First Sunday of Advent — November 30, 2025

Late November in the Red River Valley has a particular kind of stillness.

The combines are parked. The fields are stubble. The first hard freeze has come and gone, and now we wait—for snow, for winter, for whatever comes next. The land itself seems to hold its breath.

I’ve been thinking about this quiet. What kind of quiet is it?

There’s a quiet that comes from exhaustion—the quiet of someone who has simply stopped fighting, stopped paying attention, stopped caring what happens next. This is the quiet of sleep.

But there’s another kind of quiet. The quiet of a hunter in a stand before dawn. The quiet of a farmer watching the western sky for weather. The quiet of a mother listening for her child’s breathing in the next room. This is the quiet of alertness—still, but awake. Watching. Ready.

Advent begins this Sunday. The church year turns over, and we enter a season of waiting. But the question presses: What kind of waiting is this?

The lectionary doesn’t let us ease into Christmas sentiment. On this first Sunday of Advent, Jesus doesn’t speak of mangers or shepherds. He speaks of Noah. Of floods. Of people swept away because they weren’t paying attention.

“As were the days of Noah, so will be the coming of the Son of Man. For as in those days before the flood they were eating and drinking, marrying and giving in marriage, until the day when Noah entered the ark, and they were unaware until the flood came and swept them all away, so will be the coming of the Son of Man.” (Matthew 24:37-39)

Here is what strikes me about this passage: Jesus doesn’t describe a generation of dramatic sinners. He describes a generation of ordinary-looking people—people whose wickedness had become so routine they couldn’t recognize it as wickedness. They were eating. Drinking. Getting married. Giving their children in marriage. These aren’t wicked activities in themselves. They’re the stuff of ordinary life.

And that’s precisely the problem.

They were so absorbed in the normal that they couldn’t hear the warning. Noah was building an ark. Noah was preaching righteousness. But who had time to listen? There were crops to harvest, deals to make, weddings to plan. Life was full. Life was busy. Life was loud with all its ordinary demands.

And then the flood came.

I wonder if we’ve made the same mistake.

Not with floods—we’re not watching for rising water. But the pattern is the same: ordinary life so consuming that we can’t hear what God is saying. Busy, but not with the right things. Talking, but not about what matters. Religious, even—but asleep.

There’s a philosophy that has crept into many churches. You’ve heard it. Maybe you’ve said it yourself. It goes like this:

“We all have different interpretations.”

It sounds humble. It sounds gracious. It sounds like the kind of thing reasonable people say when they want to avoid conflict. After all, who are we to claim we’ve got it all figured out? Surely Scripture is complex, and godly people disagree, and we should hold our opinions loosely.

I’ve heard this reasoning discussed openly—even at church council meetings—as the defining ethos of how we approach the Bible. No pushback. No debate. Just quiet agreement that this is how mature Christians think.

But here’s what I’ve come to see: this philosophy doesn’t produce listening. It produces the appearance of listening while guaranteeing that nothing Scripture says can ever land with authority.

Think about it. If “we all have different interpretations,” then what can Scripture ever actually say? Every hard teaching can be softened. Every clear command can be qualified. Every uncomfortable truth can be reframed as “just your interpretation.” The text is on the page, but we’ve given ourselves permission to never let it speak.

This is noise dressed as nuance.

To be clear: godly people do disagree on secondary matters—on modes of baptism, on end-times timelines, on questions Scripture addresses obliquely. That’s not the problem. The problem is when we use “different interpretations” to mute what Scripture says plainly on matters it addresses directly.

And in that noise, people fall asleep.

The generation of Noah wasn’t wicked in some spectacular way. They were just busy. Too busy to notice the ark. Too busy to hear the warning. Too absorbed in the ordinary to recognize that judgment was coming.

I fear we’ve built our own kind of noise. Not the noise of eating and drinking and marrying—though we have that too—but the noise of endless theological hedging. A fog of “different perspectives” so thick that the clear voice of Scripture can’t break through. We’ve made uncertainty into a virtue and called it humility.

But is it humble to say “we all have different interpretations” when Scripture speaks plainly? Or is it actually the opposite—a way of saying we know better than the text? A way of putting ourselves above the Word rather than under it?

Luther saw this clearly. In his debate with Erasmus, who argued that Scripture’s teaching on certain doctrines was too obscure for firm conclusions, Luther shot back:

“The Holy Spirit is the plainest Writer and Speaker in heaven and on earth, and therefore His words cannot have more than one, and that the most obvious, sense.”

