“For you do not know on which day your Lord will come.” (Matthew 24.42)
A “Dennis the Menace” comic from years back shows Dennis sitting on Santa’s lap. Other kids are waiting their turn, while Dennis’ mother is on the side, surely wondering what he is about to say to Santa, since she knows better than anyone what his conduct is like on a typical day. Dennis is holding a hand to the side of his mouth as he whispers to Santa, “I try to be really good right before Christmas, but this year the time just got away from me.” Yes, we smile, but the real reason we like Dennis so much is because he speaks for most of us. We are Dennis the Menace. Each of us has said it often enough ourselves. The time just got away from me.
As we know, time is front and center these days. The civic calendar shows we’re on the countdown to Christmas, with Black Friday behind us and Black Monday before us. The shopping days count down, as the children wait impatiently for the countdown to be over. Meanwhile, the church calendar says we’re in the season of Advent, a word that simply means “coming,” a clear reference to the coming of the celestial child in the crib at Bethlehem.
Obviously, the two calendars are both geared towards the wait for Christmas, but the idea of how we are going to spend our time until Christmas day is different, depending on which calendar we’re following. The civic calendar suggests we use our time to search the aisles for the best bargains, while the church calendar wants us to search our souls for spiritual gains. It’s not that we can’t do both, but–let us be truthful–we tend to get caught up in the store shopping and we easily forget about the soul searching.
So, the church calendar provides us with scriptural lessons to help us spend some time on soul searching. One selection we find in the common lectionary this Sunday comes from the prophet Isaiah who speaks of a time in the future when Jerusalem will be restored, when past injustices will be righted, and when the glory of God will shine upon the world as it did in days past. It will be a world on the right course again because it is a world that has learned at long last to live according to the ways of God. As the prophet says, “Come, let us climb the Lord’s mountain, to the house of the God of Jacob, that he may instruct us in his ways, and we may walk in his paths.” (Is 2.3)
Still another similar selection comes from the sacred writer, Matthew, who tells of the occasion when the Galilean Rabbi called Yeshua spoke of a time in the past when people ate and drank, oblivious to the coming flood that would end the world as they knew it. Only Noah, a good and wise man, spent his time in the work of preparation. He built an ark to save him and his family. When the flood wiped out the rest of the world, Noah survived because he had listened to the instruction of the Lord God. Now was the time for a new world to be created.
Both scriptural passages make use of the idea of time, a time in the past, and a time in the future, and the time in between. That time “in between” is our time, guided by the lessons of the past, and focused on the possibilities of the future. The question left to us to answer is how we will use this time. Here, the writer Paul of Tarsus, in another passage from Scripture provided to us on this Sunday, offers us a guide when he tells the people of Rome, “The night is advanced, the day is at hand. . . Let us conduct ourselves properly as in the day.” (Romans 13.11-14).
If we make use of our time to do as Paul says, to conduct ourselves properly, then that new world that the ancient prophet Isaiah foresaw as a possibility stands a greater chance of becoming a reality, a time, as he said, when “they shall beat their swords into plowshares and their spears into pruning hooks. One nation shall not raise the sword against another, nor shall they train for war again.”
However, if the time gets away from us and we do not “conduct ourselves properly as in the day,” then that future world will not be the peaceful world that is the world God wanted for us, but will be a world of our own making, where we eat and drink our lives away, unaware that “a thief is coming to break into our house,” an image the Rabbi from Galilee used to emphasize the urgency of making use of our time. “Stay awake,” he said, pointing to sleepiness and sluggishness as deterrents to “conducting ourselves properly as in the day.”
Surely the signs are there that we do not always conduct ourselves properly, as we look around and see a culture in conflict, a world at war, with enmity a way of life, with compassion lost in the fight. We have become sleepy and sluggish, and we have adopted the way found in the witty words of the writer Mark Twain, who said, “Don’t put off until tomorrow what you can do the day after tomorrow.”
With that philosophy of living, we continue to waste today, kicking the ball into the day after tomorrow, doing as the people in Noah’s day did, eating and drinking, blinded by our frivolousness to the flood that is around the corner, a flood that will wreck grave damage upon our world and upon us. We ignore the brutal truth that there is a point of no return. Once the fury of the flood is unleashed, there is no plugging the hole in the dam.
Truthfully, these are the things that we do not think about or like to think about, letting the time get away from us, getting caught up in the moment, not foreseeing the world that we are creating as we sleep through the day. It is a good thing, then, that we have the gift of Advent, a pre-Christmas gift that invites us to stop and think.
Years back, there was a “New Yorker” cartoon that showed two men standing before a large billboard. In bold black letters, the billboard reads, “STOP AND THINK.” The two men stand and stare at it for a while, letting the words sink in. Finally, one of the men turns to the other and says, “Kind of makes you want to stop and think.”
That, of course, is the message of the Galilean Teacher, a message that continues to be passed down through the centuries by his followers who seek to live as he lived, to see the world as he saw it, a world very much in need of redemption and restoration. The only path to that new world is to walk as he walked, using the time in between to turn the world around, making the future that the ancient prophet foresaw a reality, rather than a pipe dream.
When looked at this way, the season of Advent is more than four weeks on the calendar. Instead, it is a year-round season of preparations.
—Jeremy Myers
Sunday Brunch 