On this first Sunday in Advent we hear the cry from Psalm 80, “Stir up you power, and come!” Come to the aid of your people Israel! Come to all who require your assistance in their need! Come, help us! Come now! The prophet Isaiah echoes the psalmist’s plea, and displays the same sense of urgency, “O that you would tear open the heavens and come down.” The urgency of this cry is tempered, or at least qualified, by Jesus’ admonition, repeated three times in our gospel reading, to keep awake. “Beware, keep alert,” Jesus says, “for you do not know when the time will come.” So, it looks like we have kind of tension here. On the one hand, there is an urgent request that the Lord come and come immediately. And on the other hand, we hear this reminder from Jesus that we must remain on the alert, because we cannot know when the Lord will come. It would seem as though we are called to live with this uncertainty and tension, the tension between our time and the Lord’s time, the tension between our short-term needs and God’s long-term plans. But living in this tension does not leave us helpless, confused or floundering—far from it. Paul gives us encouraging words as to how we may live with hope in this tension between our expectations and God’s promised fulfillment: “[God, who is faithful] will strengthen you to the end,” Paul says, “so that you may be blameless on the day of our Lord Jesus Christ.”

God will strengthen us to the end. As the book of Lamentations says, ‘The Lord is good to those who wait for him, to the soul that seeks him. It is good to wait quietly for the salvation of the Lord” (Lam. 3:25-26). It is not for nothing, then, that the day of the Lord will come, as it is said elsewhere in the gospels, as a thief in the night when no one expects it. There is a positive reason for our uncertainty regarding the day and the hour. In a sense this uncertainty guarantees that the coming kingdom of God is indeed God’s kingdom that comes, and not a kingdom of ours that we establish. In fact, God’s kingdom overturns all our attempts at kingdom-building; for as God’s kingdom, is it the kingdom announced and embodied by the only-begotten Son of the Father and characterized by the love that the Father for the Son share with each other in the power of the Holy Spirit, a kingdom that is established according to God’s own will and word, and therefore not a kingdom that we design and build, but rather a kingdom for which we must wait in hope and with faith, strengthened as Paul says, to the end, so that we may be blameless on the day of our Lord Jesus Christ. Thus the kingdom of God, so one commentator has said [Barth, CD III.2.499], “will come suddenly [and thus unexpectedly] because it is foreordained and foreknown by God alone, and will occur when [we] are least expecting it, beneficially if terrifyingly upsetting all [our] expectations and plans, and thus [our] anxieties and hopes.”

God’s kingdom is not dependent on, nor is it determined by our wants, fears, longings, cravings or needs. It isn’t determined by us at all. Rather, it is God’s kingdom that comes into being solely according to God’s own plan for his creation. Moreover, it is promised, carried out and fulfilled in and through God’s dealings with Israel culminating in the life, death, and resurrection of Jesus of Nazareth. God’s relationship with his people Israel is the basis of God’s coming reign of justice, life, and peace for all.

But the fact that we must wait and hope for the coming of God’s kingdom does not mean that in the mean time we should do nothing. If we did nothing, then we would hardly be blameless. No, the promise of God’s coming kingdom should motivate us to be very busy indeed. The one thing we know that we can and must do, as Jesus tells us, is to beware, to keep alert, and to keep awake. This is the first thing we must do, and it is the most important; for it means that whatever else we do, we do with faith according to the hope that it in us. Grounded in hope of God’s coming kingdom in Christ, therefore, we are to keep alert to the signs of God’s kingdom, a kingdom that is shaped and defined by the life, death and resurrection of Jesus Christ. For example, we are to be awake and thus respond, as he did and still does, to the cries of the poor, the needs of the hungry, the plight of the oppressed, the losses of the war-torn, the lament of the lonely, the pain of the sick and the trials of the suffering. By being alert to their needs and responding to their pain we dare to live into God’s kingdom that only the God of Israel can establish, as we turn our backs on all those human-designed kingdoms that ultimately are built on pride, fuelled by our desire, designed by our self-righteousness, and engineered by our common lust for glory.

To be alert, therefore, means that we pay attention to how our activity glorifies God and not ourselves. Thus not everything we do, not every activity, however noble we might consider it, is a living-into God’s kingdom—not even in the church. In fact, it is usually the more honorable aspects of our work that are most susceptible of self-righteousness. Therefore, the church is especially vulnerable, perhaps more than other institutions, to the temptation of self-importance. Consequently, there is a certain undeniable element of truth to the often-repeated criticism made by those who refuse to have anything to do with the church, that it is filled with hypocrites. Ghandi, a Hindu who was attracted to Christianity, famously quipped when asked why he consistently refused to become a Christian, “Oh, I don’t reject your Christ. I love your Christ. It’s just that so many of you Christians are so unlike your Christ.”

To be alert, in other words, is to live by faith alone. To live by faith alone is to live humbly, responsibly, obediently and thus freely in Christ, respecting God’s law as we abandon ourselves to the freedom of the gospel. We may not know why we feed a particular hungry person other than that he/she is hungry, and we may not know why we serve this person except that our service makes us free and that in the faces of the hungry we see the face of Christ. We may not always know what we are doing when we obey God’s law than that it is God’s will that we do it; and we may not know what it means to let God take control of our lives when we abandon ourselves to the gospel than that it is the only thing that can give life.

However, this definition of keeping alert, of keeping awake as we abandon ourselves to God’s law and open ourselves up in faith to God’s promised future, flies in the face of how we usually interpret responsibility and freedom in our day; for according to the modern myth, both require choice. The gospel exposes that myth and destroys it; for at the root of the modern myth is the idea that we are free to choose our own destiny. This would make us God and Lord. The reality is very different. The theologian and Christian pundit, Stanley Hawerwas, has written recently that according to the modern ethos of freedom, “We believe that we should be held responsible only for the things we freely choose when we knew what we were doing. The problem with this way of thinking,” he says, “is that it makes [e.g., something as basic as] marriage unintelligible. How do we ever know what we are doing when we promise lifelong monogamous fidelity? Christians are required to marry before witnesses in church so we can hold them to the promises they made when they didn’t know what they were doing.”

We are free to listen and obey, to pay attention and respond to the promptings of the Spirit, to follow in the way of the cross, to hope for a brighter future in Christ, and to have faith that our lives and the life of the world is in God the Father’s loving hands. This is how we keep alert and stay awake even as we cry out, “Stir up your power, O Lord, and come.”

-Amen-