If you’re looking for an unusual Christmas gift, for about ten dollars you can buy a death clock.  A death clock is a computer program that will calculate the day of your death.  You just enter all the pertinent information: things like your age, your health, your weekly hours of exercise, and your personal habits, and it will make various actuarial calculations and begin counting down until the day of your death.  If you don’t want to spend the ten dollars, you can find various websites that will do the same thing.  You can even get a screen saver that is a death clock, so every time you look at your computer you know how much time you’ve got left.  A death clock may spur some of us to greater productivity: I guess I’d better get busy on that sermon, today.  But besides being a goad to greater or more useful activity, I can imagine only two reasons for owning a death clock.  The first would be kind of like gambling.  It might be fun to have a death clock simply for the thrill of trying to beat the odds.  The second reason to have a death clock is to shake us out of our complacency.

In today’s Gospel lesson Jesus also tries to shake us out of our complacency.  Anyone who lives on Staten Island can understand perfectly well the metaphor he uses.  If Jesus were a Staten Islander, he might have said, “If the residents of Todt Hill had known at what time the Ninja burglar was going to strike, they would have bought a dog, locked the doors, and set the alarm.”  It’s just human nature, we’re on guard but as soon as the crisis has passed we become complacent again.  The Ninja burglar hadn’t struck for two months, so everyone forgets about him and becomes complacent.   We haven’t seen Jesus in about two thousand years, so everyone becomes complacent and forgets about him.  But Jesus is saying, “Don’t forget about me, because I’ll show up when you least expect it, just like the Ninja burglar.”

Advent is the season of the Church year when we intentionally try to shake off our complacency.  Advent functions both retrospectively and prospectively – I like to say stuff like that every now and then so you know I’ve been to seminary.  What I mean is this:  Advent is retrospective in that it looks to the past.  We shake off our complacency as we prepare to celebrate Jesus’ birth in Bethlehem.  But Advent is also prospective in that it looks forward to the Day when Christ will come in glory.  We shake off our complacency as we prepare for his second coming.  But we don’t shake off our complacency out of fear.  The Lord comes like a thief in the night, but he is not a thief.  Despite everything the TV preachers tell us, the one who comes at the end has to be like the one who came at Christmas. He is not coming again to destroy us or, at the very least, to destroy the infidels.  The Jesus who was born to Mary in Bethlehem is the same Jesus who will return at the End.  And we know this Jesus, don’t we?  This is the Jesus who hung out with tax collectors and sinners.  This is the one who came to seek and to save the lost.  This is the one who said those who are well have no need of a physician but those who are sick.  This is the one who said, “’Go learn what this means, ‘I desire mercy not sacrifice.’ For I have come to call not the righteous but sinners.’”  Does this sound like someone’s whose heart’s desire is to turn us all into pieces of well-done toast?  I don’t think so.  We shake off our complacency so we are ready to greet Jesus not with fear but with joy.

St. Paul has a message for the Christian community in Rome: Wake up!  Paul wrote to the Romans just a few decades after Jesus’ death and Resurrection and already people we’re becoming complacent, getting distracted by the things of this world; things like drunkenness, debauchery, licentiousness, quarreling, and jealousy.  Paul wants them to concentrate on the things of God, which are the really important things.  Just as every day we are one day closer to our deaths, so too every day we are one day closer to our salvation.  So don’t waste your time, St. Paul says.

What about us, are we wasting our time?  Are we sleep-walking through life?  Advent is a good time to wake up, re-focus and re-prioritize.  The clock is tick, tick, ticking away.  I really don’t know how accurate those death clocks are, but two things are certain: We’re all going to die and the Lord is going to return.  So let’s use the time we have wisely and live life to the fullest.  We could drink, and quarrel, and be jealous of each other but what a waste of precious time that would be.  Advent is a time to concentrate both on the past and on the future.  But we also concentrate our minds on the present.  Jesus came that we might have life and have it abundantly – not in the past, not in the future, but right now.  We need only to wake up and to ask God to help us to concentrate on the things that really matter – to cast off the works of darkness and to put on the armor of light. Amen.