The baptismal font at St. Paul’s Episcopal Church, Seattle, just before dawn on November 27, 2022.
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Wake up!
Open your eyes. Stretch. Yawn. Stretch again. Roll to your side, take a breath, and lift your shoulders up from the bed. Sit up straight. And then stand. Stand up and walk.
Drink water. Stretch again. Rub your eyes: yes, it is morning. You are not dreaming. You are awake. You are alive. The sun is rising. The day is beginning. The time is now.
We need to be awake for what is happening in the day. We want to be awake for it. Maybe in the wee hours we despaired: we knew logically that the sun would eventually come up, but the night is deceptive. It recruits us into thinking that all is lost, that it will be night forever, that there is no sun, and so there will be no sunrise.
The night is haunted by fearsome ghosts, by dreadful creatures. Confused by ignorance, terrorized by violence, cornered by despair, we huddle in our beds, or under our beds. We fear the worst: that nation will always rise against nation, that refugees will endlessly teem at the shore, that our public square will always be poisoned by rancor and cynicism, that queer sanctuaries and grade schools will never be safe from gun-crazed assassins, that oceans inevitably will rise as ice caps melt and hurricanes churn toward their devastating landfalls. Oh, times are hard, and the night feels long, even endless.
In the light of day, these creatures may not loom as terribly. But they still lurk! We are not naïve. We know that the sunrise won’t immediately enlighten everyone’s minds, as if by magic; we know everyone – even small children – are still vulnerable to violence and terror, and there have been at least 602 mass shootings in the U.S. so far this year; we know the world truly is broken and deeply troubled; we know that quiet despair can dull our senses even at bright noonday. But we look toward the dawn with confidence nonetheless, sure of God’s promise to be present—and to be powerful: we know that the Creator is out in front of us as cloud by day, and our rear guard as fire by night; we know that Christ is reliably at our side, our companion on the Way; and we know that the Spirit’s flame dances on our heads and sets our hearts on fire. God does not merely exist. God is active. God is moving, as sure as the swift sunrise. And so we enter the day—no matter what it brings—with confidence, come what may, just as our forebears have done, just as they always have done.
Here is something I realized in the darkest days of the pandemic – something I may have instinctively known all along, but the global catastrophe made consciously clear: very few people in the bible, down all of those long centuries, assumed that the world would make sense, or be stable, or be in any way “right-side-up.” If anything they assumed the opposite: the boot of empire will crush us, they reasoned; the city will be leveled, they conceded; all will be lost, they lamented. Most if not all of the New Testament was written down after Jerusalem had been destroyed, and while the Jesus Movement was being persecuted, and in the wake of sad conflicts between the churches and their kinfolk in Jewish synagogues. And yet they woke up, they stood up, they walked into the day, they set store by God’s light, they were sure of God’s promises, even as everything around them was falling apart.
They could see what we now see: that no matter what terrible things will happen, God’s dawn beckons. The eastern clouds are alight with silver, then scarlet, then gold. The sun has risen. The day has arrived. And we are filled with life, with vigor, even with joy. So, again: wake up. Open your eyes, stretch and yawn, stand up and walk. It is morning; the day is beginning; the time is now.
And there is everything to be done.
Our forebears in the faith did not assume a stable, right-side-up world with a happy ending that they would see in their lifetimes, and yet they found much to do, right next to them, close-in around them. They wove the fabric of community, and they did it by “laying aside the works of darkness,” to borrow a metaphor from Paul’s letter to the church in Rome. “Lay aside the works of darkness,” Paul preached to them, because the works of darkness drive us apart from one another; they inspire us to hoard, to anxiously keep to ourselves what we fear we need, no matter what our neighbor has, or what our neighbor needs. The “works of darkness” teach us that some of us matter more than others; that the system is ranked and rigged; me first, us first, America first – which of course means somebody else has to be last.
This, then, is the great biblical insight, the great teaching, the Advent gift of our ancient Christian forebears, their precious gift to us, in a box wrapped in purple and midnight blue and silver: even if the world collapses fully, even as the world collapses, God’s dawn is rising every bright new morning in communities of justice and peace, in villages where the villagers “put on the armor of light,” in parishes where the people lay aside the works of darkness and wake from sleep. This is the insight; this is the teaching; this is the gift: We respond to a collapsing world by putting on the armor of light, right here, just here, especially here, in this parish.
We are God’s morning people, up early to greet the dawn. This is our eschatological theology, our theology of the end, the telos, the end times, the fulfillment of God’s promises, the Good News that rises strongly in a shattered and shattering world. We are God’s morning people.
Are you a morning person? Maybe not, but hang in with us, we’re serving strong coffee, right after mass. But the morning-people metaphor may work for you night owls, too. At St. Paul’s we pray the daily offices, the rhythm of morning, noonday, evening, and bedtime prayers. Some of us rise quite early and are well suited to take up the antiphons and collects prayed by the church as the day begins. Others are nocturnal, our officiants for compline, our choir for God’s song in the night. Each hour of the day and night can find us at prayer and at work, here at church and in our homes, putting on the armor of light, making God’s house ready for all that is coming, sometimes just keeping watch.
(Literally keeping watch! – As I talked with your search committee in our discernment this past year, I learned you’ve now installed cameras to safeguard the labyrinth garden, complete with a public-address system with a loudspeaker that one of you named “the voice of God.” I’ll be working my shifts in that ministry, helping us to stay at our post in this beautiful but troubled corner of the city I love, the city I call home.)
Many of you are meeting me for the first time today, so let me tell you something about me, if you haven’t already suspected it: I am very much a morning person. I want my funeral to be scheduled for the morning, and my favorite Resurrection appearance – and my funeral Gospel! – is the early-morning breakfast by the sea in John. I like that morning encounter so much, I had it tattooed on my right arm. (On my left arm, Jonah emerges from the great fish … in the light of the morning.) I like to get a lot done, and done early. And so I love today’s Good News in which Jesus encourages restlessness, watch-keeping, taking care of things in the wee hours, getting ready. And I love Paul’s caffeinated exhortation to the Romans that they work energetically, always with God’s help and God’s guidance, to be a community of light, a house church alight with the morning.
And then, as the winter sun edges around the southern sky, all of us working in shifts, all of us turning to one another and to our neighbor, all of us doing what needs to be done (but never as drudgery, always as God’s good – if hard – work); then we will find, at all hours, that God’s advent is already here, God’s dominion has already dawned, that no matter how troubled the world is, God’s light has already flooded the landscape, opening our minds, raising our spirits, and firing our hearts.
Here we ascend to the new Jerusalem – right here on Roy Street at the bottom of Counterbalance Hill, and yet also atop God’s highest mountain – and we can look out from here to see all the houses of prayer across the world, bright jewels refracting the rays of dawn, house churches alight with the morning. Here we share with one another God’s glad peace, a peace that dwells warmly within our walls, a quietness that hallows our glinting towers.
O house of Jacob, come, let us walk in the light of the Lord!
***
Preached on the First Sunday of Advent (Year A), November 27, 2022, at St. Paul’s Episcopal Church, Seattle, Washington. This was my first Sunday as rector of St. Paul’s.
Isaiah 2:1-5
Psalm 122
Romans 13:11-14
Matthew 24:36-44