I’d like to take this opportunity to wish you all a very happy new year.  We’re still a month out from the ball dropping, the confetti flying, the big college football bowl games, and the changing of our calendars to 2008, but in the cycle of the church year, this is day one.  We begin, again, with Advent.  We begin with birth.  We begin actually before birth.  We begin expecting birth.  We start the year in a state of anticipation, watchfulness, alertness, hopefulness.   We are just enough out of sync with our other way of keeping time that it challenges us to clarify just what we mean by starting the new year of Advent today. 

Since my parents are here I can’t let them get through the service without telling a story about them.  On the farm in Bellefontaine, for the last number of years, there has been developed another unique way of keeping time.  Probably every household has to decide for themselves how they choose to set their clocks.  Do you set them to the actual time, or do you set them slightly ahead so you can get away with leaving the house 8:03, drive for 15 minutes, and still arrive at your destination at exactly quarter after eight?  The Miller family selected this latter strategy, only, in my way of seeing things, went well overboard. The main authority on time in the house, a clock that hangs on the wall in the kitchen, was often set 10, 15, sometimes even 20 minutes faster than the time that the rest of the world operated on.  The intention was to help us be on time to events, be relaxed about having more time than what first meets the eye, but what it actually did was cause more confusion than clarity.  For one, you had to remember how far ahead the clock was set, so you could do the math in your head to figure out how much free time you still had before you really had to leave.  Also, whenever someone in the house would call out and ask what time it was, they’d always get an answer from someone around a clock, but then have to ask a second question as to whether that person was using our time or the real time.  Since we had sort of established our own little time zone, we affectionately started calling it Miller time.  In Miller time you can walk out of the house and arrive at your destination earlier than when you started.   

So being out of step with normal time is something that feels quite normal to me – although Abbie and I have firmly decided to end the practice of Miller time in our own house. 

But all of us are in this together when it comes to our church clock.  We’re starting a new year well before the other new year is here.  We’re in our own time zone, moving to a unique sort of rhythm, taking our cues about what time it is from the sacred schedule of liturgical time.     

The first voice we hear to help get us oriented comes from the great Hebrew prophet Isaiah.

He says: “In days to come, the mountain of the Lord’s house shall be established as the highest of the mountains…and all nations shall stream to it.  Many peoples shall come and say, ‘Come, let us go up to the mountain of the Lord.  God shall arbitrate, for many peoples; they shall beat their swords into plowshares, and their spears into pruning hooks; nation shall not lift up sword against nation; neither shall they learn war anymore.”

This is where it all starts for us.  This vision is spoken at a time of great national turmoil in Israel.  They were threatened with moral failures within the nation and military invasion from without.  Things seem to be coming to an end.  But this word breaks through the darkness and serves as a new beginning by offering an alternative ending to the story.  Instead of a scattered and fractured humanity, there is a common center that we share, the mountain of the Lord, which acts like a magnet as it draws people from all nations to learn the ways of peace.  And then everybody becomes a peace evangelist, recruiting others to go with them.  “Come on, let’s go up to the mountain of the Lord.”  It’s a place where arbitration is happening.  Grievances are being heard and reconciled.   

The culmination of this vision involves instruments of war being converted into instruments of peace and creativity.  Isaiah imagines collecting up all the bloodied swords that were used in battles, putting on our blacksmith clothes, and pounding away until the metal is reshaped into plowshares, tools for farmers to use to bring in the harvest.  This is like driving all the tanks back to the foundry, melting down the steel, and recasting it in the form of garden rakes and hoes and tillers.  Nations shall not learn war anymore.  A time when we close down the war academies and retrofit the buildings to be schools for music and philosophy and literature and medical research.    

This prophecy is our starting place.  And this is much more than political idealism, or naïve hopes for a future of tranquility and prosperity.  This is God’s dream for the world and the ever present ache within us for that dream to be realized.  It’s not as much a prediction of what’s certain to happen one hundred years from now as it is an expression of the deepest longing of our humanity.  It’s not all that concerned about what’s practical, or even possible.  This is an impossible vision that encompasses all of creation.  It is a vision that can come about only through the God of impossibilities.   

We start with an ache and without this ache there is no new beginning, just more of the same with no end in sight.  Our first act of the new year is to express a longing deep within our gut that we believe originates in the very Creative Spirit who is the Master of the Universe.  We start with the impossible belief that in days to come all nations will learn instruction on how to live together in peace.

What time is it?  It’s time to see this word breaking through our own darkness and shaping our own hopes and desires and actions.        

The ache of Isaiah helps gives us our bearings as we enter into the apocalyptic words of Jesus from Matthew 24.  “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 the 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.”  A quick reading of the context around these words of Jesus shows that the unknown day he is referring to is not one of universal peace like Isaiah’s, but one of near universal collapse.  And near universal collapse is exactly what Matthew’s original audience was experiencing.  Jewish nationalists had taken the temple out of the control of the Romans and their puppet priests, only to see the Romans retaliate by laying siege on Jerusalem and destroy the temple.  The entire world of these early Christians was left with literally no stone left on top of another.  It was like somebody had dropped the bomb on them and they were living right in the middle of apocalypse.

But Jesus’ words here are not words of doom, but words of hope.  His whole message is that even though everything seems to be falling apart, that’s not the end of the world.  Even though God seems invisible, the Son of Man, the Human One is still coming into the world.  Even though it looks like we’ve lost our humanity, the One who teaches us how to be Human is still on his way in.

The task for us who live in apocalyptic and fearful times is to pay attention.  To be watchful.  To keep doing the things that the master has asked us to do.  To keep ourselves from becoming numb and to continue feeling the ache of Isaiah.  The key phrase that gets used for this and is used in the parables that follow, is to “keep awake.”  Don’t fall asleep to God’s presence in the world.  Don’t let the violence and suffering around you lull you into some kind of trance where your eyes are too heavy to notice Jesus all around you.  Keep living like a human being so that you can stay sane in an insane world.  If you fall asleep, you get swept away in it all.   

Jesus uses the days of Noah as an example of how to stay awake.  Noah and his crew were paying attention, and nobody else was.  Everybody else got swept away and only Noah and his family were left behind.  Despite popular belief to the contrary, it’s good to be left behind.  You don’t want to get swept away by the floods of popular opinion and general hopelessness.  You want to stay grounded in God’s ache for peace that Isaiah spoke so clearly.  That’s what keeps our feet rooted in firm soil, so to speak.  The ones who are sleeping and have nothing of substance to hold them down are the ones who “get took” and the one’s who keep awake are the ones who are left.

So two people could be working side by side out in the field, or in side by side cubicles in the office, or two people will be teaching in the same school, or two mothers will be caring for their families in a time of war — one is getting swept up and carried away by worries and fears and the other stays grounded in God’s daily presence that is always coming into the world.

What time is it?  Time to stop sleep walking through life and allow ourselves to get prodded awake by the Human One who even now is coming into our world.

In our off kilter calendar, it is the season of expectation.  God comes to us at an unknown hour.  This Advent, and this year we will be visited by the Christ.  Christ will show up at work.  Christ will come into our homes.  Christ will speak through an encounter with a stranger on the street.  Christ will be present in something we see that strikes us as utterly beautiful.  When will these things happen?  No one knows, only God.  One thing is for sure.  The Christ is coming.  It’s up to us to ache for that coming, and to be awake enough to notice when and where Christ arrives each day.