Twenty Four Seven

Poolesville Presbyterian Church

11.30.14; Rev. David Williams

Scripture Lesson:  Mark 13

Twice in the last week, someone has said to me, in the thicket of some wildly busy thing: “You can sleep when you die.”  Which really, really bugs me.  I like my sleep, particularly when I’ve got a belly full of meatlike product and vegetarian gravy.   It seems a really telling saying for our time, just about perfect for this season.  Because now, more than at any other time of the year, we seem pressed for time.

We’re in the thickets of the holiday season now, and it feels like time is more and more at a premium.  Events and year-end deadlines, preparations for gift giving and family gatherings, travel and tests?  It’s so much, so much that sharing war stories of anxiety and overwhelmedness becomes a part of our assumption about the nature of this time.

The demands of our culture, of work and of school and the ten thousand other expectations layered upon us?  That’s what can easily become the essence of this season, as we frantically rush about trying to meet every need and seize every opportunity.  We must act now!  We’ve got to double down and lean forward, which we do until we find ourselves so doubled over and off balance that we’re toppling head over heels.

It’s a peculiar thing, this season, but it mirrors a deeper cultural reality, one that marks a change from even a generation ago.   We are never off.  Things never shut down, never, not ever.  They can’t.  Our culture is 24-7, always on, aways going.  And so we must always be going, always be ready to take that email or make that sale.  Carpe Diem, we cry, as if there is no difference between seizing the day and seizing a doorbuster flatscreen at one-thirty in the ay em on Thanksgiving Day.

Maybe it’s that I’m old, old enough to remember when 7-11 opened at seven and closed at eleven, and that was a revolutionary thing.  Old enough to remember when there was only one restaurant around that stayed open into the morning hours.

But now, now we’re always on.  It’s the joy of this era, and without question, there are some amazing advantages to our interconnectivity.  But it’s not always the most amazing thing.  Our co-workers get snitty if we don’t immediately respond to that email they sent at 9:47 at night.  OurAs if it is some improvement that there is no longer any space between the demands of our work and our home lives, as the blurring of demands on our existence gets more and more intense.  

We counterbalance that with all sorts of tricks and hacks, trying to find ways to cut corners and to tighten up, to make our lives even more productive.  But the faster we go, the further behind we fall, like the red queen in Alice in Wonderland.  

And here comes Jesus, in the middle of this season when, like, we’re already doing everything we can, and he says: Keep awake.  Awake?  We’re supposed to stay more awake?  We start every morning in a flurry, making the coffee first thing, sitting there with our giant bucket of stimulant beverage and toeing the line between drinking enough to be productive and drinking so much our heart explodes.  

Our whole lives can feel like trying to keep ourselves focused and on and going strong, and what we feel more often than not is a desire to just slow things down, to take things at a saner pace.

And here, Jesus, Jesus of all people, tells us that we’ve got to be more awake?

Why?

This passage comes to us from a portion of Mark known as the “little apocalypse.”   The “little apocalypse” runs for most of chapter 13 of Mark’s Gospel, and contains much familiar imagery.

There are wars and rumors of wars.  There are earthquakes, trials and tribulations, cats and dogs, living together, the whole shebang.  At the conclusion of the sequence of events, we hear, in verse 26, that there will be the arrival of the Son of Man coming in clouds with great power and glory.

There are a couple of elements, however, that make this a bit different from the typical end-times schpiel.  

Most apocalypses follow a particular format.  Anyone who had the pleasure of working their way through the Book of Revelation last year with me knows that apocalypses are a little bit bizarre.  There is usually 1) a bizarre vision being presented from God; 2) an angelic intermediary to interpret the strange visions, and 3) a clear judgment of bad folks.  Jesus doesn’t stick with this mold, and more importantly, he gets done with it quickly.  Eight verses.  Boom.   As in last week’s story from Matthew, when Jesus wants to tell how things end, he gets around to mercifully quickly.  

Because while that story is important to Jesus, it is less important than the impact he hopes his story will have.   It is the conclusion that matters.  You know things will happen.  You don’t know when.

“It is like a man going on a journey,” he says, spinning out a story to interpret the story.  That man leaves each worker in the household with the simple instruction to do what they’re supposed to be doing.

It is that tension between the fulfillment of the Reign of God and the anticipation of it’s arrival that is why this passage gets served up on the first Sunday of Advent. What Jesus is saying is not to be understood as being true only for the generation that heard him first. The reality he is describing isn’t something that occurs at one moment in time, or at one place.

The arrival of God’s Kingdom does not belong to one particular generation...it belongs to all of us.

And it’s not a reality that happens at one moment, and then passes on. As Christ says, though Heaven and Earth will pass away, my words will not pass away.   That call to stay awake, then, has direct implications for how we are to live our lives in the now.

But is that the form of wakeness that Jesus is asking for here?  Is this the shimmering juddering stress of the twenty four seven culture, exhausted and strung out on caffeine?  It is the wakefulness of anxiety insomnia, as you lie there with your eyes wide open, mind racing, unable to shut down in the terrified knowledge that IT COULD HAPPEN AT ANY TIME!  Are we to be Reign of God paranoid, rushing about in a state of hypervigilance like Mad Eye Moody?

Sure, we are meant to stay awake.  But what that looks like, I am convinced, is nothing at all like the wild churning stressfest that we have made of our culture.  There is no peace in that.  There is no grace in that.  The approach we take to our twenty four seven lives looks nothing at all like the Kingdom.

Our adult ed class has, over the last month, been poring over a book called The Slow Church.  It’s an interesting book, a countercultural book, one that’s both insistent and gentle.  It’s based on the premise that maybe, just maybe, being awake and ready for the Kingdom isn’t quite like being stressed out about an imminent deadline.  It looks like living that life, right now, that shows you understand what it is that Jesus asked us to live.

It means resistance.  Gentle, insistent, persistent, as we make a point of structuring our lives, our whole lives, in such a way that the Kingdom can be perceived in them.  We are awake, and active, and doing what we are meant to be doing.

Let it be so, for you and for me, AMEN.