The theme for this Advent is iWait.  Advent is the beginning of the Christian year when we begin again to tell the cycle of stories that shape our faith.  We move from Advent to nativity to epiphany to lent to crucifixion, resurrection, and then to discipleship until we are back again at the beginning.  Each time we begin, we know that we’ve traveled some since the last time we passed this way, and so we come to this beginning having experienced a few more of our own beginnings and endings.

This year’s series of sermons are titled to make an acronym of the word wait.  We are going to talk about “watching,” “anticipating,” “imagining” and “touching” the one who has come, who is come and who is to come – even Lord Jesus.  Advent has the potential of being a spiritually formative time for each of us in our personal journey.  Hence the “i” in each of the sermon titles.

The first Sunday of Advent always reminds us that we are anticipating both the baby Jesus and the King of Glory who comes as the stars fall from the sky.  There is the coming of Jesus as the babe of Bethlehem and there is the promise that Jesus returns again to complete the work of redemption that will bring once and for all God’s reign of peace and justice to all of creation.  It is safe to say that we are a lot more comfortable with the first coming of Jesus than we are with the second one!

The biblical text speaks about the second coming in wildly symbolic and overblown language and images so that we modern literalists barely know what to make of it.  Apocalyptic images are about the end of the world as we know it.

Some commentators have used the term “prophetic” apocalypse to describe the kind of passage we hear today as words spoken by the adult Jesus during his ministry.  Prophetic apocalypse is a sort of gloom and doom view of the world.  It tells us what the world will look like if it continues as it is.

There is really not a shortage of apocalyptic images in our own world.  Teenagers with bombs strapped to their bicycles...children starving in Darfur...children orphaned by AIDS across the African continent...women repeatedly attacked violently in the Congo...icebergs that belong at the South Pole migrating to the South Pacific...nearly 20% of Ohioans suffering from food insecurity... Someone once told me that they believed that people of faith should not watch the news.  It was just too violent and showed too much evil.  For this person, it was enough to have a personal relationship with Jesus Christ and not know what was going on in the world.

In the age of i pods and i phones and i tunes...we are tempted to an i faith.  We can easily become comfortable with the routines of our church services, and get warm and cozy with the little Lord Jesus asleep on the hay.  Except that the first Sunday of Advent comes to disturb us with its wild predictions about the coming of the King of Glory.

The world will not continue as it is.  God intends to do something.  Already has.  Already is.  And will.

We are watching for a world where there is no hunger, no war, no poverty, no epidemics of preventable diseases, no child that leaves school without an education that prepares them to live as citizens in the community.  We are watching for a world that isn’t losing rainforest and polar ice and hundreds of species of animals annually.  We are watching for a world where women and men work alongside one another in every culture with equal access to education and economic opportunity.  We are watching for a world where every person has food, clothing, shelter, freedom from addiction, and meaningful relationships.

We are exhorted to watch, “to stand up and raise our heads,” because there is hope for real change in the world, and for real healing in our lives, and for real redemption from those things that hold us captive.

Be alert for the signs that redemption is coming.  You see the trees begin to leaf out, and you know that summer is coming.  You see the leaves begin to turn, and you know that winter is coming.  Learn to read the signs of the coming changes, Jesus reminds us as we begin Advent.

I’ve unfortunately had opportunity to do a lot of watching with people who are alert and watchful recently.  The waiting room of the intensive care unit is a place where people are alert for any sign that confirms their hope.  A squeeze of the hand, a blink of recognition, an improvement in the numbers on the ever present monitor – everybody is watching with great alertness for any sign that their loved one is improving.  And sometimes, the signs that come are not the ones that we are alert to; not the ones that we have been watching for and we have to shift our expectations.  Ever so slowly and with great reluctance, the focus of hope shifts from the miracles of modern medicine to the promise of God’s eternal presence and care.  It is not easy, always, to read the signs and to know the hope to which we are called.  But we are always called to hope.

