put on
the Lord Jesus Christ, and make no provision for the flesh, to gratify its
desires.
At one moment in our church’s life, one of the committees took on the task of encouraging our church members to come to worship. Folks like you didn’t need any encouragement. You were already here. But there were some that had slipped off the radar. They hadn’t been seen in quite a while.
You can imagine the task. A task force combed through the lists of names. Who knows this person? Who knows that one? Before we reach out, is there any evidence they have been here? And then, the phone calls commenced. Conversations ensued, summaries were shared, and encouragements were offered.
You can imagine the responses. Some had a job change. Some had a life change. Some had quietly moved out of town. A couple of them had quietly moved to heaven. A few offered excuses. A few others offered good reasons. And then there was one guy – I’ll call him Sam.
Sam worked seven months of the year as a groundskeeper at a nearby golf course. When winter came, the course laid him off. He collected unemployment. After the spring thaw, he was hired back again. Our eager volunteer said, “Well, we would love to see you whenever you can attend.” Sam said, “I can’t make it to church when I’m working. Sunday morning is prime time for golf. In fact, I see a lot of church members on Sunday morning."
“I understand,” said the volunteer, “but we would love to see you when you aren’t working.” “No,” he replied, “during the winter I take a long nap. Besides, the last couple of times I went to church, I fell asleep.”
“Oh my,” said the volunteer, “were you embarrassed?” “Not as embarrassed as my elderly mother,” he confessed. “She didn’t like my snoring.”
That was many years ago. The last time he came to worship was many years before that, decades in fact. To use an Old Testament phrase, Sam is now sleeping with his ancestors. And it has always intrigued me. How can anybody fall asleep, especially in church? Is the sermon boring? Have you heard it all before? Did the announcements go on too long? Was the prayer too subdued? Was he weary when he arrived? Overtired from a late night? Or was there too much wine during - or after - Saturday dinner?
Who can say? Perhaps we can take a moment to survey the room to see if anybody is nodding off.
“It’s time to wake up,” says the apostle Paul. The Jesus who came once is coming again. With him will come the full dominion of God. Not just the hints and whispers of it – but the whole thing. The complete experience. The Big Day, the Final Day, the Day of the Lord. All of human history is coming to its conclusion. God’s great salvage operation is right close at hand. “Don’t stay asleep. Wake up and claim the Brand New Day.”
Now, that’s preacher talk. In the sermon business, we call that “amplified speech.” The one in the pulpit turns up the volume to “11.” Everything is spoken louder, described as bigger. The volume aims to motivate, energize, and keep our attention. We can thank Paul for pointing to something Great and Large and Wonderful. He wants us to be ready to claim it when it arrives. He’s a good preacher.
And he is also a good pastor. For he knows, just as soon as he’s done speaking, the crowd can slide back into complacency. After the dog barks for a while, it is no longer heard. There is a long, slow slide into the status quo. Behaviors become habits. Habits become routines. We begin to believe the future will look a lot like the status quo. So, he smacks the pulpit and bellows out, “Wake up!” Then he adds, “Watch how you walk.”
Wake and walk: two verbs for the beginning of Advent. As the poet Bill Leety once suggested, “Pay attention to the verbs. Verbs do all the work. Verbs carry the freight.” So, let’s take a moment to explore these two verbs and try to understand what they have to do with the season.
“Wake up.” This verb is not referring to the gentle emergence from the deep pool of dreaming. It’s not that thirty-minute return to consciousness. Rather, it’s a shaking, a rousing, like an air horn at a basketball game. Or that smoke alarm that screeched at 3:00 a.m. when your chimney was backed up. Paul uses the same verb that he and others use for “raising” the dead. It’s loud, like a trumpet in the graveyard shouting, “Get up!”
And here, the waking is not from regular, old sleep, but from a form of hypnosis. It’s that long, slow slide into oblivion. You don’t even know it’s been happening. Like that moment during the third quarter of the Penn State game yesterday. There was a blazing fire in the fireplace. My belly was full of pizza, Kielbasa, and onion dip. That huge piece of pumpkin pie tasted so good. I didn’t even notice I was drifting into a carbohydrate coma on the couch.
