When you least expect it

 

Matthew 24: 36-44
New Ark United Church of Christ, Newark, DE
November 27, 2022

Image description: Photo of the word "hope" as a lighted sign in all caps letters, white, with bright white lightbulbs dangling above from trees, at night, with dried leaves on the ground.

This morning we began our worship service with one of my favorite Advent hymns, “Awake! Awake, and Greet the New Morn!” Another Advent hymn reminds us to “Keep awake, be always ready”. Jesus tells his disciples to keep awake because they do not know on what day their Lord is coming. In today’s manner of speaking to be awake or to be ‘woke’ is to be aware, to be educated and informed, to be conscious (as opposed to unconscious) of social and racial inequality and injustice. Being woke means being in solidarity with those who can’t escape the suffering of their reality. To be woke means being aware of not only other people’s problems but also the systemic causes of them.



To a certain extent it doesn’t take much effort to be aware of other people’s suffering. With the 24/7 news cycle and social media we are surrounded by the awareness of gun violence, climate change, violence against women, queer and trans people, Black, brown, and Indigenous people, and the poverty that connects all of them. It can be all too easy to return to being unconscious and asleep or numb ourselves or distance ourselves from the very real threats to other people’s lives. In truth we can’t be awake to it all of the time if we are to be of any kind of help to those who need it.



And yet if you’re disabled or isolated, you can’t afford to not be aware of what’s going on in the world because not to would be even more isolating. Last week on Twitter I came across a tweet that read, “Honestly how do some people keep going? Like isn’t everyone else just completely incapacitated by dread and sorrow about how wicked the world is?” Some people said they cope by getting lost in a book or a movie or a hobby or emotionally distance themselves for a while. Others are attending to their inner life with a therapist and a good prescription or two. A few said they exist with a mixture of rage and spite while others said they persist because the people they love do, because there are things that always need to be done, because their lives are not solely their own, because the sorrow and horror are always there and for them community helps them achieve a sense of balance. One person said if you want to experience the light, if you want to find the way through, you first have to admit you are in the dark.



The way Matthew puts it is, “About that day and hour no one knows”. Jesus is speaking about the coming of the Messiah and the end of the age but he could also just as well be talking about the future, about the end of the world as we know it, and about death. About that day and hour no one knows. A couple weeks ago I said that our spiritual address is ‘now and not yet’. At some point in human history, “now” was not enough. It was not enough to live just for this moment, this day, and tomorrow, if it was granted to us, to live for that day.



Much of human living is about controlling for what we don’t know will happen. Empire is designed to control for what we don’t know will happen, and in so doing we have made living and life on this planet that much more fragile and precarious. We’ve become hypervigilant, our lizard brains are constantly engaged, because so much of life feels unsafe and uncared for. And so now we live in between the now and the not yet and we are exhausted, as though we exist in the present and in the future but also the idealized past all at once. We think we know when in truth we really know nothing. If you want to experience the light, if you want to find the way through, you first have to admit you are in the dark.

Poem by Lana Rafaela entitled "I Think It's Brave"
i think it's brave that you get up in the morning even if your soul is weary
and your bones ache for a rest
i think it's brave that you keep on living even if you don't know how to anymore
i think it's brave that you push away the waves rolling in every day and you decide to fight
i know there are days when you feel like giving up but i think it's brave that you never do

That is where Advent begins…in the dark. The dark of the womb. The dark of our questions. The increasing dark of the night. The dark is where our hope begins. We light candles to show us the way. We gather in ways that are safe to help lighten the isolation and be in solidarity with those who cannot escape the suffering of their reality. And when we least expect it, when we’re in the dark, when we’re incapacitated by dread and sorrow, a small glimmer of hope, a way through it shows up in the shape of imperfect kindred community online or in the mail or at our door or on the phone.



So when Jesus says to be ready, maybe he also means to be ready for hope and life to show up when we least expect it and then to come alive when it does. All of us are living our lives until we cannot. We do not know the day and hour when God will show up. What if ‘woke’ also meant ‘being fully alive’? Woke to the breath moving in and out of our bodies. Woke to the taste of food, the smell of the air, the sound of our voice, the touch of water on our skin, our eyes opening in the morning. Woke to the earth and its seasons, its life that goes on without us. Woke to our tears and grief, our joy and laughter, our pain and our anger, our hope and our desires. Woke to the people in our lives, their joys, their sorrows, their beauty and their flaws, woke to their whole selves. Woke to our neighbors, woke to those we struggle with, woke to those who cannot escape their reality.



Being fully alive in this moment, this day is an act of hope itself. I invite you to take the word “hope” with you this week as a lens, as the viewpoint through which you experience your life this week. If there is a moment when hope shows up when you least expected it, I invite you to share it on our church’s Facebook page. Each week there will be a pinned post with the word of the week and underneath in the comments you can share your experience. If you are not on Facebook, please email your experience to the church and it will be added to the post. Week by week we will experience and write our own Advent devotional series.



When I was a child I learned a song in Sunday school, maybe you did too, that said “Love is something if you give it away, give it way, give it away. Love is something if you give it away. You end up having more.” I think the same is true about hope. Giving hope to someone else means we end up having more hope. May we be a glimmer of hope, a way through, an experience of the light for someone when they least expect it.

Benediction – enfleshed.com (adapted)

Go forth being fully alive
dwelling in the nearness of God,
for our breath, our heartbeat,
our shouts of praise, our showing up,
all of it—when we least expect it— God with us. Amen.