Grace to you and peace from God our Father and the Lord Jesus Christ. Amen.

Keep awake, be ready, we are not in control. Happy Advent, dear sisters and brothers.

Our time of preparing for the encounter with God incarnate in a particular human being called Jesus of Nazareth has begun again and with it a new church year. The texts, prayers, and hymns for today carry a tone of expectation and hope that we greet with joyful recognition. “O, come, o, come, Emmanuel” will be happily hummed in many a car or home today. With eagerness we prepare for God’s coming in the child, the Word of God born a wordless child. We are holding off the Christmas tree in this church, the decorations, the Christmas hymns until it is really time. There is no Gloria during Advent, no opening processional hymn. We invite silence for preparation.

On the first Sunday of Advent we are invited to think about this:
Keep awake, be ready, we are not in control, we are out of control. There will be a day when the Lord comes. And no one knows when. Not the angels, not the Son of Man, not even dispensationalists or the Left Behind authors. This is the testimony of the Scriptures of Old and New Testament alike. There will be a day when the cycles of the church year with its rhythm of holidays and ordinary days, with readings for year A, B, and C will be no more. There will be a day when the Lord comes, and the old world is dismantled and a new world is beginning. The dismantling is the time of judgment, the new world is the time of God dwelling with God’s people, Torah / instruction going forth from Zion, the nations forgetting how to make war. And we have nothing to do with it. For once we are out of control. For me as a control freak there couldn’t be a more comforting gospel message this morning. If that’s what we are supposed to keep awake for, I’m ready.

We mostly live our lives trying hard to have everything under control. And we have to. If you make arrangements without your calendar, chances are you are going to mess up somebody’s life and schedule. If you show up at someone’s house without an appointment people may not be ready and can’t welcome you in the way they wish to.

Our sense of security is mostly a sense of being in control. Much of the collective trauma this nation experienced after September 11, 2001 was rooted in the definitive sense that we all, including our leadership were not in control. We thought this was a perfect nation, with perfect defenses, with perfect security and then suddenly this was proven totally wrong. The country felt ripped off, as if some thief had sneaked in and stolen the safe, secure world in which we thought we lived.
True, much of the time we are in control. Most of our days go just as we plan. We have burglar proof locks, home security systems, insurance policies against disaster. We meticulously manage our calendars, plan our wedding feasts just as the people in Noah’s days, spending months in preparation for that most important day in our lives.

But then there is that late night phone call, that flat voice on the other end, someone died, an accident, a wedding engagement called off. Or there was that morning at 9:00 o’clock in September three years ago when we saw the planes hitting the twin towers.
In the depth of our being we know that we are not in control. And if we don’t we can learn it from the Biblical witnesses. Isaiah’s vision of Zion, of Jerusalem, of peace was written out of the experience of the Assyrians destroying much of Judah, besieging Jerusalem, a time of utter fear and hopelessness, crisis because the leadership’s sense of security and control had been proven totally wrong. The example of Noah to which the gospel lesson refers back also shows how the security of everyday life of eating, drinking, marrying and giving in marriage is fragile and betraying.
We know that we are always only a step away from crisis. Our world that seems so together is not as substantial as it seems.

The times when we realize that we are not in charge, like that late night phone call, are times when we get a glimpse of God working in large and powerful ways. Our lessons today about the coming of the Lord, the day of the Lord, are an invitation to go ahead and call on God’s creative, re-creative power at all times, not just in times of crisis. Keep awake, be always ready for God’s coming to his people. All we can lose is our delusion, our illusion that we are in control, that we were ever in control. All we can win is the great and powerful presence in our lives of that God who is none other than the one already present in our midst in Word and Sacrament and whose mystery of coming to us in a child as the Word made flesh we celebrate at Christmas.

For those who listen to the Word, remember their baptism and gather around the table, the coming of the day of the Lord, the coming of Christ in the end time, with judgment and all, is nothing scary only because they do not know when this is going to happen. The advent of Christ who is already in our lives cannot be a surprise nor a scare.

The Advent message of “Keep awake, be ready,” serves as a strong reminder to keep awake, keep open for the dimension of our creator God. While focusing on God’s presence among us as Word and Sacrament it teaches us willingness to let God be creator. The call “Keep awake, be ready for God’s coming,” brings back a yearning to let the creator finish what was begun in creation. The world is not in our hands, thank God. Fear not, look up and take heart.

I want to tell you a story, dear sisters and brothers.
My mother died 16 years ago tomorrow. It was two nights after the first Sunday of Advent that year. Our family was in a time of crisis, our secure world had grown very insecure since she was diagnosed with cancer only in the summer and it was obvious that she would die rather soon. We were clearly not in control. There was nothing that could be done.
It was in this time of ending that I caught a glimpse of God’s time, a sense of our true insecurity and our true security. It was my mother’s faith that guided us through this time. She was not afraid. After the first shock she looked up and took heart. She put her life back in God’s hands, gratefully and peacefully, although born in 1933 she had had a difficult and fatherless childhood and her opportunities for higher education in the fifties were less than favorable. In the end though the growing sense of frustration about missed opportunities did not count. She was looking for God to finish what was begun in creation and she chose for her own funeral a verse from Psalm 57: I cry to God Most High, to God who fulfills his purpose for me. And my father complemented it with a verse from 1. Corinthians 15: It is sown in weakness, it is raised in power.

My mother died in the living room that was decorated for Advent as it had been every year, with a wreath and candles and some of the same old straw stars that we had used for many years. Her sense of a sure expectation and hope though came from a life long practice of faith through many cycles of church years with the familiar alternation of ordinary days and holidays, in the presence of God in the Word and at the table.

Keep awake therefore, for you do not know on what day your Lord is coming. Fear not, look up and take heart. And thanks for all the saints among us who teach us the true hope in God who surely will finish what was begun at creation.

Amen.