Then my wife yelled at a missed extra point, as she is prone to do – and I suddenly opened my eyes. “Wake up!”
And walk. If you were reading along with the pew Bible (NRSV), you didn’t see the verb “walk” in verse thirteen. You heard Paul say, “let us live.” But the verb in the original language is “walk.” Drawing on the old Hebrew notion, which was familiar to Paul, to live is to walk, to make your way through the world, to move and to move on, to follow your feet into the realm of holiness.
As he says, “Let us walk decently, as if we belong to the darkness.” He contrasts the “decent walk,” the holy walk, with three pairs of behaviors that often happen after dark: reveling and drunkenness, illicit sex and licentiousness, in quarreling and jealousy. Or as someone puts them in relevant speech, “in frivolity and indulgence, in sleeping around and dissipation, in bickering and grabbing everything in sight.”[1] We can’t afford to waste a minute of these precious daylight hours.
Wake up and walk – because the King is close at hand. The hour is near. God’s salvation is coming right here. This is the message of Advent. The herald announces it every year. Truth be told, the cycle of liturgical seasons circles around, year after year. As helpful as it is to mark church time that way, we live fifty-weeks in Advent. We are always waiting for God to come in the fullness of glory.
Laura read to us Isaiah’s vision of peace, a vision so compelling that the prophet Micah said, “I’m going to reuse those words in my own book.”[2] The day is coming when all people shall walk to God’s house on top of God’s mountain. God will judge them and instruct them. They will pound their weapons into farm tools and they “ain’t gonna study war no more.”
“O Israel,” cries the prophet, “let us walk in the light of the Lord.” Not in the darkness of suspicion and destruction – but in the brightness of God’s revelation.
Then the Psalm that we sang, a Psalm prayed by generations as they walked to God’s house on the top of God’s mountain. “I was glad when they said, ‘Let us go to the house of the Lord.’” Glad, not sad. Glad, not bored. Glad, not sleepy or lazy or full of excuses, but glad. Because gladness is the overwhelming emotion when we live in the fullness of Christ. It’s the conviction that, all evidence to the contrary, everything is going to work out in the end – because Everything and the End all belong to God. The poet says there will even be peace in the Middle East. Imagine that!
Wake up and walk this way. These are the opening invitations as Advent rolls around once again. They are continuing invitations for our spiritual life because we tend to nod off to sleep and we tend to become spiritual couch potatoes. Open your eyes! Get up and get moving! Paul wants the Christians in Rome to be ready for God’s encroaching kingdom. The same holds true for the Christians in Clarks Summit.
Dr. Christine Valters Paintner is a wise spiritual director in Galway, Ireland. She knows how our bad habits form when we convince ourselves that the-way-things-are are the way things will always be. The God who will come finally is already close at hand. The status quo has been punctured open. The darkness has been broken by the Light. So, she says, “The image of awakening calls us to shake off the slumber that creates a veil between reality and our perception.” [3]
If we are spiritually asleep, things happen that threaten to do us in.
- Like frivolity and indulgence: when we lose track of how many glasses of wine we’ve been sipping or how many Moscow Mules we’ve been pounding down. We could live in a fog until Advent says, “Wake up and leave behind the spiritual substitutes.”
- Like dissipation and sleeping around: if we hop from one romantic attachment to another, we trade our identity as God’s beloved ones for cheap thrills that inevitably cheapen us. Advent says, “Step out of the darkness of shame into God’s cleansing light.”
- Like bickering and grabbing everything in sight: if we exist only to grab and consume whatever we can, stoked by greed and jealousy and endless comparisons to everybody else, Advent says, “Open your eyes – and then open your heart. There are others here, too, and we are all waiting together for what God so deeply wants for us all.
Wake up and walk. The alternative to living only for today is living for tomorrow. It will be God’s tomorrow. It will be the eighth day of New Creation, where all darkness is punctured by light. We can be full of ourselves, driven only by our appetites. Or we can be full of Christ, abounding in love, honoring one another, and showing wide grace far greater than ourselves. For that is what God’s tomorrow will be, for us and for all.
In the words of the ancient
prophet, “Come, let us walk in the light of the Lord.”
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