Wake And Repent, But That's Not All

First Sunday in Advent 2023

In many churches, the prescribed hymn for the first Sunday in Advent is “Wachet Auf,” which in English is usually rendered

“Wake, awake, for night is flying,

the watchmen on the heights are crying;

awake, Jerusalem, at last.

Midnight hears the welcome voices,

and at the thrilling cry rejoices:

‘Come forth, you maidens! Night is past.

The Bridegroom comes! Awake;

your lamps with gladness take!’

Alleluia!

Prepare yourselves to meet the Lord,

whose light has stirred the waiting guard.”

The implication given is that the Bridegroom, Jesus Christ our Lord, will come to claim His Bride, the Church, in the middle or at the end of some night. Of course, that’s not fully what the Gospel words of Jesus say to us today. St. Mark, echoing the teaching of St. Peter, puts it very succinctly: “Take heed, watch; for you do not know when the time will come. . .you do not know when the master of the house will come, in the evening, or at midnight, or at cockcrow, or in the morning.” We have to be ready for Him every moment of every day. It is our 24-7 responsibility as Christians. And most sermons would then remind you to repent. Confess your sins and get right with the Lord by His justifying grace. And that’s about it.

But there’s more, isn’t there? St. Paul gets right into it in the first lines of his letter to the Church of Corinth. And that was a church that generally needed to repent all the time, in the midst of a city culture that had a lot to repent for. We could call Corinth one of the early “woke” cities. They accepted every perversion, every vice, everything contrary to the Ten Commandments. It’s almost like their principal god was Vice. Nasty place to build a Christian community. But Paul tells them, and us, that they have received and exhibited the grace of God, given in Christ, by the work of the Holy Spirit. We’ll see later in the letter–which I encourage you to read this Advent–that they had marvelous external manifestations of the Spirit. They worked with the Spirit using the gifts the Spirit gave–healing the sick, prophesying the word of God, speaking and singing in tongues, uttering words of wisdom. This confirmed that they were all disciples of Christ, but you’ll see that they weren’t all saints yet. So more had to be done before the return of Christ, a return they expected any day. After all, hadn’t Jesus Himself told them always to be ready. Always, he seems to say, be awake, not “woke.” We’ll see in Paul’s letter that this church needed to purge out the bad leaven–men and women in public sin–and therefore insist on repentance of bad behavior. Moreover, like all of us, the Corinthian church needed to focus on bringing the Gospel to unbelievers. A church in the midst of a hostile, evil culture, with members who aren’t living out the call of Christ, ignoring the command of Jesus to go and preach His Good News. Sound familiar? It’s a message for every lukewarm age, every mediocre church, every community that has fallen asleep morally and politically, especially ours today.

In the light of these NT readings, the prophet Isaiah makes a lot of sense, even though he ministered several centuries earlier. Every generation needs to ask if the problems they face isn’t in some way the result of its own unfaithfulness to the Gospel. Have we become unclean? Is that somehow connected with a public that freely votes to make all regulation of killing babies before they are born an untouchable reality? A culture that forgets God’s clear instruction for a man to leave his birth family and cleave to a woman for the continuation of the human race? A milieu that claims a man can become a woman and a woman become a man, even though that is not just wrong, but impossible? Yes, we need to repent, not just as individuals but as a Church and as a society, and plead with God: “Lord, please look on our weakness and stupidity. Forgive us these terrible crimes and send your Spirit to stir up fire in the heart of every believer, to share your Gospel with those who are hungry for the Truth, and that’s anyone who does not believe in You, O Lord.”