Sermons from St. Paul’s Episcopal Church
December 2, 2007: Advent 1
The Rev. Melissa Skelton
Matthew 24:36-44
Jesus said to the disciples, "But about that day and hour no one knows, neither the angels of heaven, nor the Son, but only the Father. For as the days of Noah were, so will be the coming of the Son of Man. For as in those days before the flood they were eating and drinking, marrying and giving in marriage, until the day Noah entered the ark, and they knew nothing until the flood came and swept them all away, so too will be the coming of the Son of Man. Then two will be in the field; one will be taken and one will be left. Two women will be grinding meal together; one will be taken and one will be left. Keep awake therefore, for you do not know on what day your Lord is coming. But understand this: if the owner of the house had known in what part of the night the thief was coming, he would have stayed awake and would not have let his house be broken into. Therefore you also must be ready, for the Son of Man is coming at an unexpected hour."
At first I didn’t notice that anything was wrong. I had unlocked the door and walked into the apartment as I always did after my morning run from Chelsea to Gramercy Park and back again. I had gone into my little galley kitchen, brewed myself a cup of tea and was carrying it across the dining room the way I did every morning when out of the corner of my eye, I sensed that something was different. And so I stopped and turned and looked, and this is what I saw: A dining room cabinet, my dining room cabinet normally locked, with its door ajar and the window right next to it pushed up and wide open.
The first thing I experienced was confusion. “Yes, the cabinet and the window are open,” my brain told me, “but what does it all mean?” Then in a flash it registered. My mother’s silver tea service, the only family heirloom I had ever been given, was not in the cabinet where it belonged! Someone had pushed open the window, broken into the house and had stolen the most valuable and treasured thing I had ever owned.
“Keep awake, therefore, for you do not know on what day your Lord is coming. But understand this: if the owner of the house had known in what part of the night the thief was coming, he would have stayed awake and would not have let his house be broken into. Therefore, you also must be ready, for the Son of Man is coming at an unexpected hour.”
These words from Matthew’s gospel begin Advent and along with this, ring in the beginning of a new Church year. The images, of course, don’t seem very comforting. Stay awake, they seem to say—the way you would if you were watching for a thief—so that you can be ready for the surprising and unexpected way that God may break into your life.
I use the phrase “break into” on purpose, of course, because God’s arrival in this passage is not gentle but comes uninvited and unscheduled, breaking in and disrupting the normal flow of things. And so Matthew’s Jesus compares God’s coming to a thief breaking in during the night. Matthew’s Jesus also compares God’s coming to what happened in the Noah story when the people were swept away while they were right in the middle of “eating and drinking, marrying and giving in marriage.” Finally, Matthew’s Jesus says that God’s coming can result in a kind of splitting: “Then two will be in the field; one will be taken and one will be left. Two women will be grinding meal together; one will be taken and one will be left.”
Whatever image Matthew’s Jesus uses—the image of the sleeping householder and the thief, the image of people surprised by the flood or the image of a person next to us disappearing—we’re left wondering why being awake or ready is so important. What is it about either that will assist us in opening the door for the “Coming One” to break into our lives?
I think we have to start with our understandable ambivalence about God breaking into our lives. I don’t know about you, but given the choice between holding on to what I most treasure or what feels normal to me and letting go of either of those in order to be more awake to God’s breaking into my life, given a choice, I would choose the former over the latter..
But few of us are given that choice. The way it happens most of the time is that we come home one day to find the tea service or its equivalent gone. And this happens not just once but over and over again. And so to tell the truth, I think the way it works a lot of the time is that we begin to wake up and open ourselves to God after the thief has broken in and our dearest treasures have been rested from our hands, after we and others have been swept away in the flood, after looking up and finding the person next to us is gone. The lifelong process of our waking up to God’s mysterious and merciful coming in our lives arrives with and comes after the experiences themselves.
But what are we waking up to? Is it just about greater self-awareness or the sense that life and relationships are transitory? While I believe both of these are an important part of what we wake up to over time, the Coming One during the season of Advent, the one whose incarnation is about God’s identification with us and with all humanity not only comprehends both but transforms both.
I was away last week to see my family. One of the things I did was to have a conversation with an old friend, a now retired successful corporate executive who lost his wife to breast cancer two and half years ago. It was a traditional marriage, one in which she had done all the cooking and had paid attention to the household and the children and in which he had had the career. It was a very happy and satisfying marriage for both them.
After talking about a lot of other things, I had the nerve to ask him about the impact the experience of his wife’s death had had on him as a person. He closed his eyes tight as he thought about this and he began in a quiet voice and said something like this:
“Melissa, maybe this sounds hokey, but I find that I’m much more sensitive to what other people are going through (he winced when he used the word “sensitive”). It’s as if all of this kind of thing was going on before, but I was asleep to it all, maybe because I didn’t believe it had anything to do with me. Now whether it’s about the war or about my neighbor next door and what she’s going through with her daughter or about my friend across the country trying to raise money for a liver transplant, I find I’m much more effected by what they’re going through, and I try to be in touch with them trying to do what I can to help or just to let them know I care.”
This is what the Coming One in the season of Advent is all about. We will never be fully awake when he comes; we will never be fully ready. But what we can do when he arrives is not to move on too quickly. We can sit before the empty cabinet, walk around the flood-drenched house, stand in the lonely field, and wait for the gift of a new heart and a new life that he is offering us. I have to believe that this lifelong process is for our and the world’s good and is all about enlarging our hearts and extending our hands to one another.
Naomi Shihab Nye, a poet known to many of you, describes this lifelong process of waking up to the needs of the world in her poem entitled “Kindness”. Nye now lives in Austin, Texas, and so you will hear images from that part of the world in her poem.
Kindness
Before you know what kindness really is
you must lose things,
feel the future dissolve in a moment
like salt in a weakened broth.
What you held in your hand,
what you counted and carefully saved,
all this must go so you know
how desolate the landscape can be
between the regions of kindness.
How you ride and ride
thinking the bus will never stop,
the passengers eating maize and chicken
will stare out the window forever.
Before you learn the tender gravity of kindness,
you must travel where the Indian in a white poncho
lies dead by the side of the road.
You must see how this could be you,
how he too was someone
who journeyed through the night with plans
and the simple breath that kept him alive.
Before you know kindness as the deepest thing inside,
you must know sorrow as the other deepest thing.
You must wake up with sorrow.
You must speak to it till your voice
catches the thread of all sorrows
and you see the size of the cloth.
Then it is only kindness that makes sense anymore,
only kindness that ties your shoes
and sends you out into the day to mail letters and purchase bread,
only kindness that raises its head
from the crowd of the world to say
it is I you have been looking for,
and then goes with you every where
like a shadow or a friend.
Naomi Shihab Nye
