Preparing Our Attention

The following video transcript has been lightly edited

Welcome to Advent, which is the beginning of the Christian calendar year. The liturgical calendar of the Church begins with Advent, and Advent simply means arrival. And so the Advent season is about preparing ourselves to celebrate the arrival of Christ. Not just the arrival of Christ in history, which is certainly what Christmas is about, but also the arrival of Christ in our day to day lives, and ultimately, the hope we have for Christ's future arrival.

That one day, it is, we are told, that Christ will return. And in Christ returning, the world will be made right. Death, evil, and sin will be destroyed, and the world will be made whole. And so Advent is about preparing. Preparing for our need for the arrival of Christ. And we do that in a couple different ways.

We do that by engaging the brokenness of the world, but also practicing waiting.

And so what I want to do today is I want to offer you three ways that I think we have to train our attention as we are a people of waiting in the midst of Advent. And we're gonna look at it through the passage in Luke 21 in which Jesus tells about his second coming and he says that he will arrive Like the Son of Man in the cloud.

And so it's this Theophany, as it's called. It's this cataclysmic event in which God returns and the world as we know it is transformed. The kingdom of heaven collides with the kingdom of our universe. And they are together made whole. And so Jesus tells his disciples to be alert. To keep their heads up.

To be on guard to what is coming. And so that's what we want to do. In order to prepare, we need to train our attention. To do that, we want to keep our heads up, we want to be on guard, and we want to be alert to what's going on in the midst of the world. So for you, as you enter into this Christmas season, it might be something in which you already know it's just gonna run on by.

But what you want to do instead is you want to keep your head up. A lot of basketball going on in my world right now. And when I teach basketball, or was the volunteer coach in the midst of my kids rec league, you always want to try to encourage kids to keep their head up. Keep their head up while they're dribbling. Keep their head up when they catch the ball, because then it allows them to see the game that's going on around them. If they don't keep their head up, then they can't see, and if they can't see, they can't they can't pass, they can't shoot, they can't score. So this reminder from Jesus is similar. We gotta keep our head up.

We have this great ability to sort of get into rhythms and habits that just run our life away where our heads are down and we're a bit oblivious. And so we're missing the world around us. We're missing how God might be arriving in our life in the day to day. We're missing the hope that there is from the promise of God's future arrival.

We're missing the hope of the reality of Christ as a human entering into the history of this world and affirming the goodness and the beauty. So we want to keep our head up. You know, the other way we tell people, we say, hey, keep your head up, is a form of encouragement. So when something's hard, when maybe someone's made a mistake, we say, hey, keep And the reason that we offer that up is we say, Hey, this moment doesn't define you. You're going to get through this. There's more to come.

And so when Jesus tells his disciples to keep their head up, he's saying, Hey, I'm going to come back and it's going to be an unimaginable event and I'm going to deal with evil and sin and death, but you don't have to be afraid of that. You can keep your head up because you're a person of hope. You know who God is because God has come into history and you've known who that God is. So keep your head up because you're a hopeful person. And that's great advice for us. We want to keep our head up. We want to keep our heads up and we want to be hopeful versus heads down and oblivious.

So what does that look like for you this Advent season? What does it look like for you to go through your day to day? And the holidays with your head up and hopeful versus head down and oblivious. So that's about us raising our heads, keeping our head up. The next thing we want to remember is to be on guard. Jesus says be on guard for the worries of this life. I was recently out in a field getting a tree for Christmas with my kids and it was a tree farm so there are all kinds of trees, there's snow on the ground, perfect place for a snowball fight. And I'll tell you what, with the trees and the multiple people, if you were not on guard, you were going to be caught off guard and hit. With a snowball on the side of the ear. My kids were certainly excited to get that shot on me.

And so Jesus advice to us is just that, like, be on guard. Be on guard that the worries of this life, the chaos that happens in the midst of the holidays, the busyness of our lives and the perpetual pressure to perform and succeed, be on guard against those because that's not what the world is about, that the world is about love and peace and gentleness and mercy and kindness and goodness. And unless we're on guard, those things will come after us. They'll sneak up. And we'll miss the way that God is arriving in our day to day. And we'll miss the way that God is arriving in the future. We'll miss the hope that we receive in the midst of that. So we want to be on guard.

So what does it look like for you to be on guard? To be on guard to the things you know that are the things that trip you up in the midst of the holiday season. Maybe it's the stress has a tendency to create more conflict. So be on guard for that. Maybe the pressure and the the pace and the busyness makes you grumpy, so be on guard for that. Whatever it is, be on guard.

Because if we want to be people who are prepared for the arrival of Christ, in the celebration of Christmas, in our day to day, and in the future, we want to be on guard for the ways that the world sucks us away and draws us to the place in which we're checked out.

Finally, Jesus says to keep alert. And the way he tells his disciples to stay alert is through prayer. I don't know about you, but if there's long periods of waiting for me, it also might include napping. There's a boredom that happens in waiting. There's a giving up. There's a disconnection. And in the simplest ways, you're just sitting there waiting. You nod off. You're no longer alert. But Jesus says, no, no, no. I want you to be alert.

I think one of the ways that we can stay alert to how God is arriving in our lives, both now and in the future, is through prayer. As we engage God in prayer, it allows us to keep our mind awake. To keep our eyes open, to listen to what's going around so that we might see. That we might see the kingdom of God breaking in.

So this holiday season, in the email that you got for this video, there's a prayer. And I want you to take that prayer, and I want you to pray it each day. I want you to individually engage it, personalize it, to help you stay awake in the midst of this Advent season as we prepare for the arrival of Christ.

I hope this is helpful for you. You know, as you think about it, I think we all have different forms of preparation and we have different forms of traditions that happen between now and Christmas and the new year. And I think many of those things are wonderful, but they can also distract us from the way the kingdom of God is breaking in, the way Christ is arriving in Christmas, the way Christ is arriving in the future, the way Christ is arriving in our day to day.

And so keep your head up, be on guard, and stay alert to the way that Christ is meeting you here and now in the midst of this season. I hope you have a great week and look forward to our continued celebration of Advent together.