The problem, Luther insisted, wasn’t that Scripture was unclear. The problem was that we didn’t want to hear what it clearly said.

True humility doesn’t say, “Who can really know what this means?” True humility says, “Lord, I submit to what You have said—even when it cuts against my preferences.”

True humility is quieting yourself to hear.

And that brings us back to Advent. Back to the quiet fields. Back to the question: What kind of quiet is this?

Are we quiet because we’ve stopped listening? Or quiet because we’re finally ready to hear?

Isaiah saw something.

Seven centuries before Christ, in a time of political chaos and spiritual compromise, the prophet received a vision: the mountain of the Lord’s house, lifted high above all other hills. Nations streaming toward it—not in conquest, but in pilgrimage. Enemies laying down their weapons. Swords hammered into plowshares. Spears reshaped into pruning hooks.

“Nation shall not lift up sword against nation, neither shall they learn war anymore.” (Isaiah 2:4)

It’s a vision of the world made right. The world as God intends it. And for a moment, reading it, your heart lifts—yes, let it be so.

But Isaiah doesn’t end with the vision. He ends with a command:

“O house of Jacob, come, let us walk in the light of the LORD.” (Isaiah 2:5)

Do you see what he’s doing? Isaiah doesn’t say, “Sit back and wait for this glorious future.” He says, “Walk in the light—now.” The vision of what God will do shapes what we must do. Seeing where history is headed changes how we live today.

To walk in the light means to order your life according to what God has revealed. It means letting His Word illuminate your path rather than stumbling around in the dark of your own opinions. It means submitting to Scripture’s clarity rather than hiding in the fog of “different interpretations.”

Light exposes. That’s what light does. And some of us, I think, have grown comfortable in the dark.

Paul picks up the same thread in his letter to the Romans. Writing to Christians who were tempted to drift, to grow comfortable, to lose their edge, he delivers an urgent wake-up call:

“Besides this you know the time, that the hour has come for you to wake from sleep. For salvation is nearer to us now than when we first believed. The night is far gone; the day is at hand. So then let us cast off the works of darkness and put on the armor of light.” (Romans 13:11-12)

The hour has come to wake from sleep.

In the original Greek, Paul uses egeiro—the same word used for Christ being raised from the dead. This is no accident. Paul isn’t giving a gentle suggestion. He’s calling believers back to their baptism—back to the moment when they were raised from death to life, washed clean, clothed with Christ.

You’ve already been woken up. That’s what Paul is saying. In baptism, God raised you. He pulled you out of the grave of sin and dressed you in the righteousness of His Son. You are not a person of the night. You are not a child of darkness. You belong to the day.

So why are you living like someone asleep?

“Put on the Lord Jesus Christ,” Paul concludes (Romans 13:14). The armor of light isn’t something you manufacture. It’s Christ Himself. You put on what you’ve already been given. You live out what’s already true.

This is the difference between Law and Gospel. The Law reveals our sin—it shows us that we’ve been sleeping when we should have been awake, drifting when we should have been anchored, closing our ears when we should have been listening. The Law exposes us. But the Gospel forgives. And more than that, it reminds us of who we already are in Christ. The Gospel says, “You’ve been woken up—now live like it.” Paul isn’t threatening the Roman Christians. He’s calling them back to their baptismal identity. He’s reminding them—and us—of what’s already true.

But here’s the sobering part: baptism is not magic. God’s gifts can be rejected. You can be baptized—truly washed, truly claimed—and still turn away. You can know the truth and close your ears. You can have the light and choose the darkness.

That’s why Paul writes with such urgency. That’s why Isaiah commands and doesn’t just comfort. That’s why Jesus warns about Noah’s generation—people who had every opportunity to hear and chose not to listen.

The light is available. The Word is clear. The hour is late.

The question is whether we will walk in it.

So what does it mean to be awake?

I used to think it meant anxiety. Vigilance as tension. Always scanning the horizon for signs, always calculating whether this war or that earthquake meant the end was near. That kind of watchfulness exhausts you. It turns faith into a nervous surveillance operation.

But that’s not what Jesus describes.

“Keep awake,” He says, “for you do not know on what day your Lord is coming” (Matthew 24:42). Notice: your Lord. Not a stranger. Not an angry judge you’ve never met. Your Lord. The one who knows you. The one who died for you. The one who claimed you in baptism and feeds you at His table and speaks to you through His Word week after week.

