Wake up! Be Alert!

Luke 21:25-36. Psalm 25:1-10

How many of us have found ourselves woefully unprepared?  My husband Dave and I had a car with an unreliable gas gauge.  We learned to keep the tank full.  The hard way. Running on empty – never a good thing to do.  But many of us do it.  Financially, emotionally, spiritually.  We are drained.  This first week in Advent we are reminded of the hope that Christ brings to fill us up again.   Rev. Martin Luther King, Jr., had this to say about hope.

If you lose hope, somehow you lose the vitality that keeps life moving.  You lose that courage to be, the quality that helps you go on in spite of it all. And so today I still have a dream.

Isaiah, John the Baptist, Luke, and Paul - all were hopeful, yet anxious that the Lord would show up and their communities would not be ready.  We need to prepare for royalty, the King of Kings, but sadly often all we have to give Jesus is the spiritual equivalent of Ramein noodles.

We are invited to open up a clear path for the Holy Spirit to enter and live within us fully.  I have come to realize that it is my job as pastor to make sure you all have brooms.

Why, is this?  I want you to experience the thrill ride of life with Jesus Christ.  I want you to know him, walk with him, pray to him, yell at him, and love him, at the very least like other members of your family.  We are all ministers in the church, Paul tells us, each of us having the opportunity to play a vital role.  I have been encouraging, nudging, and exhorting you to get involved in sharing the word and work of Jesus beyond these church walls.

You likely remember Paul’s love poem, heard at many weddings.

13 If I speak in the tongues of mortals and of angels, but do not have love, I am a noisy gong or a clanging cymbal. 4 Love is patient; love is kind; love is not envious or boastful or arrogant 5 or rude. It does not insist on its own way; it is not irritable or resentful; 6 it does not rejoice in wrongdoing, but rejoices in the truth. 7 It bears all things, believes all things, hopes all things, endures all things.8 Love never ends. 13 And now faith, hope, and love abide, these three; and the greatest of these is love.

Unless you have the love of Jesus motivating you, it is empty noise, clanging cymbals.  The number one priority, the number one hope that I have - is that you have a loving relationship with God, Jesus, and the Holy Spirit, the different expressions of the Triune God that make up one God.  As your pastor, I want you to have this.  As a person, I want to share with you the best thing that ever happened to me.

I want you to know from your bones, what it is like to trust Jesus more fully and give over yourself to God.   I want you to live life not worrying  - a life that knows the wonders of faith’s embrace.   I want you to have Jesus within you and by your side every moment, during the peaks and the valleys. I want you to wake up to the deep happiness that knowing and living with Jesus, provides.

Without the spirit we are like the dead, but with the Spirit we are alive, full of hope, and on our feet.  Luke, in our gospel today, urges his communities to hold on.  We, too, must hold on to the hope that is Jesus returning in glory.  Both within our hearts and in the world. Hold on with the loving spirit Christ has given us.   Do    not    let     go.

Don’t be unprepared.  Wake up. Be alert.  Be ready, with the spirit God has breathed into you.  “Through Christ, all things are possible.”   The joy of Christ is waiting for you.  Thanks be to God. Amen.