For the first Sunday of Advent, Tim Reardon preached from Isaiah 2:1-5 and Romans 13:8-14. This is the Christian New Year, when a new cycle of the church calendar begins, and as is often noted of Advent, it begins in waiting as we approach Christmas.

Many of us of course, do whatever we can to avoid the actual experience of waiting, often with some sort of electronic device, and even then studies have shown we are impatient. This is not to say anything about the worth of what we are waiting for—though that is an important question—more that many of us are not eager to experience waiting itself.

The question in the sermon title is “What are you waiting for?” But, perhaps as important is the question about how we are waiting. On the surface is a straight forward question with no added implications, “What hopes and needs are waiting to be answered? How does this waiting change the way you live now?”

But there is also the more pointed question, “What are you waiting for!?” There is something about this question that beckons to move beyond waiting to action. Something of this is also important for Advent. The waiting is not something new to Advent, but what is new is what Paul calls in Romans “the nearness of the day,” and it is this nearness that changes the waiting itself, the nearness of the Messiah’s arrival, the nearness of the saving and liberating movement of God.

Here, in Romans, is another hymn. Scholars have reconstructed the basic shape of the hymn like this:

• The hour has already come for you, from your sleep, to wake
• The night is almost gone and the day has come near.
• Let us then take off the works of darkness,
• And Let us step into the armor of light.

The hymn opens, not with a reminder of our waiting but with an Advent cry: Wake up! Awake O Sleeper, now is the time. This jarring opening calls us from our dozing, from our sleep walking about the world. And we begin advent with a question not about our waiting, but “are we sleeping?” What within us needs rousing, needs awakening, to what God is doing?

Hear these words and more in the audio below.

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