11/30/2025 - Defiant Attention

Isaiah 2:1-5
Matthew 24:36-44
Fleming Rutledge, Advent: The One and Future Coming of Christ

Advent is, for me, one of the most powerful seasons of the year.

It begins in darkness. It ends in darkness.

Not just the shortening of days, but because the scriptures drop us right into the tension between what is and what God promises will be.

There is something about it that feels like the realest reflection of what it is to be alive. In my body, but also be in this world. 

Isaiah opens with what scholars call a Zion oracle — a vision announcing God’s ultimate purpose for the world. Zion is the spiritual heart of God's covenant community, and the place from which God's law and salvation emanate to the rest of the world. 

Here, Jerusalem becomes the place where all nations come to learn a new way of life; where disputes are settled in justice; where weapons become tools for cultivating life. 

This is not a literal roadmap of the future but a prophetic reorientation, a reminder of God’s deepest desires for us and all creation.

In her book Advent: The Once and Future Coming of Christ, Episcopal Priest and Theologian Fleming Rutledge writes that this kind of hope is not optimism.
“Optimism,” she says, “is a prediction; hope is a promise.
Optimism is about probabilities; hope is rooted in the character of God.” (Rutledge, Advent)

Isaiah’s vision isn’t wishful thinking — it is a refusal to accept that violence and fear have the final word. It is the conviction that God’s story ends in peace.

And Matthew, meets us with apocalyptic imagery — which is not about predicting the future or making sure you’re ready for the future, but about perceiving the present differently—seeing God at work beneath the surface (Amy-Jill Levine, Light of the World).

Apocalyptic texts were written for communities under pressure. They are meant to assure the faithful that God sees what is happening and will act to set things right (Rutledge, The Battle for Middle Earth).

So — Jesus’ command to “keep awake” is not about fear or frantic readiness. It is a call to defiant attention — to remain alert to the quiet ways God interrupts ordinary life.

That reframing matters.
He is calling his disciples into attentiveness — a readiness to perceive God’s hidden activity right in the middle of ordinary life.

So much of Matthew’s teaching lands there in ordinary life: people eating and drinking, working in the fields, living their everyday rhythms. That is where the Promised One appears. 

Not in spectacle, but in surprise. Not in chaos, but in the familiar.

Advent - teaches us how to live in the tension:

Between promise and arrival—
between the mountain of peace Isaiah imagines
and the ordinary fields of Matthew where God suddenly moves.

It teaches us to hold patience and urgency together.
Patience, because Isaiah’s vision unfolds over generations.:
Urgency, because Matthew insists God’s inbreaking can come at any moment.

Rutledge, writes that Advent begins in the dark because the light of God must be seen for what it is: a visitation, an invasion, an intervention by the One who alone can save (Rutledge, Advent).
It’s a reminder that we are not waiting for something sentimental. We are waiting for God’s holy disruption—God’s interruption of violence, despair, and resignation.

To “walk in the light,” as Isaiah urges, is not to deny the darkness.
It is to live now as if God’s promised peace is already pulling the world toward healing.
To “keep awake,” as Jesus urges, is not to live anxiously, but attentively—looking for the quiet places where God’s future is already breaking open:
in reconciliation we didn’t expect,
in courage that rises unexpectedly,
in communities and places practicing grace and mercy.

This is the season in which the church dares to speak honestly about the world: it is the time when the church looks unflinchingly into the darkness — not to be consumed by it, but to proclaim — the light shines there (Rutledge, Advent).

We are not meant to deny our exhaustion, or our grief, or the violence around us.
And if we are open to it, this season allows us to acknowledge that we are waiting for — a deliverance — we cannot manufacture.

Advent insists that God arrives in the ordinary.
God interrupts the everyday.
And God is already turning weapons into tools, already guiding nations toward peace, already stirring hope in places we assume are barren.

So today, as we light the first candle of Advent, may we trust both prophets:
that God’s light is stronger than our shadows,
that God’s peace draws near even now,
and that Christ comes—again and again—to awaken us, disrupt us, and lead us toward the world we dare to imagine.

“Come, let us walk in the light of our God.”

Amen.