Advent 1A’25
30 November 2025
Is.2.1-5; Rom.13.11-14; Mt.24.36-44
St. Luke’s Episcopal Church
North Little Rock, Arkansas
The Rev. Carey Stone <+>
Therefore, you also must be ready, for the Son of Man is coming at an unexpected hour; in the Name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Spirit. Amen. – from Matthew 24:44
Make no mistake, hippos are dangerous animals. According to the Encyclopedia Britannica they’re the sixth most deadly mammal to humans on the planet. Most of us, tend to look at hippos as cute and cuddly, creatures, who like staying cool by floating in the rivers of Africa. The truth is they are fiercely territorial and are easily threatened and can be quick on the attack.
Juliet Starrett. is a two-time extreme whitewater canoe champion, lawyer and a cancer survivor. A few years ago, Juliet was canoeing through the Zambezi River in Eastern Africa. While on that trip, her canoe was disturbed by a hippopotamus. Not so much disturbed as exploded. She was paddling along one second and the next she was ten feet in the air above the water. She says that she looked down and saw the chomping jaws of the hippo making toothpicks out of her canoe. While in mid-air, Juliet says that she spotted the nearest shore and began swimming – while she was still in the air! Her kind of thinking while in the midst of a disorienting and dangerous situation, that cool appraisal and the priority for survival, that kind of thinking demonstrates what is sometimes called the “ready-state.”
Ready-state is when someone is prepared to respond to a given situation. If an immune system is in a good ready-state, it would be able to snap back from an illness quickly and to recover. Ready-state can also be used to describe relationships. Ready-state relationships are healthy and resilient.
In a person, a ready-state is characterized by the ability of that person to enter into just about any situation with calmness, openness. mindfulness, and the ability to stay present and deal with the situation at hand.
But exactly how does one develop and maintain a ready-state?” It has a lot to do with advance-work, namely: training. Consistent, intentional training, over time, brings a ready-state. Juliet, the canoer survivor, was not expecting or planning for the hippo attack, instead she was simply trained and ready; and when the time came, her training and general ready-state kicked in.
In today’s gospel passage, Jesus is reminding us that not even he, nor the angels, know when God will come. Some like to think that God will come seeking vengeance, spitting fire and brimstone. These people look for signs in international politics and weather patterns to validate their belief that God is coming to judge and destroy the world. This is the Day of the Lord, the great apocalyptic coming of God to be with the creation fully. The reason that so many doom-sayers with signs that say, “The End is Near,” say what they say is because the prophets and gospel writers, even Jesus, used language like this: great tribulation, division, floods of fire and water.
The point they are trying to make is that the Kingdom of God is eventually going to win the day, and the existing order of things will be reversed. Instead of violence and oppression being used to secure economic and political flourishing for some, the Kingdom of God will be established so that peace and justice will walk hand-in-hand.
These reversals of the worldly ordering of life is a trademark of God’s presence and it always comes as a surprise because that kind of life, one marked with peace, justice, presence and love, can be achieved in the here and now.
And Jesus, in today’s reading, is calling us to be awake and prepared for it. Jesus is reminding us of the importance to be in a ready-state for God’s coming. This is part of what Advent is all about. Advent, it turns out, is not just a countdown of shopping days until Christmas, but a reminder of the ready-state, a call to training our spirits for God’s arrival. The Christian tradition recognizes that God has come, and will come, to be with us in three distinct ways.
The first coming of God was when God walked with us in Jesus of Nazareth. We will celebrate that coming in a few weeks at the Feast of the Incarnation, otherwise known as Christmas.
The second coming of God is the final coming which Jesus makes mention of in today’s reading, when God and creation will be as they were meant to be, fully united
The third coming of God happens between the first coming and the final coming of God. This coming of God is the daily visitation: “God with us” in our prayers, finding God in our neighbors, and seeing God in those we are privileged to serve.
What we see in these three visitations is that all of them are the hoped-for “Day of the Lord.” Each of these visitations carries with it the reversals of the normal, worldly order but also the loving and just presence of God.
How are you in a ready-state for God’s coming? How then can we be awake and watchful for the coming of God, whether in the final coming of the daily visitation of God?
There is a telling portion of Scripture that happens when the disciples have just seen Jesus ascend into Heaven. The disciples are looking up, dumbfounded. Finally, some angels appear and ask, “Why are you looking up, trying to find him?” “Don’t look up to find Jesus, look out, look in.”
Jesus is always one step ahead, going into the city, into Galilee, into life, we are meant to seek and find him there. That’s how we stay ready for God’s coming, we daily, hourly stay on the lookout for God, not in the clouds, not in the powerful events of the world, but in the quiet, domestic ways that God visits us. God may indeed someday come in the clouds but it more than likely will come in your life.
Advent reminds us to stay in a ready-state, to stay awake and ready for God is doing. Not just for the great celebration of Christmas but for the final coming of God, and also for the ever-present daily visit of God with us in the here and now. Like the hippo that suddenly disturbed to canoer on the Zambezi River, God can disrupt our normal self-centered ways. Be ready, be awake because the love of God will disrupt, explode, and turn over our comfortable notions of how things ought to be. God will launch us into the air and into the waters of justice, peace, presence and love. It can be disorienting, but if we have trained ourselves to be ready, then we might work with God to establish God’s Kingdom more deeply in our hurting world.1
Therefore, you also must be ready, for the Son of Man is coming at an unexpected hour…Amen.
1 Bowron, Joshua, https://episcopalchurch.org