Parents know about this alert watchfulness.  We watch a child pull themselves up to furniture, and begin to move along and we become very alert for the coming of the day when the child lets go and begins to walk unassisted.  We hear the words “ma ma” and “dad da” and become alert every day for a new word, watching for the first sentence.  We read the signs, and we know what is coming.

We know how to be alert and watchful.  But perhaps we have not applied that alert watchfulness to the hope for the second coming of Christ.

Some would have us watch the politics of the Middle East, or the degradation of the environment and declare that these are signs that the time of the second coming is drawing near, and we should sit back and wait to be raptured.  But I do not believe that is the right way to read the signs, and I do not believe that today’s text calls us to a passive “watching” but to a radically active “watching.”

In the “Living the Questions” video series entitled “Dream Think Be Do” that some of us viewed and discussed during our most recent session of “Eat Learn Live” it was suggested that the second coming of Christ has already occurred.  That indeed, it did follow closely upon the first advent of Christ in the nativity.  But how can that be?  There has been no apocalypse.  No seven years of tribulation.  No stars falling from the sky!  But there is the Body of Christ, the church, which can be understood as the second incarnation.  These commentators were bold to suggest that the work to be accomplished to complete the vision of redemption and justice is our work.

In other words, peace in the middle east and management of climate change are not signs to watch passively, but signs that we are to become engaged in the making of peace and the production of energy that does not alter the climate.

We may be perfectly content with our lives.  We may be watching for nothing more than the next episode of Glee, or the outcome of the BCS, or the new Kroger ad, or the next Hallmark Keepsake ornament.  But that’s not true of many of us – and it’s certainly not true of most of the human community.

Cornelius Plantinga, Jr.  writes, “When our own life is sweet, we can look across the world to lives that aren’t sweet.  We can raise our heads and our hopes for those lives.  We can weep with those who weep and hope with those who hope.  We can look across the world, and across the room, and across the pew.  It’s natural to hope for ourselves, and how healthy it is to do it.  But it’s unnatural to hope only for ourselves.  And how parochial it is to do it.”

It is not a small thing while we are hoping for the right gift to be under the Christmas tree for us to also begin to hope for others.  We can begin to understand that when I watch...I watch not just for my own redemption, but for yours, too.

The iPod revolutionized the business of music.  It made it possible for each person to build their own unique preferences into the selection of music.  We can create our own play list, download what we choose and ignore what we don’t want to hear.  But the iPod did not bring an end to the concert business.  Whether it is the live performance of a great symphony or a Paul McCartney concert, people still want to gather and experience the music in community.

I think that the experience of the Christian life is something like that.  Worship is when we come together to hear the same music.  This is where the images and words and themes of scripture get downloaded.  But we need to hear this music daily and individually or we forget the words.

We can forget our place in the church.  There is no Christianity that is without the communal “we.”  We, together are the Body of Christ.  But there is no “we” if there is not an individual commitment on the part of each one to the Christian spiritual journey.  If I am not watching for the signs and you are not watching for the signs then we have no hope to celebrate together.

When I watch for the signs of the coming of Christ, I watch you.  I watch us.  I watch how we are watching.  And what we are hoping for.  And whether we are alert.

The hope that we have is born of the judgment that we experience.  Just as I see that the world is not as it should be and hope for a new world, I also see that my life is not what it should be and I begin to long for Christ to be born in me.

Today’s text is telling us that beginnings are also endings.  I see that one of the endings is mine.  My own life will end.  I am most fully human, most fully as God intended me to be when I am alert to the signs of God’s hope for me.  I do not have forever.  I have today.  I have today to be awake and alert and watchful.  I have today to be the hope that someone around me needs to experience.

Somewhere, in someone’s life, the stars are falling and there doesn’t seem to be any sign of a King coming in glory.  But there is the one who comes as a vulnerable, tiny baby, to show us what it means to be human.  He rises from this life in glory...and that glory becomes ours to display with our own lives.  Watch for it.

Let Advent teach you to become one who watches, alert and awake, for the signs that God’s glory was and is and is to come.  May it be so.