This is entirely too long to stay awake.
It’s been very close to two thousand years of repeating Jesus’s, “I tell you, keep awake”, instructions now, and the longest record for a human going without sleep is 11 days.
Most of us would be hallucinating after just a few days, and certainly not be actually alert for world-changing happenings, or making good decisions about how to respond, after a mere 48 hours.
That’s assuming we hadn’t actually just physically collapsed and fallen asleep anyway before then.
Twenty centuries? We can’t do it.
And, to be honest, I don’t really think we have to take Jesus literally in remembering these instructions.
But we absolutely have to take Jesus seriously.
And Jesus has given us some tools for that. There are a couple different kinds of watchfulness and alertness that Jesus describes today, as he tells us to stay ready for the coming of the Messiah in clouds, power, and glory. (Implied, not stated, is that this is the coming that will end the world as we know it, and probably include divine judgement on the good as well as the bad of human history and present.)
Jesus talks about the readiness of a household – possibly functioning more like a modern small business than your home, or mine – waiting for the boss to get back. Everyone in the place has work to get on with – work that keeps the place moving forward, prepares us for whatever comes next, whether the boss returns with a whole new business plan, or just to see how we’ve been doing with the one we’re already on.
Jesus also talks about our need to be watching for some signs in the natural world. He wants us to know how to expect, interpret, and understand a certain set of eclipses and starfalls that will follow a period of political and social upheaval. He wants his followers – us – to be ready to notice those things happening (instead of shrugging them off as world business as usual) and start looking for a new kind of divine intervention, even if the rest of the world doesn’t know what any of it means. Sort of the way New Jersey folks know to move over to the right lane when you’re getting close to your destination on the left side of 73, while the uninitiated rest of the world stays to the left, and misses their moment.
That kind of readiness doesn’t come from waiting until the signs appear, though. It comes from the learning and habits and practices of our whole lives. It comes from getting on with the work so that our work, our world, is ready, whether God shows up while we’re in church praying, or in traffic fretting, or at work or school, or the gas station, or in bed (asleep, even).
The readiness Jesus is asking of us – of you and of me, his followers twenty centuries after he told us to “keep awake” – isn’t a caffeine-fueled eyes-peeled staring out the window. It’s about being always ready in a way that we can sustain for the long haul.
We need practices, habits, that shape our hearts and minds and souls so that whenever the Messiah interrupts our regularly scheduled programming with clouds and power and glory and end of days, we can have the guest bed made and the snacks on hand, instead of shoving all the emotional and moral and spiritual debris of our lives under the bed at warp speed to tidy up our hearts and lives.
(Not that Jesus cares if your actual house is messy, I promise.)
And we do know, already, how to prepare for the unexpected.
I keep an ice-scraper in the footwell of my car from October through May (I grew up in Chicago). I’ll bet a lot of you keep jumper cables in the trunk all year round. How many of you have used them at least once?
We build routines of readiness for the unexpected into our communities, as well.
Raise your hand if you’ve participated in at least one fire drill…
So if this space were suddenly on fire, every one of you with your hands up would be prepared that the first thing you’re supposed to do is exit the building calmly, right?
We build routines of preparedness in our communities. We build habits of readiness into our daily personal lives. So we can – we must – build those habits and routines into our spiritual and emotional and moral lives as well. Routines of generosity, habits of spiritual housekeeping; habits of making peace, of healing hurts; routines of patience, of love, of sharing joy.
Because Jesus is coming back, and expects us to be ready – very ready – for overwhelming love and awe and justice and joy at a moment’s notice.
Not scrambling to pull an all-nighter when this one turns out to be the eclipse that matters.
Many of you have said to me that you want to be reading the Bible more, or praying more, or volunteering and serving others more.
But I can’t do it yet. I can start when the kids are a little older, when I can start working fewer hours, when my spouse or friend is ready, when I finish this other project. (Or when Jesus comes back, and all the other stuff is swept away).
I’ve said much the same thing about myself to friends and colleagues.
It really can be hard to shift the lives we have at the moment to the lives we mean to have for Jesus’s coming. But Jesus is telling us – telling the first followers who expected that glorious final judgement to happen soon, and you and me, who have gotten used to the idea Jesus won’t be back in our lifetimes – that we can’t wait for any of that to start to happen before we start being the people we want to be when God is right at hand. People who are ready for God dramatically, surprisingly, appearing in our busy lives.
So maybe, this Advent season, as the calendars count us down to remembering Jesus’ first coming, we can try to form the habits of readiness for Jesus’ last coming. Practices and habits of preparedness we can build right into our busy lives, before we’re caught unaware on the wrong side of the road.
A “generosity drill” – taking just a minute or three to look at what you carry out of the house and deciding what you could share or do from those resources if you met someone who needed help right this minute – can make you ready for an encounter with God in a vulnerable friend or stranger. (You could do the same kind of drill with what you have in your kitchen, or car, or closet.)
Spending five minutes while you’re waiting at the doctor’s office looking up resources for prayer on your phone, or pulling a bible off the shelf and putting it on the kitchen table while you’re waiting for the repair tech to show up, or putting the Forward Day-by-Day reflection booklet from the back of the church into your pocket or purse, are like putting the jumper cables and ice scraper in the car – making you ready for an unexpected need to pray, or 15 unscheduled minutes when you could soak in the stories of God.
There are any number of ways that you and I can practice Advent – can practice making peace and sharing joy so we’re ready when the opportunity surprises us; can prep healing or patience or love for when we’ll need them suddenly. There are any number of habits and choices and ways of being ready, being prepared for the unexpected appearance of God.
And every one of those habits, any practice of being ready for God to interrupt us is a practice we need – in the season of Advent, in preparation for Christmas, and every time of year, every year, always.
Because Jesus is coming.
Coming any minute.
Always.
Now.
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