One of the places I have drawn inspiration over the last few weeks and months has been from a man named Jurgen Moltmann.  He is one of the theological types who wrote books you would only read in seminary.  Moltmann is slightly more approachable and writes with people like us in mind.  Our concerns, our worries, our spiritual struggles are the things he cares about.  He is a theologian of the people.  In 1964, he released a book called Theology of Hope.  It is perhaps the most important theological book written in the last hundred years. It was written in the aftermath of World War II by a man who had lived through it and seen the consequences.  He saw first hand the failure of German political, philosophical, and spiritual progress and went in an entirely different direction.  The hope of his Theology of Hope is not in us and our ability to conquer and build.  Our hope is God.  Our hope in this season of Advent is in the coming of Jesus Christ into the world.  Our hope is in that Advent expectation.

          Our trouble, however, in Advent is our willingness to skip over this time of expectation. Skip right to Christmas.  We like the story and the images of the infant Jesus.  We do not want to wait.  We are doubly hampered by the fact that we know when this Jesus is coming into the world, or at least when it is celebrated.  Many of us have been preparing for it since 6am the day after thanksgiving.  We are detached from the sense of unknowing and expectation that Mary and Joseph felt leading up to Jesus’ birth and that we should feel regarding Jesus’ second coming, which is the content of our passage today.  It is as Jurgen Moltmann writes about that second coming, “If the future of Christ is delegated to the calendar, we have to wait for it; but if we accept it in its hope, we become creatively active in order to fall into line with it and to prepare the way for it.”  Quite simply it is the difference between waiting and expecting.  In Advent, we are living into the expectation and hope of Jesus Christ coming into the world. 

          I have always liked this Advent/ Christmas season because it reminds me of my childhood.  It reminds me of decorating the house.  Hanging lights.  Putting ornaments on the tree.  And most of all it reminds me of the Charlie Brown Christmas special which I watched religiously as a child.  My favorite part of the Christmas special and really all the Charlie Brown cartoons was Lucy, Charlie Brown, and that pesky football.  For those you who are too young to have seen it or have forgotten, in pretty much every Charlie Brown cartoon Charlie Brown and Lucy try to play football.  I say try because every time Charlie Brown goes to kick the ball Lucy pulls the ball out from in front of him.  Charlie Brown flies into the air and lands on his back.  After you have seen this happen once, you know it is going to happen the next time.  You know that Lucy is just tricking Charlie Brown saying that she will hold the ball and not pull it out.  You know it is going to happen.  You expect it to happen.  You expect it to happen so much that you start laughing and giggling even before Charlie Brown takes off running.  You are active in the expectation.  This is what Moltmann is talking about.  You do not wait around for the ball to pulled away.  You actively participate in it.  Yet again the difference between waiting and expecting.

          As we shift into Advent, our church year changes.  So happy new year.  We move from Luke’s gospel to Matthew’s.  Unlike Luke, Matthew has little in the way of a background story before Jesus’ birth.  You get a genealogy then straight into Jesus’ birth.  Not enough to fill these four weeks of Advent.  One of the genius things the people who put together our lectionary did was to use Matthew 24 for this first week of Advent.  To link Jesus’ second coming with his first.  Most importantly it links the watchfulness, the expectation of the second coming back around to the first coming of Jesus Christ.  This link to the second coming infuses and imparts a new sense of unknowing to the first coming in spite of the Christmas Day which we are rushing towards.  It forces us to once again be watchful in our expectation.

          If we were to go back, that is what all of this was about.  Our scripture tells us that the time will not be known. It tells us that Jesus’ coming into the world will be like a thief in the night.  Keep awake. That like Noah and the flood people will be going about there everyday business until they are swept away.  Jesus’ first coming, which we live in expectation of during this time of Advent, was unexpected.  The Jews looked watchfully for the messiah, but never knew the day that the messiah would burst on to the scene.  We can see part of that expectation in the “Son of Man” language used at the beginning of our reading.  The Son of Man is an allusion to the Old Testament book of Daniel chapter 7.  The Son of Man was the patron of suffering people.  He was not a king or messiah necessarily, but he held those functions.  He was seen as an agent of divine judgment and deliverance.  And it was this that the Jews were waiting for.  They did not know when though, so they went about their everyday tasks. So much so that when the Son of Man, the messiah, this Jesus Christ is born, he is born without fanfare and only later is visited by the wise man.

          With all the busyness of our lives and actually knowing the day, can we live into a better expectation than our first century brothers and sisters?  Can we be watchful in the modern era?  And if we can, can we actively prepare the way for Jesus to come into the world?

          We have a lot of distractions.  There is going to be fewer football games between now and Christmas, so that is good.  But there is this busyness of the holidays.  Shopping, preparing, cooking, decorating, wrapping.  And that is just the busyness of the season, not the everyday busyness of working, child care, doctors visits, and everything else that occupies our time.  All of these things work to take us away from the watchfulness of this passage.  They tend to make us just as blind to the coming Jesus Christ into this world. 

          How then are we to be watchful?  If we are commanded to stay awake, to be ready, how? I think that is where Moltmann comes back into this.  Watchfulness is less about waiting than about expecting and working.  It is about hoping and living into that hope.  If the kingdom of God is coming into this world.  If the Son of Man is coming to establish justice, to protect the poor, and to offer deliverance to all, what then can we do to live actively into that?

          That is the question that Greystone has begun to ask.  As we have looked at what the mission and the evangelism of this church will be in the future, this phrase missional church has kept popping.  I hope you hear a lot more about it.  The missional church is a response to the decline in church attendance in North America and an effort to reach out anew to a lost world. Individual churches, presbytery offices, and denominations are reinventing themselves to be more missional.  What will that look like?  I don’t know.  It will look different in every context.  In every context, we have to ask who is that God is calling us to?  Who are we specifically to reach out to and in what way?  In the near future, we will answer that question.  So be thinking and pray about who it is in our community that you and we are called to.

          I think that is where we get back around to the this watchfulness thing.  Being watchful for the ways that Christ is coming into the world now and begging us to engage the world.  Pulling on our heart to engage those around us in new and creative ways.  We cannot sit in our pews and be the church.  The church is bigger and different from that.  Keep awake and be ready for the places that God is calling us.  Amen.