“He Knows When You Are Sleeping, He Knows When You’re Awake”

Preached by John DeBevoise
At Palma Ceia Presbyterian Church
On December 2, 2001

Now concerning the times and the seasons, brothers and sisters, you do not need to have anything written to you. For you yourselves know very well that the day of the Lord will come like a thief in the night. When they say, “There is peace and security,” then sudden destruction will come upon them, as labor pains come upon a pregnant woman, and there will be no escape! But you, beloved, are not in darkness, for that day to surprise you like a thief; for you are all children of light and children of the day; we are not of the night or of darkness. So then let us not fall asleep as others do, but let us keep awake and be sober; for those who sleep sleep at night, and those who are drunk get drunk at night. But since we belong to the day, let us be sober, and put on the breastplate of faith and love, and for a helmet the hope of salvation. For God has destined us not for wrath but for obtaining salvation through our Lord Jesus Christ, who died for us, so that whether we are awake or asleep we may live with him. Therefore encourage one another and build up each other, as indeed you are doing.

       I Thessalonians 5: 1-11

For me, for the traditions of the Church, this is a service of mystery, this first Sunday in Advent. The service where we serve the sacrament of communion. Here, the mystery of communion. We gather together around a service that lifts up the mystery of God’s providence and the mystery of the incarnation. It’s the service, I think, that ought to be surrounded by smoke and incense, if we were bold enough in Presbyterian worship to use those things. If we were ever going to use incense in Presbyterian worship, this might be the Sunday for it. Do you smell it?

We await the work of God. And there is great mystery. Mystery as we await to see how God will bring God’s self into the world.

So there is this word from the epistle to the Thessalonians saying, “Watch, watch. Wait.” And it’s matched by the gospel text for this Sunday, which also finds Jesus himself saying to his disciples, “Wait. You do not know when I will be coming.” He also uses the metaphor of a thief in the night, meaning that we will not know when to expect it. “You do not know when I will be coming,” says Jesus, “but watch. Wait. Be ready.”

It’s an interesting text, to me. How do we wait? How do we watch? At the beginning of the text, the apostle says, “Now concerning these times and seasons, brothers or sisters, you do not need to have anything written to you.” Then he goes on and writes to them about it, for about the next ten verses.

You probably have gotten that kind of a speech before. I remember my father used to give it to me all the time. Not only to me, but to the two brothers that I shared a bedroom with for the first seventeen years of my life. It was a small room, at that, with the three of us in it. At some point, about once a week, maybe twice a week, he would have to come and stand in the doorway and say, “Now I don’t need to come in here and say to you boys….” And then whatever speech would follow that he didn’t need to come in and say to us.

Here is the apostle. About these things, about this season, about this time, brothers and sisters, I really don’t need to write to you, do I? But here I go.

Why doesn’t God do something, we ask. And Jesus says, “Wait.” We wonder what is Jesus up to? The word from the Bible is, “Watch.” When will Jesus come back? we ask. The epistle says, “Wait.” When will it arrive? children wonder. The scriptures say, “Watch.”

Part of the problem is we aren’t very good waiters. We may not even be very good watchers. We keep falling asleep. Or we get distracted. And the epistle says we get drunk. We try to distract ourselves as we live in a time of waiting, and we do it by chasing other pursuits, or by becoming drunk, or in some way intoxicated with the things that can distract us from the business of waiting and watching.

How do you deal with periods of forced waiting? How do you deal with that? I’ve been watching you, and mostly you just seem to deal with it by getting irritated with it. You’re going to be doing some forced waiting between now and Christmas, aren’t you. You’ll be standing in a line in a store somewhere, or driving around looking for an open spot in a parking lot, or waiting for a gift to be wrapped. How do you deal with forced waiting?

Watch, says the scripture. A number of you have heard of Walker Percy, who is the southern novelist who died in 1990. He spent much of his life, in fact, almost the whole of his life, where he grew up in Louisiana. He came from an extremely dysfunctional family, and it was a great burden to him that five members of his immediate family committed suicide before he left high school. He was raised by a cousin, and he went on to attend the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. While he was there, he decided that one of the ways he would respond to the pain in his own life was by becoming a healer. He decided he would become a physician, and he knew that that was what God was calling him to do. So after graduating from Chapel Hill, he went on to Columbia University and enrolled in the med school there. He spent four years getting his medical degree, and then in about 1937, he went on to become an intern. Just beginning his practice of medicine at Belleview Hospital in New York, on the threshold of his becoming what it was he had trained to do, he contracted tuberculosis. He got TB from a cadaver he was working on. Suddenly, at the age of 26, he had to begin waiting, because that’s the way they had to treat tuberculosis, to isolate people and to make them wait.

He waited until he was 27, then until he was 28, and then until he was 29, then until he was 30. For four long years, he waited in isolation. So he started reading with all of that time. He read Augustine, and he read Kierkegaard, and he read Aquinas, and he read Russian novelists, and he read American short story writers. He just read and read and read. At the end of those four years, he discovered that God had used that period of waiting to help him find Walker Percy, the person God was really calling him to be. When he left the sanitarium, he became a writer.

Advent is a waiting room in itself, a time of preparing once more for the birth of Christ in our midst. Think again about all of those lines, those waiting lines that you may have to stand between now and December 25. Lines and spaces. How are you going to deal with that forced waiting?

I want to suggest to you that you might use those as opportunities for simple prayer. Prayer that just has two lines to it. Prayer that goes like this: “O Lord, what have you done? O Lord, what are you doing?”

I lift that up as a possibility as a prayer to help you get through Advent this year. A prayer for those very moments when you feel like you’re wasting time, that to be an opportunity to lift up your heart to God and ask God to show you what God is doing while you are waiting. O Lord, what have you done? O Lord, what are you doing?

We think we have to get ready for Advent. This is a season when everybody works a lot at preparing. Here’s this verse from the first letter to the Thessalonians. It says, “So then, whether you are awake or whether you are asleep, what God did for you in Jesus Christ, God has already done.

It’s God’s doing. O Lord, what have you done? O Lord, what are you doing?

Now we prepare to gather around the Lord’s Table. Here the faith affirms to us that we receive a gift, the gift of this sacrament, of this bread and this wine, which in the mystery of God’s work, will help us be prepared for the journey toward Christmas.

© John T. DeBevoise, 2001