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Advent 1, Year A
November 28, 2004
Christ Church, Covington
“It is now the moment for you to wake from sleep” (Rom. 13:11).
Our spiritual forebears in the early Church had some curious practices.
One was the custom of keeping vigil: waking up in the middle of the night
for prayer to God. “In the night rising Christians all keep vigil” run the
opening words of an early hymn which reflects the practice. Jesus rose
from the dead in the middle of the night, while the world slept, and so
Christians woke from sleep at that same time, looking for God to work now.
Jesus’ coming again was expected “like a thief in the night” (as in our
Gospel today), and so Christians rose at midnight in order to be ready.
This ancient practice (of which there are still some vestiges in our
Church life) was all about tension. Just think about the times you have
gotten up in the middle of the night; I’d guess they had something to do
with tension, of all sorts. There is the nervous tension that has our mind
racing around so quickly that we rise to begin our day untimely whether we
will to do so or not. There is the crisis tension that comes with the
unexpected phone call in the middle of the night, raising us from slumber
to greet a new situation. There’s also the midnight rising to complete a
project for work or to embark on a recreational adventure. That’s creative
tension.
Keeping vigil was the Church’s way of creating tension for good. It’s not
wise for Christians to be complacent, spiritually asleep. We need some
tension to keep us awake and alive. Show me a situation in which there is
no tension and I’ll show you a situation where there’s no life. There is
creative tension in the resurrection of Jesus Christ from the dead; there
is crisis tension in the prospect of his coming again. Christians need to
get up, move around, keep watch and stay alert. “It is now the moment for
you to wake from sleep”, from our second reading today. Time to get up, in
other words, to greet the new situation God has made and to begin the new
work.
In other words, tension is about change. Change makes people tense,
sometimes just in the nervous or anxious sense. In the next couple of
weeks in our readings we’ll see this sense of tension played out in the
ministry of John the Baptist, who made the religious authorities of his
own time very tense indeed with his call to change. But that ministry,
with its sense of crisis, was also creative; tense, because of change.
The change that’s of most concern for us today is our own transformation,
from the life we live today to the life of Christ. This is what Paul is
talking about when he tells his readers that now is the time to wake up.
This change is full of tension, creative tension within ourselves. What
does the Apostle say? “Let us then lay aside the works of darkness and put
on the armor of light” (Rom. 13:12). We are in the process of becoming new
people. “Put on the Lord Jesus Christ” (Rom. 13:14), Paul says; in other
words, assume a new identity. “It is Christ who lives in me”, Paul says
elsewhere (Gal. 2:20). That is the project we are involved in as
Christians, and I’ll bet you can feel the tension about it within
yourselves.
Now here’s the “takeaway”, and it is (literally) something you will take
away with you. Coming to the altar rail and receiving the Sacrament is the
way we are transformed. At the moment of greatest crisis in his ministry,
at the crucial and tense juncture from death to new life, Jesus took bread
and wine and said, “This is my Body”, “This is my Blood”. Out of the
tension of his own death and resurrection and his coming again, he gives
us grace to become what he calls us to be. We make these signs a part of
who we are, the great “takeaway”. That moment of creative tension in
Jesus’ life has become the source of new life for us. There is all sort of
tension here for us today, creative and life-giving. It’s well past
midnight now; time to wake up and get to work.
The Rev’d John Bauerschmidt is Rector of Christ Church, Covington.
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