Paying Attention

First Sunday of Advent, Year C
30 November 2025

Isaiah 2:1-5
Psalm 122
Romans 13:11-14
Matthew 24:36-44

 

The return of Jesus has long animated the Christian imagination. For the first millennium many were gripped by fear, for they understood the return of Jesus to be the judgment of their lives. Their fear of purgatory and hell was probably as animated as the late medieval preacher Johann Tetzel made it 500 years later. And in Matthew 25, the return of Jesus certainly is judgment: ³¹When the Son of Man comes in his glory, and all the angels with him, then he will sit on the throne of his glory. ³²All the nations will be gathered before him, and he will separate people one from another as a shepherd separates the sheep from the goats, ³³and he will put the sheep at his right hand and the goats at the left.
But it is not only that. It is also the time of redemption, when God will bring about a new heaven and a new earth, and when the home of God is among mortals and God will dwell with us. (Revelation 21). In other words God will recreate the world as it was intended, as it was in the Garden at the beginning of creation. And because of that, Jesus’ return is not bad but good news. After all, why would we be afraid of the One whose love compelled him to live among us and give his life for the world?

In the First Letter of John we learn that God is love (4:8). Love as St Paul tells us is about giving. In Paul’s First letter to the Corinthians, Paul, having addressed divisions in the Church and emphasized the one body with many different gifts, writes, ⁴Love is patient; love is kind; love is not envious or boastful or arrogant ⁵or rude. It does not insist on its own way; it is not irritable or resentful; ⁶it does not rejoice in wrongdoing, but rejoices in the truth. ⁷It bears all things, believes all things, hopes all things, endures all things.
⁸Love never ends.
Now imagine that love is not a romantic notion or an abstract principle but that love has a name, and its name is Jesus. Then the passage reads ⁵ (…). He does not insist on his own way; he is not irritable or resentful; ⁶he does not rejoice in wrongdoing, but rejoices in the truth. ⁷He bears all things, believes all things, hopes all things, endures all things.
⁸He never ends.

That God is love is not a denial of God’s judgment only a reminder that Jesus came not to condemn the world but [so] that it be saved through him. (John 3:17)

The point of Jesus’s words in our reading from Matthew 24 is for us to be awake, to pay attention. We may ask though, awake to what, paying attention to what?
Not the Black Friday advertising, not the endless peddling of things we do not need and that only end up in our landfills.
Not the rationalizing of policy decisions we know are bad or at least conflictual, the kind of thinking Wendell Berry describes such, “The great obstacle is […] the conviction that we cannot change because we are dependent on what is wrong.”¹

Paying attention is a difficult task that requires discipline and community practice. The Church is a community that practices paying attention. As Christ’s church we pay attention who we are, what matters, and who our neighbour is in light of who God is. We remember that Jesus is Lord, that Jesus is the only Lord, and that we owe allegiance to God before we owe allegiance to anyone or anything else. This practice of paying attention is a challenge to the preoccupations and resentments we carry because it re-orders our world in the way that we relate to it.

Most of you know that I dabble in photography. My father had a darkroom, if you remember those things. While my father wasn’t around very much it was he who introduced me to photography. I have fond memories of going on photo walks with him when I was a teenager and of him instructing me in developing film and printing pictures.

I still have thousands of slides (and many negatives) from those years. A few years ago I started going through them to widdle them down to a number that I could manage to convert to digital. Even on film I had taken too many pictures!
Somehow I knew this when I was young. When after finishing high school I hitch-hiked to Italy, I left my camera at home because I had become preoccupied not with seeing the world but with capturing the world. Seeing the world is a practice that is open to the world and wants to engage the world. Capturing the world wants to possess the world. And possessing the world lives in the illusion of control when the disposition of the disciples of Jesus is not of control but of surrender, because Jesus is Lord and we are not.

On the death of the poet W.B. Yeats the poet W.H. Auden wrote the poem “In Memory of W. B. Yeats.”² Yeats died in January 1939, before the beginning of WW II but after Nazi Germany had occupied parts of Czechoslovakia. The first verse of “In Memory of W.B. Yeats” goes like this

He disappeared in the dead of winter:
The brooks were frozen, the airports almost deserted,
And snow disfigured the public statues;
The mercury sank in the mouth of the dying day.
What instruments we have agree
The day of his death was a dark cold day.

