The First Sunday in Advent

For people who suffer insomnia a good night’s sleep is a blessing. Some of us had a hard time waking up to get to church this morning. A few weeks ago an article appeared in the L.A. Times about wakefulness, or sleeplessness. It’s becoming an epidemic. The highway patrol is dealing with an increasing number of accidents due to people who fall asleep at the wheel. Employers must deal with employees who come to work too sleepy to work efficiently. Teachers must find ways to instruct students who have been up half the night. A growing percentage of the population isn’t getting a decent night’s rest. Consequently, car wrecks are more frequent, production is lagging, and health problems related to chronic wakefulness are mounting.

On the other hand, some societies are guilty of too much sleep. I think I saw that in rural Paraguay. Paraguayans love to sleep. If it was a little cold, or a bit rainy that was an excuse to stay in bed. One man I knew complained, “Most guys in this town only work one hundred days out of the year.” A similar situation could have held in Bible times; too much sleep when there was work to be done. In our epistle lesson from Romans 13:11, St. Paul declares, “it is high time to awake out of sleep.” Let us read Romans 13:11-14. [Read them.]

On this first day of the Church calendar, the passage from Romans urges us to live more Christ-like. St. Paul uses the metaphors of sleep and vigilance, day and night, light and darkness to teach us that.

It is time to wake out of sleep according to Paul. Why? “Our salvation is nearer than when we first believed. Night is far spent, the day is at hand.” In other words, life is short. Eternity is right around the corner. Each calendar day brings us nearer to the day of the Lord, the day we see the Lord Jesus. Slumbering when it is time to wake is a figure of spiritual lethargy. When you are on guard duty a lazy slumber in the hammock is irresponsible. A soldier must be vigilant and ready to defend his comrades. If he is snoozing, he must wake up, throw off the garments of slumber, and put on the armor of faith. Remaining in a state of spiritual torpor, where sin is tolerated and good works are shirked, can lead to a spiritual coma.

St. Paul’s words are a dawn bugle call to Christ’s soldiers. “Wake up! Awake out of spiritual lethargy. Put on Christ. Throw off the coverings of the night! Cast off the works of darkness and get up!

What are the works of darkness? The apostle mentions, “Revelry and drunkenness, lewdness and lust, strife and envy.” Some of these sins should have belonged to his readers’ past, to their pre-baptism lifestyle. The works of darkness represent immoral sexual practices, excessive drinking, coarse joking – the kind of partying that we are all too familiar with. They also stand for dissension and envy of which we are all culpable.

A few of us grew up in strict fundamentalist households. The rules for me were no movies, no card-playing, no dancing, no rock music, no alcoholic beverages, nor cigars. At some point in our spiritual pilgrimages we came to see these prohibitions as legalism, as artificial regulations having nothing to do with Scripture. Hence, we turned our backs on this heritage. Rejecting legalism was good. But did our new sense of freedom lead to excess in the other direction? Are some Christians letting themselves go too far? Yes. Believers dabble in the works of darkness when they utter obscene language, tell raunchy jokes, read trashy novels, get drunk, watch movies that contain explicit and gratuitous sex, when they indulge in premarital sex, or do heavy petting before marriage. I may be wrong, but I think it displeases God when Christians misuse the words “God” and “damn” and “hell,” and “suck” and the other four-letter words. We can choose better words to say what we want to say. Every word we utter is a moral choice, and we should live above reproach in a crude and course culture. The Bible tells you and me, “Cast off the works of darkness, and put on the armor of light. Let us walk properly, as in the day, not in revelry and drunkenness, not in lewdness and lust, not in strife and envy. But put on the Lord Jesus Christ, and make no provision for the flesh, to fulfill its lust.” The collect for Advent goes, “Almighty God, give us grace that we may cast away the works of darkness, and put upon us the armor of light.”

This message from Romans convicted a young man named Augustine. He tells about it in his classic book, Confessions. It was the summer of A.D. 386. Augustine was sitting on a bench in a walled off garden. Next to him laid portions of the Bible. His mother Monica kept Bible parchments laying around the house for study. But Augustine was never interested. He was an intellectual who scorned Christianity as belonging to the ignorant. He sowed his wild oats, and loved to party. But as he sat in the garden his heart and mind began to undergo violent agitation. Clearly an inner struggle was going on in the young man. He flung himself on the grass beneath a fig tree. As he was lying there he heard the voice of a little boy or a little girl, he couldn’t tell which. The voice was repeating two words: “Tolle, lege; tolle, lege” (“Take up and read; take up and read”) He got up from the earth, sat on the bench, picked up the parchment, and opened it at random. His eyes fell on the words, “Cast off the works of darkness… Let us walk properly, as in the day, not in revelry and drunkenness, not in lewdness and lust, not in strife and envy. But put on the Lord Jesus Christ, and make no provision for the flesh, to fulfill its lusts.”

The words hit him like a sledgehammer. He finally understood the cause of his struggle. The guilt and condemnation of sin were crushing his heart. He wept in shame, and saw for the first time Christ as His Savior. He finally understood the grace of God in giving Jesus to die on the cross to pardon his sins and grant him eternal life. He surrendered his life to the Lord that day, and became one of the great leaders of the Church.

