You know the old story of the mother banging on her son’s door in the morning. “Johnny, wake up. It’s time to go to school.” He yells out from his room, “I don’t want to get up. I don’t want to go to school.” “Why not?” asks his mother. “Three reasons. First, school is no fun. Second, all kids make fun of me. Third, I hate school.” His mother answered, “I’ll going to give you three reasons that you must go to school. First, because I’m your mother and I say so. Second, because you’re supposed to go to school. Third, because you’re the principal and you need to unlock the building.” The Bible suggests that we need to wake up, that we are sleepwalking our way through life. “It is now the hour for you to awake from sleep,” says St. Paul. “Stay awake… you must be prepared,” says Jesus. “Let us walk in the light of the Lord,” says the prophet Isaiah. We don’t ordinarily think of ourselves as asleep at the wheel. But the Bible does. Jesus and the other Biblical authors are warning us that we are missing what is really going on because we’re lost in a slumber of our own making. We begin the season of Advent, the Church’s year with a cock crow. What does the Bible think lulls us to sleep and what is the alarm clock which will snap us into awareness?
It might seem counterintuitive but for the Bible the lullaby that can send us drifting off into lala land is anxiety, worry, unease, fear, angst. I say counterintuitive because anxiety and worry are what usually keep us up at night. Am I going to be able to pay all the bills? Will I get a good report from the doctor? Are the kids safe? What is going to happen to our country after the election? That’s what makes us toss and turn. While these kinds of questions keep our physical senses on edge, they serve to dampen our spiritual awareness. When such questions are swirling around in our heads they too easily befog our souls into forgetting that God is in charge. Once we imagine that we are the ones who make good things happen we forget that “for those who love God all things work together for good, for those who are called according to his purpose,” as St. Paul puts it. Things might not be happening the way we would have it go if we were running things, but God is smarter than we are. So the Bible warns us that unless and until we are alert to the action and presence of God, we are missing what is really going on – we’re, as the saying goes, dead to the world.
If that’s the case, what wakes us up from spiritual slumber, from sleepwalking through life? To answer that question we need to situate ourselves in the three-fold themes of the season of Advent. First, Advent is about the past. This season we remember that Jesus is our elder brother. The Babe born in Bethlehem two thousand plus years ago was “like us in all things but sin.” That means that our identity is secure. We are the sons and daughter of God. Each of us is unique and unrepeatable made out of love and for love. God creates us because He loves us each individually. We have a family resemblance to Jesus. As he was, so we shall be. As Jesus lived, so we should live. All He asks of us is to let Him come into our lives deeply and truly. He understands us better than we can ever understand ourselves and His dreams and desires for our lives are much better, bolder, and bigger than our own could ever be. We stay awake when we know our identity as kin to Jesus. We are made in God’s image and likeness and by our baptism we are now adopted into His family.
But Advent is also about the future. So we need to set the alarm if we’re going to wake up in time. We do so by remembering where we are going. There’s probably a few old time-y Catholics like me that remember the Baltimore Catechism. First question: Who made you? God made me. Second question: why did God make you? “God made me to know him, to love him, and to serve him in this world and to be happy with him forever in the next.” Sister Millicent drummed that into me. Since we know the destination we want to make sure we don’t nod off on the way. Otherwise we might veer off course and end up someplace we don’t intend. Advent reminds us that God calls us into the future He has planned a place for us. Our eternal destiny shapes our choices and decisions in daily existence. If we don’t want to be sleepwalking through life then we must remember that the point of this life is to prepare ourselves to live in the next.
Finally, Advent is about the present. What is that spiritual cup of coffee, NO DOZ or Red Bull that keeps us awake as we go through daily life? It comes when we are aware of the presence of God in all things and through all things. Did you see a movie a few years ago called The Bucket List? Two old codgers who are terminally ill make up a list of all the things they want to do before they die. Being terminally ill woke them up about how important it was to live each day. Church, even if we are not all ill, we are all terminal. No one gets out of this life alive. We need to stay awake and live each day to the full. We should be living our bucket list daily – not climbing the Himalayas or white water rafting down the Colorado but forgiving an old wound, being reconciled to an enemy, paying forward a kindness received, helping the next generation to take their place in the world. If you are not doing what you would be doing if you knew these were your last days on earth then something is messed up. Since we are going to die, let’s live each day with that awareness. That’s how we heed the Lord and stay awake. We can’t change the past and we are in the hands of God in the future. Let us live this day confident that with God’s grace all will be well, all manner of things will be well.
