The Long Watch

 Mark 13:24-37, Isaiah 64:1-9 (1 Corinthians 1:3-9)

I’ve often been puzzled by Isaiah’s appeal for disruption that we hear today:  “Oh, that you would tear open the heavens and descend, that the mountains would shake.”

We’re entering the season of Advent, which will lead us again, as it does every year, to heavens that sing with angels, and the gentle miraculous peace of a sleeping infant, the incarnation of love. 

How desperate must you be to want God to come with fire and trembling fear and earthquake, instead?

And then I realized I might understand a part of that, after all. Because recently I’ve gotten a little nostalgic for March.

Yes, surprisingly nostalgic for those first scary and disruptive days of this pandemic in our country, when life as we knew it came to a screeching halt.

I’m not nostalgic for the fear for our health care workers, family, and friends, or the toilet paper shortages, or the rising case loads (we’ve got that back already, anyway). 

It’s the shared sense of urgency of those days, the need to care for one another: the calls to check in on those who were alone; the rallying to raise funds and support for workers and industries knocked out by the shutdowns, the pizzas delivered to hospital emergency rooms and EMT stations.

March was terrifying – and it carried an urgency of compassion and care, sacrifice and support. The love of God was manifest in hundreds of ways, thousands of individual actions.

But humans aren’t good at sustaining that urgent compassion, that immediacy. Ten months of disruption and anxiety grind into us, fostering resentment and exhaustion. Disasters that drag on weigh down our souls, sacrifice and support erode our hearts when problems build instead of resolving.

We’re tired. It’s harder and harder to pay attention, to leap into caring for strangers, to look – and keep looking – for God at work.

And that’s exactly what Jesus is talking about when he tells his disciples to stay alert, to watch the signs.

The darkening of the sun and moon, the falling stars he mentions are going to be just one more in a long cascade of disaster and distress, he tells us. Destruction of the city. Wars and rumors of war. Global upheaval. Famines and earthquakes. Family betrayals, the direct and personal trials of our faith, false prophets, and devastating loss. By the time the sun darkens we’ll be so exhausted from putting one foot in front of another, making it day to day, that the falling stars may not even register, much less the gloriously terrifying arrival of the Son of Man.

That’s why Jesus has to remind us, order us, insist to us: stay alert. 

Somehow, Jesus’ friends, his followers, you and I, have to watch through all these disasters, all the turbulence and loss, to see and respond to the particular upheavals that are the signs of the coming of God.

As this pandemic keeps climbing and winter is coming, after a summer of fire and hurricane and partisan strife, Jesus is telling you and me right now to wake up, watch closely, stay alert for the newly-disruptive signs that God is powerfully at hand.

It’s a tall order, a big ask. And I’m sure Jesus knows that.

He promises the guidance of the Holy Spirit in our trials, the gathering of God’s beloved into glory. Paul promises us that Christ will strengthen us all the way through.
We – you and I – are commanded to keep watch, but we do not do it alone.

And the disruption of our everyday may actually help us, even if it’s also wearing us out.

In my conversations with family and friends, and some of you, this last week, I kept hearing people say that the changes enforced by this pandemic have helped many of us sense what’s most important in the ways we celebrate love through the holidays. 

In the same way, we can let the ongoing disruptions of our lives renew our sense of urgency – not fear, but the immediate importance of compassion and care for one another.  

God’s presence pours into our world in our acts of care. 

This year that might be a phone call to someone you can’t be with, or a month of rigorous quarantine so you can be somewhere. It might be gifts and food delivered to overworked nurses and first responders, acts of generous sympathy when our colleagues’ work - or our own - is disrupted again and again, or pouring time and money into keeping a roof over a stranger’s head and food on anyone’s table.

We can let the fact that so much must be different this year keep us alert to the action of God. Instead of seeking substitutes for things and actions that will get us close to “normal”, we can make choices to make our traditions different – more like the coming kingdom of God. 

If we can’t browse the stores for a perfect gift, perhaps we can shop for hope, reconciliation, justice and transformation – the hallmarks of the reign of Christ. We won’t all do that the same way – sometimes it’s about the particular gift we buy; sometimes it’s about doing that shopping with a lit candle and persistent prayer, instead of crowds and lists.

