‘Awake, for night is flying’: An armchair theologian’s mission statement for Advent and the new year (1 of _?)

“Wake, awake! for night is flying,”
The watchmen on the heights are crying;
“Awake, Jerusalem, arise!”
— Philip Nicolai (Hymnary.org)

A couple of weeks ago, I attended a planning workshop at my parish church that took an unexpected turn. The workshop was part of a congregational self-study, and, as I’d hoped, the conversation quickly turned to mission statements, vision and strategic planning. Good enough! Before I retired from college teaching, I was part of an institutional self-study when we were up for reaccreditation.

The self-study experience was positive, in spite of my irritation with some of academic buzzwords we threw around, and I felt like we were on familiar ground at the parish workshop. Then, the facilitator threw out a curve ball. Take two or three minutes, we were told, and draft a personal mission statement.

Now I’m a great believer in mission statements. I’ve always admired management guru Peter Drucker’s dictum that they should “fit on a T-shirt” (even though the one mission statement I helped write was so wordy, it would have required 10-point type on a size XXXL). But a personal mission statement? I thought they were a bit silly, and I never tried to write one.

But I accepted the challenge. I liked the way the workshop was going, and I’ve been through enough academic planning sessions to appreciate the difficulty of the exercise. So I decided to give it a try. To my surprise, it took me less than a minute. (I guess having stage 4 cancer tends to make you think of goals, objectives and measurable outcomes in a new light.) Here’s what I came up with:

Personal mission statement: To use my gifts in the time I’ve got left to do what I can to repair the world (tikkun olam).

A word or two may need translation there. Literally. Tikkun olam is the Hebrew for “repairing the world.” According to Wikipedia, my go-to source as an untrained armchair theologian, it’s “a concept in Judaism, which refers to various forms of action intended to repair and improve the world.” As I understand it (and I’ll be the first to admit my understanding isn’t very deep), it has a lot in common with the Christian concept of co-creation.

Another translation: Spiritual co-creation, according to Google’s AI Overview (another favorite source for armchair theology), is “the idea of humans working in partnership with a divine power, such as God, the Universe, or Source, to create their reality.” Does that sound a little New Age-y? Well, Google AI continues in the same vein, “It involves a blend of human action and divine assistance, requiring individuals to take intentional steps while also surrendering to and trusting a greater plan for their highest good.”

That’s a little more down-to-earth, and it raises interesting questions of grace, free will, faith and good works (interesting, at least, to an armchair theologian). But co-creating reality with God seems a little above my pay grade. That said, I like the idea of helping God repair the world. As Wikipedia puts it:

In the modern era, particularly among the post-Haskalah movements [a reference to the Jewish enlightenment of the 18th and 19th centuries and contemporary Reform Judaism], tikkun olam has come to refer to the pursuit of social justice or “the establishment of Godly qualities throughout the world” based on the idea that “Jews bear responsibility not only for their own moral, spiritual, and material welfare, but also for the welfare of society at large”.

That’s better than Google AI’s New Age-y stuff. I find the pursuit of social justice entirely relatable. Hence my personal mission statement at the parish workshop.

And the emphasis on mission, vision and planning at the workshop couldn’t have come at a more opportune time. We’re closing out 2025, which has been a terrible year for me, both healthwise and politically. It began with side effects of immunotherapy that threw me for a loop, and it seems to be ending with a paramilitary blitzkrieg in the streets of cities like Chicago and threatened quasi-Stalinist purges in the Pentagon and the US Senate. But I’m coming out of my challenges OK. For now. And we have elections coming up next year.

Also, we’re coming up on Advent and the beginning of the church year.

And there’s a lot more to Advent than the Christmas shopping season, with which it coincides. A blog on the ELCA churchwide website says “the church has observed Advent as weeks of preparation since the fifth century with themes of watchfulness, preparation, and hope infusing this season.” For me, and I think for other Lutherans, it’s a time to take stock and look ahead. For a little strategic planning, in other words.

