A young professional woman from Ohio decided to seek her fortune, discern her vocation, and potentially change her life for the better by moving to England. She relocated to London where she began to pursue an advanced degree, seeking new opportunities in the work world.

One of the things she took with her from the Midwest was an insatiable love for the Chicago Cubs professional baseball team. She followed the games on the internet, listening to the live feed. The problem with this arrangement was that, when the games began, often around seven or eight o’clock in the evening in the United States, it was one or two o’clock the following morning in London. That made for a very late — or early — bedtime.

In the year when the Cubs were on the cusp of qualifying for the World Series, she eagerly tuned in to listen to the games that would decide who would qualify. But she’d been listening to every Cubs game that year, all broadcast in what was the middle of the night where she lived. After tuning in to the game that was to seal the Cubs’ fate, the inevitable happened. She fell asleep and awoke only in time to hear the post-game wrap-up. The Cubs had won. They were in the Series. She had missed all the excitement.

On her Facebook account she lamented, “I’ve waited years for a moment like this, and of course I slept through it!”

Is there a moral to this story? One might be: Try to get more sleep. Another might be: Try to order your affairs in such a way that you will be alert when events transpire that you believe to be of critical importance to you.

In this young woman’s defense, once the World Series began, she stayed awake for every game. Her comment was, “True Cubs fans never give up.” And, in demonstration of her commitment to her favorite team, she remained faithful to the last out — staying awake for all of it.

The writer of the gospel of Mark sets the tone for the Christian season of Advent with appropriate advice. “Something important is happening. Stay awake! Don’t miss it!”

The context for Mark’s good advice is a parable that sounds to many modern readers like an antique story hardly applicable for today. Here’s the problem with the parable. As it was originally intended, it undoubtedly presumed that there was to be a cosmic event, an ending of human history of some sort, in the near future for those first readers or hearers of Mark’s message.

Mark’s gospel reflects this conviction in more than one place. The entire thirteenth chapter of Mark is known to biblical scholars — and most pastors who preach on this gospel — as ‘The Little Apocalypse.’ An apocalypse was understood to be a rolling up of the scroll of history, a dramatic ending of the current age and the ushering in of a new and different one.

Given the nature of the four New Testament gospels, and the circumstances under which they were written, we have no way of knowing whether Jesus actually said the words — or whether Mark simply created them for his version of Jesus — but we have a remarkable Jesus pronouncement in this gospel. Mark has him promising, or perhaps warning, that there were people alive and listening to him speak who would see the end of the Age. That makes us wonder what Jesus, or at least Mark, thought the end of Age was supposed to look like.

If there truly was to be a cosmic interruption of life on our planet, then Mark’s parable, which has Jesus calling his listeners to stay awake, makes perfect sense. But what if the cosmic interruption never came? There’s good evidence that, as the first believers imagined it, such an event never occurred. So, then, does the parable say anything to us?

It surely does.

The parable about watching and waiting — and staying awake — has a cosmic meaning the first believers probably never imagined. Here’s what it is: At any moment in human history, including our generation, God’s surprise interruption of the ordinary flow of things can and does break in. Why should it? Simply put, it’s because the universe is grounded in God, who is the source and energy of everything. We don’t exist, much less stay alive and thrive and survive, without God’s energy flowing into and through us, giving us life and meaning, both now and for the future.

But it is possible to go to sleep on that reality, and suppose life is an accident — or a meaningless joke. You can live your life with no realization whatsoever that the life force that keeps your heart thumping is the life with which God energizes your existence. You can stumble along, wondering where you came from and where you’re going.

Or you can wake up.

So, as we launch a brand new church year, what exactly is it that’s happening, through which we don’t want to be found sleeping? To put it simply, we are in the midst of an invasion, a revolution calculated to upend everything that seems ordinary. Nobody should sleep through a revolution.

The invasion comes from the greatest energy source known to humanity. The living God has created an astonishing universe and brought to life on at least one planet — ours — an incredible ecosystem, ruled (or frequently misruled) by the likes of you and me. And into this unlikely cauldron of human striving and hoping and seeking and doing and stumbling and succeeding, the source of all energy unloads in our midst a generous measure of energizing dunamis (a Greek word that gave rise to the English word “dynamite”).

Jesus, the Christ, is the agent of God’s great gift, the energy that launches a revolution in the human family. In our experience, Jesus the revolutionary comes to us as Spirit power — energy that can turn our lives God-ward. That Spirit power is at work in our midst right now, largely through people who are already caught up in it.

Advent’s message is a reminder of something that’s also true in March or July — that the Divine Source of all energy is busy, right now, revolutionizing the lives of the people whom God loves. We can be a part of that. Some of us already are. But we can also miss the revolution, simply by sleeping through it.

Stay awake! Stay alive to the power and promises of God. They come at us endlessly, surprisingly, in ways we sometimes least expect. We can miss it. We can sleep through it. Or we can wake up to the promises — that we are loved, we are God’s, and we are people of destiny.

It’s Advent. Wake up! And stay awake to the gifts of the power and presence of God in our midst. Those gifts are designed to revolutionize our lives. The revolution goes on. It’s going on right now.

Rejoice and be glad!