On the first Sunday of Advent, Mark's Gospel challenges us--ready or not--to get ourselves ready for the coming of the Lord. To get ready by paying attention and by expecting something new to happen in this life. To get ready by watching and waiting. Indeed, this is the theme for the first weeks of the Advent season-people of God: watch, wait, get ready, for the Messiah is near. Wake up!

Wakefulness, spiritually speaking, is more difficult than downing yet another double tall latte. I wonder, sometimes, what's going on in our society that we are so sleepy, so frantic about staying awake. Coffee consumption in the U.S. is at an all-time high. We seem to have a need to wake up-and we do so to the tune of nearly $20 billion a year. That's a lot of money just to stay awake, especially given that caffeine actually reduces the body's ability to handle stress, and God knows, we live in stressful times.

If we wait and watch only for the things the world presents to us, we would be completely stressed out, indeed. According to the evening news, we're waiting to go to war. We're waiting for more economic hard times. We're preparing for the financial structure of our state government to collapse. We're watching for the next terrorist attack. We're waiting to see how horrible the famine in sub-Saharan Africa is going to be. We're preparing for the AIDS pandemic to threaten the future not only of Africa, but now of Asia, as well.

We live in a fearful time, a frightening time, and that fear engenders mistrust in us. Fear becomes our mental habit. We replay it over and over again in our minds and then our behavior is modeled on that. We are terrorized by our own fear, paralyzed by suspicion and uncertainty. We become demoralized and dispirited. We are at risk of living only for ourselves and our private security. Our future has been foreshortened. All that we're waiting for finally is the next shoe to drop, and we pray only that it doesn't fall on our head. In this condition, brothers and sisters, we will never experience the advent of God's Messiah.

So, hear the Word of God for us this day. The times in which the prophet Isaiah lived and the times in which Mark the gospel-writer lived were no less frightening. Those, too, were times of war, times of exile, times of brutal occupation, times of poverty, times of fear, times of turning away to false gods. In the midst of just such times as these, the prophet and the evangelist show us another way to live, another way to think, another way to believe and pray. They point us towards another world to imagine: the world as God intends it. This is what Advent is for, after all, to teach us how to watch and wait, to remind us how to live.

To wait for the coming of the Messiah, we must see with the prophet's eyes that day of peace, the renewal of creation, the wholeness of life restored for all. We must hold a clear picture in our mind's eye of that day when all people will be drawn together in love and none will live afraid. We must every day do the mental practice of seeing the earth as God intends, full of love and light. This is the Advent work that we must do, the spiritual discipline of waking up to the coming of the Messiah.

What might it mean for us to retrain ourselves to stay awake in this way, to be spiritually awake? How might setting our sights on the advent of God's Messiah help us wake up to what's going on in our lives and in our world? How can we be clear about what we're watching for? For many of us, a state of spiritual wakefulness and alertness will call forth some spiritual disciplines that may be new or unfamiliar or, at best, rusty from lack of use.

We are given the traditional spiritual practices of prayer, of scripture reading, of worship. That's why it's so important for us, especially in this season, to make time for silence, to listen for the voice of God. Amidst all the rush and hustle and bustle of these days, keep aside some quiet time to do the real work of Advent, to watch, to wait, to expect something new to happen.

It also occurs to me that, perhaps, we can learn some things from the field of sports psychology and adapt it into something of a spiritual practice. This might be especially helpful to those of you who've taken in a football game or two this weekend. Over the last thirty years or so, people in that field have done a lot of work in the area of psychological training, on exercises that strengthen mental skills so as to enhance physical performance. Call it visualization, imagery rehearsal, mental practice . . . it's about the fascinating interplay between the mind and the body.

Basically, it goes like this. Say your golf swing is off a bit. After a period of relaxation training, during visualization, you practice the perfect swing in your mind. There is a great deal of research showing that your actual performance does improve after visualization. And there is also evidence to suggest that if you use the wrong imagery-if you imagine yourself missing the swing or losing the game-your performance actually gets worse.

It seems that an athlete's performance in the theater of the mind produces actual, measurable changes in the performance of the sport. Psycho-neuromuscular research shows that when you imagine performing a certain skill, your muscles fire in the same sequence as if you were actually doing it. Neural pathways are created and reinforced. So, in sports medicine, coaches work with athletes to make their visualization as vivid, as real, as detailed as possible, to involve as many of the senses as possible, and to practice, practice, practice. It's a lot of work, requiring daily effort and a great deal of discipline and creativity.

The point I want to suggest this morning is that this whole field of visualization, imagery, mental practice can give us a very helpful framework for understanding what the work of Advent is like. The world we see in our mind's eye can shape the world that's coming into being.

Are we preparing only for a world of war, of hate, of fear, of suffering? Or are we preparing ourselves to be ready for the world God longs to form, where the lamb and lion lie down together, where spears are forged into pruning hooks, where justice rolls down like water and righteousness like an ever-flowing stream?

To put it another way, it matters that our mental practice is lined up with how God intends us to live. Because if we're not careful, our mental practice will produce the wrong results, and we'll fall into waiting for just those things that the world tells us form our future. But instead, if we start imagining and living into the world as God intends it to be, a new future becomes possible.

We must work with God now to create an opening for something new. We must live lives that exemplify God's new realm, the promised kingdom, here and now. This requires of us a movement from fear to engagement, from paralysis to involvement. It means becoming part of the renewal of creation, fostering justice, and forging bonds of peace.

Even as we wait for the Messiah, our ability to see ourselves as the people God has created us to be-people of faith and hope, people of courage and compassion-will make all the difference. The work of Advent is to live so fully as God's people here and now, that we will be truly ready to receive Christ into our hearts once more this Christmastime.

This will not easy. Just as for athletes, it will require of us discipline, persistence, intentionality, and practice, practice, practice. We must believe in our heart of hearts that God wants more for our world and our lives than the limited version we now can see.

Stay awake, people of God. Watch. Wait. And do the hard work of preparing yourselves for the coming of the Lord. Remember, the Messiah for whom we wait is the Savior we already know in Christ Jesus. Come to his table now, and meet him here, for even as we wait, he is already alive in our midst, ready for us to come home to his promise and his love, his justice and his peace.

Amen.

© Patricia E. Farris, 2002. Permission is given for brief quotation with attribution. All other rights reserved.