For us, it’s a time when “The watchmen on the heights are crying / ‘Awake, Jerusalem arise’,” in the words of an chorale long associated with Advent, by Philipp Nicolai in 1599. I hope I’m not stretching if too far if I take it as a message not only hope and joy, but also of planning, maybe even a message about mission statements. After all, Nicolai is recalling here the parable of the wise and foolish virgins and it’s to the wise virgins who have their lamps trimmed and ready for a wedding feast that Nicolai’s watchmen cry out:

“Oh, where are all you virgins wise?
The Bridegroom come, awake!
Your lamps with gladness take!
Alleluia!”

Plan ahead, ye virgins wise, I’m thinking. And make sure your personal mission statements fit on a T-shirt. (Speaking of T-shirts, ELCA has an arrangement with Old Lutheran to make T-shirts reading “God’s Work. Our Hands” available to congregations. It’s as good a summary of co-creation as I’ve seen anywhere.)

OK, fine. I left the parish workshop with a personal mission statement. And as I thought about it, it reminded me of one of my favorite chorales. (You can hear it in the YouTube clip embedded above, of an arrangement by a Norwegian-American composer whose work I grew up with, listening to my father’s 10-inch LPs of the choir at St. Olaf’s. We went to an Episcopal church at the time, but Dad was a PK, a Norwegian-American pastor’s son, and the Lutheran chorales were always part of Christmas for me.)

But what do I actually do to repair the world? I’m not in a position to talk sense into the president of the United States, and I can’t even get his masked Border Patrol agents off the streets of Chicago. I’ve had a vague feeling lately that I do chair a committee in my parish (faith formation, not a bad fit for an old academic), and spending more time on it might be a better use of my time than doomscrolling about the latest outrage from the White House.

There’s a Jesuit practice called the discernment of spirits that’s been helpful to me. I won’t try to explain it here. But it involves deciding, or discerning, “which direction is our life taking us—toward God [consolation] or away from him [desolation],” as an explainer by Loyola Press of Chicago puts it (brackets in the original). When I talked about my workshop mission statement with my spiritual director, she suggested I think about three questions. Here they are, with my off-the-top-of-the-head answers:

• Who or what am I working for? Why, sure! Social justice. But what does that mean? It has something to do with community. I want to be a peacemaker, and bring people together. Growing up as a “TVA brat,” i.e. a Yankee living down South, I always felt like a bit of an outsider, not fully Southern (and not fully northern after I moved up North). So inclusion has always been important to me.
• Who or what am I resting in? How can I answer this without waxing academic? A Finnish theologian named Tuomo Mannermaa finds the presence of Christ indwelling in the faith of the believer. But, for me, I find it in music, joy and consolation (in the Jesuit sense) in music ranging from Lutheran chorales to American shape-note folk hymns and “Africa-lachian” roots music that blends African and southern Appalachian traditions.
• Who or what am I living for? I’m kind of a spiritual mutt, But my early formation was Anglican, and I keep returning to an Episcopal table grace: “Bless this food to our use, and us to thy service, and make us ever mindful of the needs of others.” That, for me, sums up everything from the Eucharist to the Golden Rule.

I want to journal on the three questions, so here’s my plan: If I don’t get sidetracked by the latest outrage in the White House, the Pentagon or Congress, I’d like to take this Advent period to reflect further on those three questions. (A word about my own formation: I grew up in the Episcopal Church, am now a member of an ELCA Luthran congregation and taught for 20 years in a Catholic libral arts college. I like to call myself a a Luther-o-palian in the ecumenical spirit of Pope John XXIII (with a taste for country Baptist hymnody).

But I’d like to think I’m embarking on this Advent reflection in the spirit of one of the iconic figures in Lutheran church history.

Philipp Nicolai lived in times more troubled than our own, according to a bio on Hymnary.org, the authoritative website maintained by Calvin University. Educated at Luther’s Wittenberg University, he was ordained in 1583. He was soon caught up in the 16th- and 17th-century wars of religion, and fled first parish when Spanish troops arrived at the behest of the local Roman Catholic town council.

