TIME TO WAKE UP

GOSPEL — MATTHEW 24:36-44
First Sunday in Advent

​Advent is a season of waking up. Even as the days grow darker, we are awoken to the light of truth about our lives, the world, and, ultimately, God. But no one really likes being woken from sleep, real or metaphorical. No one likes being pulled from a cozy blanket to a crowded commute, from dreams to reality, from what’s comfortable and “always has been” to what’s actually happening right now. It’s why when we have pivotal, perhaps painful moments in our lives in which we become aware of something previously hidden, or about which we shed the veil of denial, we refer to them as “wake-up calls.”

Yet it is never God’s intent to hurt us by rousing us from sleep. It is not to punish us for our past mistakes, to expose our inner failings to the world, or to add to the already deep well of shame that so many of us carry. It is for our good that God comes to reveal that which was hidden, breaking into our world as human flesh and blood. And it is for our good that, through our baptism, we are able to “put on the Lord Jesus Christ” (Romans 13:14). The divine image is revealed in you, and in every friend and stranger. God knows, loves, and takes delight in each of us.

That is why nations will beat their swords into plowshares, their spears into pruning hooks, and their guns into gravel to build a highway for our God. We won’t need to learn war anymore, as the prophet says (Isaiah 2:4), because you can’t raise arms against your own kin, another person in whom the living Christ dwells.

This season is a time for us to awaken to this new reality: at any moment, and at every moment, Christ lives among and within us, helping us rub the sleep out of our eyes, and revealing a different way. Welcome to Advent.


From sundaysandseasons.com.
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