In this passage I think Paul is using an image from
the life of Roman soldiers to say what’s going on in the grand scale of
history. I invite you to imagine what
reveille would have been like back then for a Roman soldier. It is time to wake up. The night has run its course. It’s dawn and day is imminent. It is time to get dressed for the day. Take off the nightclothes, and like
honourable soldiers put on your armour and go take your post on watch. But, let’s not be so nostalgic and naively
polite about this. What soldiers did at
night back then didn’t really involve nightclothes. You just needed lots of food, lots of
alcohol, and lots women for after when you finished bragging and fighting over who
was the best in battle. You would have a
bunch of soldiers and their cohorts for the night (usually temple prostitutes)
laying around on the floor in a temple feast room or back at the barracks and then,
at just before dawn somebody comes to rouse the room full of you from your
drunken stupor. “Wake up! Quit grumbling! You gluttonous, drunken, over-sexed pigs, you
know darn well what time it is! Get
up! Put your armour on. It’s time to get out and to be
honourable. You are soldiers of the
imperial Guard and you represent the Emperor.”
Paul takes this image of Roman soldiers at reveille
to describe humanity since Jesus was raised from the dead. God is doing something new, something in the
order of a new act of Creation that requires us to get up and get on with it,
to get dressed for the day. A new age in
Creation history is upon us since the resurrection of Jesus. Just as sure as night runs its course and
darkness gives way to daylight, so God’s new day of salvation in Jesus Christ
is upon us and it is time we dress for the day.
It is now dawn. Let us begin to
live in this New Day.
Paul here tells the Roman Christians that they know
what time it is. The word he uses for
“know” entails they have experiential knowledge of the day of salvation to
which he is referring. Also, the word he
uses here for “time” isn’t the one that means chronological time. Actually, that word is chronos. He uses another
world for time, kairos, which means a
decisive moment in history. The set hour
is upon us now for a moment in history bigger than the extinction of the
dinosaurs, bigger than the fall of Rome, bigger than Columbus coming to
America, bigger than the moon landing, bigger than the invention of the
personal computer, bigger than the fall of the Berlin Wall, bigger than 9/11,
even bigger than the global fear created by the last American election. This set hour is upon us for when God puts an
end to the sin and death. Jesus bearing
our sin in his flesh took sin to its death and so then God raising Jesus from
the dead put the nails in the coffin for death itself. In that moment New Creation began. Salvation!!!
N.T. Wright says it quite well what will come, “God is going to do for
the whole Creation what he did for Jesus on Easter morning.” That is the hope of the Christian faith.
Paul says that it is now the hour for us to raise up
from our sleep. “Sleep” in the early
church was a metaphor for death. In 1
Thessalonians Paul refers to those in Christ who have died as having fallen asleep. Raising from sleep is a metaphor for rising
from death. By the gift of the Holy
Spirit at work in us making us to become more Christ-like as individuals and
especially so as a Christian fellowship, we participate now in Jesus
resurrection life and thus in the salvation that is coming.
Christian community is a foretaste of the day of
salvation coming. Please don’t let
yourself be lulled into thinking the Christian faith is just a matter of
private beliefs, or how to be a good God-fearing person, or simply the means to
get to heaven when you die; or into thinking that church is just something
good, God fearing people do. To know the
love of God in Jesus Christ is nothing short of being raised from the
dead. The Church, this congregation,
every congregation, every fellowship in Christ is a light-bearing participation
now in the future that is coming.
So here we are now on the first Sunday in Advent
reminding ourselves of the very real hope that we have in Christ Jesus and the
coming salvation. The shear presence of
the Holy Spirit in our midst gives us the certainty about this future that
makes us able to live the way of the cross that Jesus lived – lives of
faithfulness, hope, and love. We don’t
just believe the Gospel. We are becoming
the Gospel – a fellowship that actively embodies Jesus and his resurrection and
we demonstrate this in living cross-formed lives.
This is the first Sunday in Advent the day we remind
ourselves of the very real hope we have in Jesus Christ of the Day of Salvation
that he is bringing. Isaiah looked
forward to that day. He saw a Day of
Peace (next week’s theme), a day when we will beat our swords into ploughshares
and our spears into pruning hooks and study war no more. To carry on with what I have been saying, we
as a Christian fellowship need to be actively engaging ourselves in making this
hope of peace known in every home of this community. We are coming up to Christmas and yet the
primary sound being heard coming from our churches is the sound of sleigh bells
when it ought the sound of sledgehammers on anvils.
Friends, we know what time it is, but seriously, we
need to wake up. It’s God who’s blowing
reveille for us. We are slumbering in
the early morning stupor of a privatized, nostalgic semblance of the Christian
faith. We are good, God-fearing people,
who care about each other and this church.
Well and good, but how is the community around us seeing in us or
receiving from us any evidence that God is present and cares. If this church closed, would Chatsworth
notice we were gone? The Hour is upon us. It is time for us to get up and embody the
hope we know deep down in our aching bones.
Amen.