When we can’t gather in big parties for celebration, perhaps we can seek out new ways to celebrate love and sacrifice and faithfulness – the traditions of the kingdom of God. One of us might write that celebration into cards and thank you notes; another might create an online festival that many more can share. 

In any year, but even more in this year, our Advent practices should be whatever helps us to notice and invest in the kingdom of God: a world of reconciliation, hope, trust, and transformation that begins here and now.

The forced changes of this pandemic, one friend told me, can even relieve us of burdens we’ve carried for years. 

We simply can’t get everything “right” or perfect the way tradition insists. We can’t be in many places, so we really can't try to be in many places at the same time.

That may, in fact, be one of the signs of the coming of God. 

When things change in such a way that we can’t rely on ourselves no matter how hard we try, when we are forced into letting go and trusting God instead of ourselves, that’s a sign of God’s powerful nearness breaking in, disrupting and transforming the habits of our lives, whether we wished it or not.

Lillian Daniel, a preacher and writer, reflects that when the world around us is busy, keeping us sleepless, being awake to God may actually be restful for us. 

I am learning that the more we watch for God, the more we actually see and feel God healing and transforming and renewing the world, humanity, and ourselves. The more we see and feel that, the easier it is to trust our own burdens of pain and frustration to God, let those burdens fall from our backs, and rest in God.  

The more we watch for God’s love and compassion, the more we feel it in our hearts. And then the easier it is to both care for others, and receive that care ourselves.

I believe that’s what Jesus wants for his disciples, for his friends and followers facing a generation of disruption and disaster. That refueling with the fierce and powerful love of God that comes from watching for God’s presence. 

I believe that’s what Jesus wants for his disciples, for you and me this year and always. That he commands us to keep alert for God’s signs, because in doing so, we will rest and be renewed in the compassion and justice, reconciliation and hope, strength and trust that come from the nearness of God, breaking in to disrupt our lives for good.

Commitment

 Joshua 24:1-3, 14-25; Matthew 25:1-13

Did anybody else find yourself anxious, impatient, or exhausted, this past week?

As the waiting and the vote counting went on and on. And on. And…well, we fell asleep waiting for Nevada, and Pennsylvania, and others, more than once.

Waiting for a bridegroom to come and waiting for a President to be elected are different, but it’s pretty easy for me – and maybe for you – to feel a connection this morning to the women with their lamps in Jesus’ story: waiting, and waiting, and waiting….. 

Matthew’s community – like other early Christians – would have recognized that feeling, too. They were waiting, of course, for Jesus to come back. Soon, he said, right? 

And, like us, many of them were anxious about the results. What will happen to the world? Will my family and friends be okay? 

It’s hard to live in waiting, whether it’s about an election, a pandemic, a transition in your family or career, or anything else. Yet Jesus insists that suspense and uncertainty are part of the coming of the kingdom of heaven; part of the fulfillment of God’s plan and promise, so we’d better be prepared for just that, and fuel up.

Long waiting would have been familiar to the people of Israel, too. Waiting through a long generation of wanderings in the wilderness, and more generations of oppression in Egypt, waiting and working to claim a home in a new land God had led them to.

All that long, uncertain waiting is in the background of the story we heard today, when Joshua gathers the people to celebrate a moment of celebration, remembering what God has done to create a people, and bring them to a new home, to a place of both refuge and abundance.

In that celebration, Joshua invites – no, challenges – the people to “serve the Lord,” to worship God above all else, and honestly and faithfully follow God’s commandments.

“Of course we will! God’s done a lot for us, we’re God’s!” the people respond. 

That’s not enough, though. Joshua presses them, because this is a big commitment: You can’t serve God unless you’re absolutely not going to turn away; not going to give up when the going gets tough or you get a seemingly better offer. 

Our choice to serve God starts in gratitude and celebration, but even more it’s about what we want to do, and who we want to be, whatever the future holds.

The people of Israel say yes again, they commit to God and affirm it with a promise to hold themselves accountable and a formal covenant ceremony.

