Preached on Sunday, November 30, 2025, the First Sunday of Advent, at Trinity Episcopal Cathedral, Little Rock.

“Then two will be in the field; one will be taken and one will be left. Two women will be grinding meal together; one will be taken and one will be left. Keep awake therefore, for you do not know on what day your Lord is coming.” (Matthew 24:40–42)

My friends, welcome to Advent.

While the rest of the world already seems to be waist-deep in the “Christmas spirit,” we wet-blanket Episcopalians, we ambassadors of restraint, say, “not yet. First things first: Advent.”

The season of Advent originated in the first few centuries of Christian history, as the Church’s theology of liturgical time, of the relationship between celebration and preparation, was maturing. “For every feast, there’s a fast,” those early Christians said. Whenever we celebrate, we will have first prepared ourselves in some way. For instance, during Lent, we prepare for our celebration of Christ’s resurrection. And likewise, during Advent, we prepare for our celebration of Christ’s incarnation.

Prepare: that’s our theme for Advent at Trinity this year. Our goal at Trinity this year is to consider all kinds of ways we might prepare for Christ. And our staff and congregational leaders have put together all sorts of opportunities for us to practice preparing. Sunday School in Advent will have a different take each week: today, for instance, the adults learned how to prepare our homes with flower arranger extraordinaire Missy McCain, and the children prepared our Advent wreath for here in the Cathedral with Margaret Faulkner. This afternoon at 4:00 pm, we’ll gather for our annual Advent Service of Lessons and Carols, preparing for Christ by hearing yet again the prophecies of Holy Scripture and singing some seasonal favorites. Every Wednesday in Advent, we’ll have Healing Eucharist, Community Dinner, Koinonia Eucharist, Book Club, and Choral Compline––come to one of them, or come to all of them. This Advent, Trinity’s Book Club will read Isaac Villegas’ Migrant God, helping us to prepare for Christ by drawing close to the stories of migrants and of immigrant justice. I have it on good authority that St. Nicholas of Myra will be making a couple of visits to the Cathedral this season: this Wednesday at Koinonia and next Sunday at Children’s Liturgy. Our annual Christmas Pageant is on Wednesday, December 17, and as always, there’s a role for everyone who wants one. And this coming weekend, we welcome to Trinity the Rev. Dr. Kelly Brown Douglas for our Diocesan Advent Teaching Mission. She’ll lecture on Friday evening––“Hope in Despairing Times” is the title––and then she’ll preach at the 10:30 am service on Sunday. All of these opportunities are wonderful ways for each of us to practice preparing.

And believe it or not, preparation is the theme of this morning’s Gospel reading, too. Matthew’s Gospel gives us another way we might prepare for Christ: “keeping awake.”

Matthew’s Gospel tells us that God’s activity is close at hand. God is drawing near. When will it happen? Nobody can know for sure, not even our Lord—and certainly not anyone trying to calculate it to the exact day and year. We can’t put God’s arrival on our calendars. There are no calendars of chocolate to countdown Christ’s coming. “About that day and hour no one knows, neither the angels of heaven, nor the Son, but only the Father.”

However, we’ll certainly receive signs of Christ’s coming. We’ll receive hints along the way. As Christ comes closer, there will be signs to let us know. But just as all those people who didn’t know a flood was coming until Noah had climbed aboard the Ark, so will we miss out on Christ’s coming if we don’t pay attention. “For as in those days before the flood they were eating and drinking, marrying and giving in marriage, until the day Noah entered the ark, and they knew nothing until the flood came and swept them all away.” Eating and drinking and celebrating weddings left and right—nothing necessarily bad in and of itself, but certainly all things that distract us, having us look at ourselves rather than looking for God. And so it is with “the coming of the Son of Man,” too. Our own self-absorption risks distracting us from the Advent of Christ.

And when that happens, we get left behind. “Two will be in the field; one will be taken and one will be left. Two women will be grinding meal together; one will be taken and one will be left.” It happens in the blink of an eye: we focus on ourselves, and then, all of a sudden, we’re left behind from what God is doing right in front of us, right here in our own lives, “now in the time of this mortal life,” as that Collect has us pray. God has something in store for us, God comes close to us, but because of our inattentiveness, we miss it.