Nicolai also fought, albeit intermittently and verbally, with German Calvinists over differing viewpoints on the Eucharist. In 1598 he fled a second pastorate, when Spanish troops again threatened invasion at a time when he and his parishioners had recently “passed through a frightful pestilence,” according to John Julian’s 1907 Dictionary of Hymnology, quoted at length in Hymnary.org, Nicolai wrote “Wake Awake, the Night is Flying,” during the plague, explaining:

Then day by day I wrote out my meditations, found myself, thank God! wonderfully well, comforted in heart, joyful in spirit, and truly content; gave to my manuscript the name and title of a Mirror of Joy, and took this so composed Frewden-Spiegel to leave behind me (if God should call me from this world) as the token of my peaceful, joyful, Christian departure, or (if God should spare me in health) to comfort other sufferers whom He should also visit with the pestilence.

Hence the spirit of joy in Nicolai’s version of the parable of wise and foolish virgins. Nicolai was a typical churchman of his day, and he wrangled bitterly with Jesuits as well as Calvinist Protestants. But he had a mystical streak not typical of Lutherans of his day, and when the plague hit town, and according to 20th-century historian Arthur Carl Piepkorn:

He withdrew from all polemical activities and gave himself over completely to caring for his people, to intercession, and to meditation on the everlasting life that Christians already possess in this world and on the state of the faithful departed in the place of celestial light and refreshment. Out of this came a work “fragrant with the pure aroma of heavenly flowers,” Freudenspiegel dess ewigen Lebens […] dedicated to his sorrowing parishioners and townspeople. (439-40)

Included in the Freudenspiegel (mirror of joy) were the two hymns on which Nicolai’s reputation stands today, “Wake Awake, for Night is Flying” and the Christmas chorale “How Brightly Shines the Morning Star.” Nicolai was a bundle of contradictions (something I also find relatable) and a bitter polemicist (which I don’t), but in “Wake Awake,” he sounds a basic theme in many Christian faith traditons. I hear much the same watchman’s cry in a Black spiritual performed by Joe Thompson, one of the last traditional Black fiddlers from North Carolina:

Well, I got oil in my vessel
Keep your lamp trimmed and burning
Got to be ready when that bride groom comes.

First of ___ posts (I’m hoping for four if my attention span allows me) on my spiritual exercise for Advent, trying to think though a personal mission statement I drafted at a parsh church workshop that touched on mission statements and strategic planning. Next: Another take on Jesus’ parable of wise and foolish virgins, and how it helps me lean into my own efforts to “keep my lamp trimmed and burning / Got to be ready when that bride groom comes.”

Links and Citations

• “Discernment: Consolation and Desolation,” Ignatian Spirituality, LoyolaPress Discernment: Consolation and Desolation https://www.loyolapress.com/catholic-resources/ignatian-spirituality/discernment/discernment-consolation-and-desolation/.
• “LiturgyGram: About the Season of Advent,” ELCA Worship, Nov. 29, 2017, Evangelical Lutheran Church in America, Chicago https://blogs.elca.org/worship/890/.
• Arthur Carl Piepkorn, “Philipp Nicolai (1556-1608): Theologian, Mystic, Hymn Writer, Polemicist, and Missiologist: A Biobibliographical Survey,” Concordia Theological Monthly, 39 (July-August 1968): 432ff https://ctsfw.net/media/pdfs/PiepkornPhilippNicolai.pdf.
• Phil Stewart and Idrees Ali, “Pentagon threatens to prosecute Senator Mark Kelly by recalling him to Navy service,” Reuters, Nov. 25, 2025 https://www.reuters.com/world/us/pentagon-threatens-prosecute-senator-mark-kelly-by-recalling-him-navy-service-2025-11-24/.
• Joe Thompson, “I’ve Got Oil in my Vessel,” lyrics as covered by Scott Ainslee, Thunder’s Mouth, Jan. 13, 2014 https://cattailmusic.com/category/lyrics/thunders-mouth/.
• Also my “Blacks, whites and Southern old-time music,” Hogfiddle, Sept. 27, 2009 https://hogfiddle.blogspot.com/2009/09/blacks-whites-and-southern-old-time.html.

[Uplinked Nov. 25, 2025]