That’s like what we do today, when we mark Consecration Sunday on the church’s calendar. We make and renew our commitment to God in gratitude that God has sought us out, chooses us, protects us, brings us into relationships of love, and works with and through us to create a place where we can thrive in God’s promise. 

We’re individually at different places in that story, we experience it in different ways, but as we worship together today, we are all part of that story of God’s good gifts to us.

Like the people of Israel, we make our commitments to God today out of gratitude, and also to affirm what we want to do, and who we want to be, in everything the future brings. 

Beyond the church, we regularly make commitments to help us do what is essential to our values, but might not do automatically: like sustainability pledges to reduce our use of the earth’s resources. 

\We make promises and commitments to help us actually carry out the actions that make us into who we want to be – the Girl Scout promise spells out ways to help me be a person who lives for others; a commitment to serve meals at a soup kitchen might have helped make you into a person who regularly shows up and cares for our neighbors.

That’s why I make a financial commitment to the church, too. In the packet of Consecration Sunday materials we sent out, I told you the story of how I was first inspired to work toward tithing because I wanted to be more like a priest whose faith and love I admired.  These days, I make a financial commitment that will stretch me, just a little, every year, because I want my weekly budget to be a way to keep my attention fixed on God: what God is up to in my life and yours, the love God is inviting me to share.

And over the years that commitment has indeed helped me depend on God with deeper trust, not just about money, but in all of life. I hope that has made me more like the saints I admire.

Making a commitment that stretches me also makes me stretch my vision, and look more actively for what God is doing among us, at Trinity. So I see things I might have overlooked: not just our worship – together even in separation – and the food that comes into and goes out of Leslie’s pantry, but also a friendship that formed from the need to check on one another when the coronavirus first separated us; people who’ve never been through our doors, but feel connected to God through our online worship; and teachers who move heaven and earth to help their students connect to God and one another in spite of Zoom fatigue and COVID distance.

And every time I write my pledge check, I’m reminded of the gratitude for all God has already done that led me to make this commitment in the first place.  

Keeping this commitment to God has become an anchor to hope and love and a sense of God’s commitment to us – to me – that carries me through ordinary days and the extraordinary really-no-one-asked-for-any-of-this stresses of 2020. 

This isn’t just about money, of course. The same thing happens with other commitments we make to God’s work. Like being fully present in worship, even when it’s not easy to be here every Sunday, or to open my prayer book every morning. 

Keeping that commitment makes it easier for me to experience God’s commitment to showing up for us, for me. There have been days and long months of my life when the only evidence I had that God was listening was the fact that I had somehow showed up to pray one more day in spite of doubt and depression.

And a commitment to love my neighbor keeps pulling me into conversations and places where God is creating miracles, love, and abundant life – often places I just don’t want to go: hospital emergency rooms, political arguments, city streets, even some glittering parties.
For you, those places might be different – like finance meetings or homeless shelters – but we all need a nudge or commitment to get us out of our safe zone to meet God in new places and ways.

I believe that Joshua challenges the people of Israel to make their commitment to serve God not once, but three times in a row, because a strong and unbreakable commitment will prepare them for a future where there will be times of anxious stress, times where God seems distant or absent, and where the abundance that God has given us may not feel like enough. There may also be times when we’re too comfortable to get excited about serving God. Occasionally, in those times of both comfort and stress, our commitment to God is the only evidence we - or others - have of God’s presence. 

And that’s how it fuels us for the waiting, for the periods when there’s no active evidence God’s looking out for us. When the virus goes on and on and gets worse; when electoral suspense drags, or the results aren’t what we hoped for, and public divisions get worse, our commitment can protect us from giving up. A commitment can anchor us when we are lonely, or hungry for change, thirsty for justice and compassion, or far from home. 

It also protects us against losing touch with God when we’re perfectly satisfied with life, and don’t feel any need, and don’t look for God at work, day to day.

Our commitment to God is the oil we need to keep our lamps lit when the waiting runs long, and longer still. It’s the fuel that makes us ready to meet the celebration when God arrives in our midst. The day by day keeping of our commitments to God’s work and purpose, the promises that help us carry out God’s love for the world, these are the fuel that lights the way, for us and for others, into the joy and fulfillment as God’s kingdom comes.