“Wake up and cast away the works of darkness” is a word for all of us on this first Sunday in Advent. The season of Advent is semi-penitential. That is why it is purple; symbolic of repentance. Thus, a penitential note marks our advent celebrations. We examine our lives, repent of sin and prepare for the day when we meet the Lord, who comes to us as Judge. We read and study God’s Word and meditate upon the example of Jesus in order to eradicate the works of darkness.

Advent is also a message of hope. The purpose of Christ’s First Coming was to inaugurate the mission of dispelling the night and bringing in the beams of day. The advent message is, “Wake, awake, the night is flying.” In a redemptive sense Christ is the Sun of Righteousness who rises out of the East. We reverence His coming. The rays of Christ’s sunshine are overcoming the works of darkness. The new age of God’s kingdom is dawning. It is slowly but surely moving to the full light of day. God loves the world and sent His Son to save it. Christ will one day come again in total victory. You have to love that hope.

This being the case, what is our response? We must look to our conduct. We can’t live as though it were still the night. We put on the armor of light and don ourselves with the Lord Jesus Christ. That is what St. Paul tells us in our passage: “put on the armor of light… put on the Lord Jesus Christ.” The verb is that used for getting dressed. Putting on clothes. How should we understand this putting on the clothes of Christ? We understand it in justification and sanctification.

On the one hand, in justification, if we are in Christ, God the Father has already dressed us with the robes of His Son’s righteousness (Romans 4:4-8; 8:3-4; 10:3,4; 2 Cor. 5:21; Gal. 3:27). We are clothed with Christ by faith in baptism. Positionally, we stand just because our Holy and righteous God has declared us justified in Christ, no longer condemned by our guilt and sin. Our Heavenly Father sees not our filthy rags, but the pure garments of Christ’s obedience and righteousness. We rely on Christ alone for our salvation.

On the other hand, in sanctification (our lifelong quest for holiness), putting on Christ’s garments is something you and I do daily. It has to do with our continuing battle with the sin nature. We are to put off one set of clothes and put on another set. As we put aside the deeds of darkness we are to put on the armor of light. We are to put on the weapons of light. As light Christians are to permeate non-Christian society as light shines into darkness. As light we are to change our culture reducing the darkness. Banishing the darkness and shining the light is the church’s mission. Through our words and works people see the light of Christ and come to believe in Him. Paul wants us to make Christ the focal point of everything we do. Christ should be like a suit of clothes that we wear all the time.

How do we clothe ourselves with the Lord Jesus Christ? We exemplify the qualities Jesus showed while He was here on earth (love, humility, truth, and service). In a sense, we role-play what Jesus would do in our situations (Eph. 4:24-32; Col. 3:10-17). C. S. Lewis wrote about role-playing in chapter seven of Mere Christianity. He believes role-playing can build Christ-like character. How does it work?

Lewis mentions two stories. The first is Beauty and the Beast. He comments, “The girl, you remember, had to marry a monster for some reason. And she did. She kissed it as if it were a man. And then, much to her relief, it really turned into a man and all went well. The other story is about someone who had to wear a mask; a mask that made him look much nicer than he really was. He had to wear it for years. And when he took it off he found his own face had grown to fit it. He was now really beautiful. What had begun as a disguise had become a reality.”

Lewis suggests we wear masks. Pretend that you are a son or daughter of God. Are you Mr. Impatient or Mrs. Lazy? By looking at the life of Jesus Christ and reading the Bible try to get an idea of what patience and discipline looks like. Imagine it. Picture Christ doing it. With that image in mind, make a mask. Disguise yourself as Mr. Patient or Mrs. Industrious. Wear a patient mask. Wear a diligent disguise. Then put on your act. Pretend to exercise patience, or hard work, or whatever antidote you need to overcome your shortcoming. Do you feel self-centered? Put on a compassionate mask and act it out. Do you feel mean? Put on a mask of kindness.

Some individuals might object. What is the good of pretending to be what you are not? Isn’t that phony baloney? Not always. There are two kinds of pretending. “There is a bad kind, where the false front is there instead of the real thing; as when a man pretends he is going to help you, and doesn’t. But there is also a good kind of pretending, where the faking leads to the real thing. When you are not feeling particularly friendly but know you ought to be, the best thing you can do, very often, is to put on a friendly manner and behave as if you were a nicer person than you actually are. And in a few minutes, as we have all noticed, you will be really friendlier than you were.”

So very often the only way to gain holy qualities that you lack is to start behaving as if you had them already. That is why children’s games are so important. Children are always pretending to be grown-ups – boys playing army, girls playing house, both playing school, and so on. All the time, kids are hardening their muscles and sharpening their wits, so that the fantasy of being grown-ups helps them to grow up in reality.

In a way, by pretending, by role-playing what Jesus would do in our situation, we gradually grow into Christ-likeness. So watch the children play. Let their games remind you of your duty to play the role of Christ in this world. Pretend to be loving, responsible, humble, and joyful, and those qualities may actually become a part of your character.

The message of our Bible passage is this: if you are a child of God, you are clothed in the robes of Christ’s righteousness, now start living like it. Put on Christ. Shine the light of Christ, cast off the works of darkness.

Let us pray.

Past Years:

Play Sermon: