It was a cold and rainy night in Florence, our second night in that Renaissance city that inspires overconfidence. The Woolseys and the Masons were there for the Thanksgiving holiday, looking in on our daughters, Margaret and Cameron, who have been studying there this fall. We were staying in the guesthouse of the American church on one side of town near the train station; the girls’ apartment was on the other side nearer the Ponte Vecchio. After a late dinner in the San Lorenzo neighborhood, our boys, Will and Rhett, decided to go back to the girls’ place for a while. At 22 and 19, they had no fear of finding their way. Their fathers had thirty years or so on them, and although we had faith in our young men, we have learned that a little fear is not a bad thing. We let them go. The womenfolk went to bed, pretending to sleep. John and I sat up watching a woman on the BBC give scores on American football “matches” that had one team “outpointing” another. Go figure.

At 1:30 we called the girls for an update. The boys had left ten to fifteen minutes before and would be there any time. John opened the second-floor window and stood by it, looking down the street, watching vigilantly for almost an hour. I waited and watched behind him with no less interest, resisting the temptation to rush out and find them, not wanting to undermine their manhood. At last they appeared, chilled and chastened, reluctantly confessing their lostness, but happy to be home. No happier than their fathers, or their mothers.

Jesus uses the image of a homeowner who watches in the night to keep his house secure against a thief to picture the proper posture of the faithful. We are to watch and wait, Jesus says, for the coming of the Lord. We must be alert, not asleep and not alarmed.

On the first Sunday of the church season of Advent, we are called to watch and wait for the end of the world, as we know it. Comes a time, the Bible says, when life as it is now organized will end and our lives will be duly judged. Jesus piles one image upon another to communicate the urgency of our attention. He reminds us of Noah’s day, when everyone went about his or her business without thought to judgment. And then the rains came. He adds the pictures of two men working a field and two women grinding at a mill. One will be taken and the other left behind. (Strangely to those who nowadays hope for the so-called Rapture of the true church and fear being left behind, in the ancient parlance of this parable, the ones taken away are judged unworthy; those left behind are rewarded.)

Next, Jesus offers us this image of a safe or secure house—which is a nice fit for our Advent theme Seeking Shelter. Anyone who wants to know security in this life will be like the homeowner or the fathers who sit by the guesthouse window watching and waiting. Two ways of living are judged unsafe or insecure for the coming of God: hyperactivity on the one hand, inactivity on the other. We are not to busy ourselves in worldly interests and forget the things of God, but neither are we to ponder the things of God and withdraw from God’s world.

Allow me to stay with the theme of illustrations from Florence. I paid handsomely for the privilege, don’t you know?! Michelangelo designed the so-called and misnamed New Sacristy of the San Lorenzo church. It is actually a funeral chapel for Lorenzo the Magnificent, the great patron of the arts in Florence during the Renaissance and the ruler of the Medici family. Lorenzo is buried there, alongside his brother, who had been murdered some 14 years before Lorenzo’s own death. The room is simple and elegant, square, lit by windows placed high on the walls and subtly angled in such a way that they narrow towards the top, thus drawing your eye ever more upward toward the clear-glass cupola, and beyond it to heaven.

More interesting are the tombs of Lorenzo’s son and grandson: Guiliano and Lorenzo. They sit on the adjacent sides of the room, facing each other, the altar resting on the fourth side opposite the elder Lorenzo and his brother Giuliano’s tomb. Of the namesakes, Giuliano was a man of action, Lorenzo a man of contemplation. Michelangelo portrays the latter in a gentle pose of pensiveness, the former in soldier’s armor. Neither figure resembles the actual men, which Michelangelo claimed didn’t matter because in 50 years no one would care. He wanted to portray their characters instead.

Underneath the statues of the men, resting back to back on each of the marble coffins, are other statues. Under Giuliano’s a woman and a man represent Day and Night, when clarity leads to action; under Lorenzo’s, similar sculptures depict Dusk and Dawn, where ambiguity leads to thoughtfulness. Michelangelo believed that if one stood in the middle of the room, balancing these two traits, one would have the proper perspective of the complete human being. Thinkers must learn to act, and actors to think.

In Jesus’ parables about the end of all things, he wants just that from us. He wants us to be thoughtful about our lives and active in doing things we would want God to find us doing at the second advent of Christ. This is our only true security. Whatever illusions of control we might have over our lives are just that, illusions. If we rely upon ourselves, we will all of us sooner or later find ourselves vulnerable and broken, unable to secure the house that is our life against the judgment of God.