We’re not watching for a stranger. We’re watching for someone we love.

That changes everything.

Advent wakefulness isn’t frantic. It’s attentive. It’s the alertness of a bride who knows the bridegroom is coming and wants to be ready—not out of fear, but out of love. It’s the watchfulness of a child on Christmas Eve, not dreading the morning but longing for it.

And here’s the Gospel at the heart of it all: the Word is clear enough for those with ears to hear.

We are not left groping in the dark. We are not abandoned to confusion. God has spoken—in the prophets, in the apostles, and finally and fully in His Son. The Scriptures are not a puzzle to be decoded by experts. They are a lamp for our feet and a light for our path. The Holy Spirit, as Luther said, is the plainest writer and speaker in heaven and on earth.

The clarity is there. The question is whether we will receive it.

I need to say something about grief.

This is the first Christmas season after Climax Lutheran closed its doors. For many of you, that church was where you were baptized, confirmed, married. It was where you buried your parents and watched your grandchildren toddle down the aisle. And now it’s gone. The doors are locked. The pews are empty.

I know what that loss feels like. We left Sand Hill years ago, and even now there are Sundays when I ache for what was—for the faces I knew, for the rhythms that shaped our family’s weeks. The grief is real. I won’t pretend otherwise.

And I know that this blog, these words from the outside, might feel like salt in a wound. Who am I to speak into your community? Who am I to call for clarity when everything feels so uncertain?

I don’t have a perfect answer to that. I only know that I was formed by this place. That I love these people. And that love sometimes means saying hard things—not to wound, but because the Word demands it.

Here is what I believe with all my heart: it is not too late.

It is not too late to wake up. Not too late to open your ears. Not too late to return to the Scriptures and let them speak with the clarity God intended. Jesus told a parable about workers who came to the vineyard at the eleventh hour and received the same wage as those who’d worked all day. The landowner was generous. Our God is generous.

There is more joy in heaven over one sinner who repents than over ninety-nine righteous persons who think they need no repentance. That’s not just a nice saying. It’s the heartbeat of the Gospel. It’s why Advent exists at all—because God didn’t leave us in the dark. He came. He is coming still.

Wake up.

Not with fear, but with hope. Not with anxiety, but with longing. The bridegroom is on His way. The King is returning. And He is your Lord—the one who knows you, loves you, and will not let you go.

So what now? What does it look like to be awake in the quiet?

Let me offer something concrete.

Start talking about God’s Word.

You gather each week. Coffee is poured. Conversations happen. The church—whatever else it has become—is still a place where you see each other, where words are exchanged, where time is spent. You have the opportunity. Use it for what matters.

Talk about the readings. The lectionary puts Scripture in front of you every single Sunday—Old Testament, Psalm, Epistle, Gospel. Four texts, week after week, tracing the whole story of God’s salvation. But how often do those readings pass by without comment? Read aloud, then forgotten. Background noise to the real business of announcements and potlucks and committee updates.

What if you read them before Sunday? What if you came expecting God to speak?

And here’s another thing: pay attention to what gets skipped.

Notice when a passage is read but not preached. Notice when the sermon veers away from what the text actually says. Notice when the hard parts—the parts about sin and judgment and repentance—get smoothed over or explained away. Ask yourself: Why? Ask your pastor: Why?

This isn’t about being contentious. It’s about being awake. A church that can’t engage its own Scriptures honestly is a church that has fallen asleep. And the only way to wake up is to start listening again—really listening—to what God has said.

I’m not suggesting suspicion toward your pastor. Most pastors labor faithfully under pressures laypeople never see. But ask. Engage. A good shepherd welcomes honest questions. And the conversation itself—the wrestling with the text together—is part of how a church stays awake.

The fields are bare. Winter is coming. The Valley holds its breath.

And into this quiet, the church speaks an ancient word: Advent. The coming. Not just the coming that happened two thousand years ago in Bethlehem, though we will celebrate that soon enough. But the coming that is still ahead. The return of the King. The day when every knee will bow and every tongue confess that Jesus Christ is Lord.

We live between those two comings. Already and not yet. The light has dawned, but the full day hasn’t arrived. And so we wait. We watch. We listen.

Not anxiously, like those who have no hope. But eagerly, like those who know that what’s coming is good.

The bridegroom is on His way.

Will He find you awake?

O come, O come, Emmanuel.

With humble gratitude, Winfred