This and the verses that follow seem to suggest that nothing changed on the day Yeates died because “what instruments we have agree the day of his death was a dark cold day.”
That dark and cold have more than one meaning does not change this conclusion.

Stanza two seems to continue with the same affirmation but surprises us.

You were silly like us; your gift survived it all:
The parish of rich women, physical decay.
Yourself. Mad Ireland hurt you into poetry.
Now Ireland has her madness and her weather still.
For poetry makes nothing happen: it survives
In the valley of its making where executives
Would never want to tamper, flows on south
From ranches of isolation and the busy griefs,
Raw towns that we believe and die in; it survives,
A way of happening, a mouth.

Ireland has her madness and her weather still suggests the same verdict as “what instruments we have agree.” Yet we are surprised by the line “for poetry makes nothing happen,” if only for the fact that this is a poem by a poet about a poet. One would expect poets to think poetry as more potent than to make nothing happen.
But then the stanza takes a turn. It ends with an assertion, using the image of rivers (introduced in the second verse) to suggest that poetry is in fact “a way of happening, a mouth.”

The poem concludes with the third stanza, repeating part of the first:

Earth, receive an honoured guest:
William Yeats is laid to rest.
Let the Irish vessel lie
Emptied of its poetry.

In the nightmare of the dark
All the dogs of Europe bark,
And the living nations wait,
Each sequestered in its hate;

Intellectual disgrace
Stares from every human face,
And the seas of pity lie
Locked and frozen in each eye.

Follow, poet, follow right
To the bottom of the night,
With your unconstraining voice
Still persuade us to rejoice;

With the farming of a verse
Make a vineyard of the curse,
Sing of human unsuccess
In a rapture of distress;

In the deserts of the heart
Let the healing fountain start,
In the prison of his days
Teach the free man how to praise.

And so while for the poet the present time is a dark nightmare in which all the dogs of Europe bark and the living nations wait, sequestered in its hate, – remember this was written in February of 1939 – the poet puts forth a different vision, a vision that includes a healing fountain and the ability to praise. It won’t surprise you to know that W.H. Auden was Christian.

If the task of poetry is on one hand to make us pay attention in a world of sensory overload, and on the other hand focus our attention in a new way, then it is not true that poetry makes nothing happen.
I think of the Talmud which teaches us that we do not see the world as it is but as we are. Auden seems to suggest that although poetry makes nothing happen, it changes us still. And if it is true that we see the world as we are then this is all the more reason to allow God to change us, for then we will see the world with different eyes. We will pay attention to the ways of God among us.

Returning to our reading from Matthew, the point of the words of Jesus is not to make us mortally afraid, for that would accomplish nothing, but to direct our attention to God, to Jesus’s Lordship, and to the future God intends and wants to bring about. And directing our attention to God, God’s presence in Word and Sacrament, in the lives of the saints, and to the tree on both sides of the river with its leaves for the healing of the nations is the beginning of our salvation, for it puts us on its path, as Catherine of Siena said, “All the way to heaven is heaven, for Jesus said, I am the way.”³

And in this sense it is helpful to think of what the Church calls eschatology, the parousia (the return) of Christ, or the last things, differently than popular culture does. In the same way that the word apocalypse means revealing and therefore the ability to see things as they are (i.e. apocalypse does not mean the cataclysmic end of the world), in the same way we can think of “end” in two different ways. The word “end” does no actually appear in our reading but it is assumed by the reader and consistent with a linear understanding of history. It is more helpful to understand “end” as fulfillment, as goal, as aim. The Greek word is telos. Jesus is the telos of history, Jesus is the telos of our lives, for he was in the beginning, is now and will be forever. And Jesus is not only coming but is already here, in Word and Sacrament, and in our life together.
In the words of W.H. Auden:

In the deserts of the heart
Let the healing fountain start,
In the prison of his days
Teach the free man how to praise.

For you and me, and for the church to know and to remember that Jesus is the aim of history, is a mouth, it flows, a way of happening, of seeing, and of being.

Amen.