We should know this already from our feeble efforts to control things day to day. A fellow pastor tells of a woman in his church that spun into what the doctor called “psychotic grief,” the kind of grief that moves into sickness and makes one unable to function in any normal way. She had been hit with a terrible blow on the sudden death of her husband at the age of 52. Although shocking and tragic, it was not the sort of thing that is so unusual. Commenting to the pastor, an older woman in the congregation said of the stricken widow: Poor thing, it’s not only that a husband died, it’s that her husband died. The pastor asked her to explain what she meant. She answered: Marilyn always kept the perfect house, had the perfect children, a perfect life. Unfortunately, life isn’t perfect. Now she knows. She thought she had everything under control. [William Willimon, Pulpit Resource (Oct-Dec 2004).]

Do you? Do you think you can control your life? That bereaved woman thought she could make her life a secure house. But stuff happens. A car crash takes a loved one in an instant. Cancer saps life out of us over excruciating months. A tornado strikes unexpectedly and bears away our houses if not our lives. A business partner makes a mistake and jeopardizes your livelihood. Stock markets crash, and retirement is no longer safe. Nothing in this life is.

Didn’t we learn that when the towers fell in New York three years ago? Didn’t we sense that for all our efforts at securing the house that is America, for all our work to build a hedge around our way of life, there is no safe place to be in this world? We should have. If that is so, if God alone is secure and can bear us safely away at the end of time, how should we prepare ourselves for that time? Should it not make us better students of home security?

Jesus says we should be watchful for the coming of God. God comes as a thief in the night. It’s odd to use the image of a thief breaking into your house as the picture of God invading your life. But the point is not the morality of God being like the thief; it is the element of surprise. We cannot predict the coming of God any more than we can predict the market or the next minute. Instead, we need to prepare ourselves for God’s coming (or our going to God) at any moment, and not think we can get to it later.

If any of you here today thinks you can continue to live your life without paying attention to your spiritual condition at this very moment, you are living in an insecure and unsafe house. Either the coming of God at the end of time or your coming to the end of your time will prove dangerous. You must prepare for eternity. Time is running out. Now is the time to think and to act. Think about your relationship to God. Put your trust in Christ, not in yourself. Commit yourself to Christ and begin to act in ways that reflect his presence, so that he will recognize you as one of his own when he comes.

Now, if you are properly balanced in your Christian life—if you are standing between Giuliano and Lorenzo, so to speak—you will become contemplative and active both, prayerful and dutiful, compassionate of heart and passionate of hands. You will not rush round to gain things for yourself, but you will offer yourself to others in need.

In the chapter that follows this in Matthew, Jesus continues to color in the picture of what a faithful person looks like, standing at the window of a secure house. He speaks of bridesmaids who wait for the coming of the bridegroom and fill their oil lamps to keep them burning, burning, burning—keep them burning till the break of day. The lamp symbolized Israel’s call to be a light to the nations. Oil represents faithfulness to that mission of service to the world in ways that show people the character of the God they have come to know.

Jesus moves then to the judgment in which sheep and goats are separated. They look alike in some ways, but the sheep are the animals that have obeyed the shepherd, while the goats are the rogue creatures that cannot be herded. We are judged by our actions, Jesus says—whether they properly reflect the heart of God’s love.

If you want to secure the house of your life, Jesus tells us, you must care. You must care for more than yourself. You must care, Jesus says, for the least of these, my sisters and brothers. You must feed the hungry, clothe the naked, welcome strangers, visit prisoners, and offer a cup of cold water to the thirsty. When you do these things for others, you put your own house in order and secure it for the coming judgment of God.

Instead of treating this Advent season as a run-up on Christmas, a time to get inspired about your faith and bone up on your caroling, why not make a start of a new ministry? You don’t have to begin big; you might just volunteer to visit one of our homebound members or bring a home-cooked meal. You might write to a prisoner or talk to someone in our church about going with her to a jail. You might serve a meal at the Stewpot during lunch or be trained to help a preschool child learn how to read before starting school. You might give a gift to our missions offering at least as large as the most expensive gift you are giving this year.

A secure life is not, like a house, locked from the inside; it is a house of love forever open to the God who comes to us at surprising times, through surprising people, and in surprising ways. Are you ready?