The great sin of Advent is not extraordinary wickedness but ordinary inattentiveness, ordinary distraction, ordinary self-absorption, whereby we miss out on what God is doing in our lives, not in some future age, but right here and right now. When we focus too much on ourselves, we focus not enough on what God is trying to do around us and in us.

And so, we must prepare ourselves. And how do we do that, you might ask? Here’s what Matthew’s Gospel says: “keep awake.” We have to keep our eyes open to what God is trying to do. We have to watch for every sign that God is sending our way. We can’t know when it will happen, but we can always be ready, always be prepared, so that when God does come near, we are ready to receive Him.

After all, who knows what it might look like? Maybe God comes to us in a conversation. Maybe God comes to us in a moment when we might be helpful to someone. Maybe God comes to us in a moment when someone might help us. Maybe it’s in a time when we might linger with someone rather than just rushing on to the next thing. Maybe it’s in a relationship we never imagined having. Maybe it’s in a door opening that we’d rather not walk through, or a door closing that we’d rather have stayed open. Who knows? But we do know this: we have to keep awake, staying alert, staying vigilant for when and where God might be on the move. Because if we’re not careful, we’llk get left behind.

Let me close with a story.

When you’re training for priesthood, you also go through hospital chaplaincy training. I did so at the Sibley Memorial Hospital in northwest Washington, D.C. I loved chaplaincy training, so much so that I considered a vocation as a hospital chaplain. But one of the common hurdles for anyone training to be a hospital chaplain––including for me!––is learning to live with the ever-present possibility that something could happen. At my hospital, I was a part of various response teams, and you could be called for anything from cardiac arrest to a combative patient to a dispute between staff members. And then there were the call shifts, being the one chaplain for the whole hospital overnight or over the weekend, being called for anything and everything. Very quickly, I felt the weight of the fact that something could happen at any moment, and even more weighty, that something would happen, and that I would need to be able to respond. (As a matter of fact, my very first night on call, during my very first week, I was called in for a neonatal cardiac arrest––a baby’s heart stopping—and my job was to minister to the family while the team responded to the newborn.)

But to be perfectly honest, for me, the toughest part of all this was to learn to carry on with my day all the while knowing that something would happen. Anything could happen. 

It’s all too easy to think about “keeping awake” and to hear a passage like this one from Matthew’s Gospel and to get anxious. It’s all too easy for our attentiveness toward God to weigh us down, even freezing us up. It goes from vigilance to hyper-vigilance, a drone of constant panic. Anything could happen. And what if something happens and we’re not ready?

But here’s what I learned at the Sibley Memorial Hospital, as I’m sure many of you medical types have learned in your own careers: eventually, you get used to it. Eventually, you learn how to carry on with your day while also knowing that something will happen that requires a response. You’re no longer anxious, no longer hyper-vigilant, but you’re still always ready: always ready to respond, always ready to lean in––or, for the Christian life, always ready to meet God when He decides to come close to us.

And you know what? Getting to that place takes time. Getting to that place takes longer than the Advent season. Some of us may not be there by the time all the candles of our wreath are lit. Christian vigilance is a habit we form over the whole of the Christian life. The more we work at it, the better we get. And the better we get, the more attentive we are to God’s activity in our lives. And the more attentive we are to God’s activity in our lives, the more our lives are transformed.

So, as we practice preparing throughout this Advent season, may we do so gently and patiently, with the kind of readiness that grows over time, not with fear, not with frantic energy, but with that quiet, steady attentiveness that trusts God to come in His own way and in His own time. May we try—day by day, moment by moment—to stay awake to the nearness of Christ: awake to the people before us, awake to the needs around us, awake to the stirrings of grace within us. And when Christ does draw near, as He surely will, may we be found ready—not perfect, but ready: awake, attentive, willing to receive the One Who takes on flesh and dwells among us, “full of grace and truth” (John 1:14). Amen.