Expecting to Not Be In Control

A sermon on Matthew 24:36-44 and Romans 13:11-14.

[for an audio recording of this sermon, click here. Photo by Joan Tran on Unsplash.]

It’s a pretty common idea that the college years are, at least in part, a time for self-discovery: a time to figure out who you are and what you want your life to look like.

But I’m wondering… has anyone ever heard that same idea of self-discovery is part of the parental journey when we send our kids off?

I’m curious because I did not expected it.

I expected to miss my son, A LOT. (I do.)

And I expected maybe some nostalgia for my own college years. (There’s been some of that, too.)

But I didn’t expect that the look back at myself 30 years ago would involve so many “ah ha” moments” about myself.

Most of those moments I am saving for therapy, but there is one that was at the center of the “ah ha” moment I had about today’s gospel this week, so that one I will share.

As I have been sympathizing with Quinn about his workload, and doing what I can across an ocean to help him think through translating ideas into outlines for his papers, it brought back memories of my own term paper stresses.

And, in the midst of those memories, I had the epiphany that I don’t think I would have done nearly as well in college and grad school if my anxiety disorder had been properly diagnosed and medicated.

That’s not to say that I don’t wish I had known then what I do now, and it CERTAINLY doesn’t mean I regret getting treatment when I finally did.

Over-functioning as a coping mechanism for rampant anxiety is EXHAUSTING and I NEVER want to try to do that again.

But thinking back to the all-nighters I pulled, and the citations that had to be perfect, and the way every other social or human obligation always took a back seat to completing all of my course work to a standard of excellence…I have realized how much that WASN’T just about academic motivation and WAS about my need for control… because that was the only way I knew to quiet my anxiety.

Even decades, several good therapists, and the right 2 anti-anxiety medications later, I still need to work hard not to jump straight from any new anxiety stimulus to what-do-I-need-to-do-to-prevent-the-bad-thing-from-happening reactions.

Which means that today’s gospel lesson about sweeping floods, sudden disappearances, thieves breaking in at night, and especially no one knowing the day and hour is a bit triggering for me.

I can maybe handle the scary scenarios if I have a chance to prepare for them.

But the unknowing? That’s tricky.

I’m all for the coming of the Son of Man to bring healing and justice to earth.

I have lost track of how many times “Come, Lord Jesus” has been my very sincere and heartfelt prayer.

But why does it have to be “at an hour you do not expect.”

I want to expect. I want to know what is coming and when. Everything feels a lot less frightening and overwhelming if I can make my plan…

Like, for instance, a plan for a four-week Advent series on Holy Expectations.  

(At this point I could have pretended that I realized ahead of time how this first Advent gospel reading would literally end on the word expect, but no. That’s just the Holy Spirit’s little surprise for me.)

And I’m so glad.

Because starting a discussion about Holy Expectations benefits from a reminder that cultivating such expectations, seeking to tune our attention and out thinking to God’s ways of operating in the world is NOT about giving us a cheat sheet to help us plan ahead… it’s not about giving us a sense of control.

Rather, it’s about grounding ALL of our expectations in the reminder that GOD is in control.

Of course, that can make Jesus’s exhortation to “keep awake” a little bit confusing.

Usually, when we tell someone to pay attention, we are urging a state of elevated focus and vigilance.

And if we were to command that as a perpetual state of being (as this gospel seems to do), the predictable result would be chronic anxiety and sleep deprivation.  

Which, I know from my college days, is neither physically nor emotionally healthy.

So, I really do not think that’s what Jesus is exhorting here.

But then, what else does he mean?

How are we to “keep awake” without exhausting ourselves?

How do we stay alert for God’s actions while embracing our inability to predict when those actions will manifest?

The reading from Romans gives us one interpretive lens.

Like Jesus, Paul also exhorts the church to “wake from sleep” in the expectation of the fulfillment of God’s plan in human history, but he defines what such wakefulness looks like in behavioral terms.

He references the standard examples of his day for self-centered and hedonistic living, expressing that a life focused on physical desires and interpersonal conflict is opposite to the way of Christ.

He uses the metaphor of night and day as a way to call the church into patterns of living that we would feel no need to hide in obscuring darkness.

For Paul, at least, wakefulness means a life that is consciously visible to God, demonstrating our commitment to the example of Jesus.

Jesus also makes a reference to patterns of behavior in the allusion to the story of Noah, although Jesus’s description of the scene before the flood is fairly tame: people “eating and drinking, marrying and giving in marriage.”

For more context on the problems in this time we have to refer to the original story. According to Genesis 6:5, “The Lord saw that humanity had become thoroughly evil on the earth and that every idea their minds thought up was always completely evil.”

These seem like vastly different descriptions of the lead-up to the flood, but if you think about it, they can both be true.

Jesus describes people carrying on the normal activities of social life, but the author of Genesis reveals what is in their minds.

It’s not necessarily the behavior that is problematic, but rather their thoughts.

Whereas Paul described outward behavior, Genesis describes inward motivations, but either way we get a picture of diverted attention.

Behaviors focused on gratification or contention.

Thoughts consumed with evil.

Attention turned in on oneself rather than being alert for God’s action in the world.

And I think this is the key to what it means to be alert in a non-anxious, non-control-oriented way.

It’s about where we direct our attention.

If our attention were to pull us into anxiety and frantic efforts to be ready, that would be just another expression of the kind of self-focused attention rejected in the reading from Romans and the story of the Flood.

It would put us and our needs at the center of all our decisions.

Of course it would. This is the direction that fear pushes us if we anticipate frightening things and try to brace for them.

But Jesus doesn’t want us to brace. He doesn’t want us to curl in on ourselves and our instincts to try to grab control when we are afraid of what is coming.

I think that’s why it’s so important that we will not know when God’s decisive action is coming.

He does not want us thinking that our hope lies in planning or preparing.

He doesn’t want our attention focused on what WE will do.

He wants us focused on what God is going to do. He wants us paying attention, staying alert for the evidence of God’s intervention in the world, not so that we can take our own steps in response, but so that we can join our steps to God’s.

Jesus wants us to keep awake so that we don’t try to take control.

As expectations go… this might feel a little out of the box… but that’s what makes it holy.

Because when we expect to NOT be in control, that’s when we are ready to join in God’s unexpected transforming work in the world.

Thanks be to God.