Jeremiah 33:14-16; Luke 21:25-36
First Sunday of Advent: November 29, 2009
These days it might seem like our political parties humiliate and degrade each other out of pure sport. While I can’t speak for all of them – some might actually be doing just that – most, I suspect, are driven by something much less sinister. In fact, it could even be considered “good” on some level. I give the politicians the benefit of the doubt. I think they believe in their own vision of what is best for our country and the world. I think they believe that if things would be done their way, if their philosophy governed the decisions, the economy would be better, health care would be fixed, we would be safe from terrorists, and the world would move toward peace.
However, when politicians really believe in their own worldview, they really believe that the best thing that could happen is to have their political party in power – because once in power, you can do so much good. But you have to be in power first, and so this becomes the end goal – getting elected. Now, you will do anything you have to in order to accomplish that goal. You will oppose everything the other side does, even if you don’t actually oppose it. You will demonize your opponent, even though you know they are as good and genuine as you…just with different beliefs. This is classic, it is common, it is not unique to politics, it is an ethic with a name: utliltarianism, or “the ends justify the means.”
It might seem a little odd at first to say that Christianity is based entirely on this ethic. Well, sort of. Instead of the endS justifying the means, we believe the end justifies the means: singular…end. We start with the end – the ultimate end, and work backwards from there. Advent is the beginning of the church year, the start of our whole faith story and it begins with the end. It begins with a text from Luke that talks about the coming of Christ again into the world, bringing about the end times.
So what’s so important about starting at the end? It all has to do with what we think the “end” is, and when it’s going to happen – or if it’s going to happen. There’s a word for this…”eschatology”, which simply means the study of end things.
We study and think about the end of the story of humanity because what we believe about that time directly impacts what we do in the present and what the content of our faith is. Even if we don’t think we believe anything about the end and so believe it actually has no impact on our actions and faith, we’re wrong.
We all believe something, even if it’s that there is no “end” at all, only infinity stretched out in front of this universe. Even if this is what we believe, a number of questions are still embedded in such a view. For example, does that infinity always include humans? is earth still around one billion years from now? do the living creatures bear any resemblance to us, their evolutionary ancestors? The answers to these questions directly affect what one does in the present, even if we’re not always conscious of it. Think response to global warming, relationship to non human creatures, perspective on what is taught in school. What we believe about the destiny of humankind really affects decisions and actions in the present.
So in Advent we stop and think a little bit about eschatology and what it means to us today. Advent is a season of waiting – it is a pre-beginning actually. We are waiting for the “advent” of something…the beginning of something. For us that new beginning is found in the birth of Jesus. But all along, ever since the earliest Christians, we have been waiting for something else: The Advent of “the end”. Another way people talk about this is we are waiting for the “second coming”, meaning Christ coming again to clean up the mess we have made and set things right.
Our biblical passages this morning are talking about that second kind of waiting. Each author is describing what the “end” will look like. Jeremiah and Luke paint a picture of what they are waiting for – what they are expecting at some point in the future. And why are they doing this? What compels people to think about a future time when things will completely change, or come to an end? Usually it’s because the present is so bad we know it can’t be all there is, forever. All through our scriptures, God promises a new world order – one that addresses the suffering we face. We call it the Realm of God, or the kingdom of God. This is a time when suffering will be non-existent and war, hatred and violence will be no more. And throughout our scriptures people have found comfort and hope in visions of the Realm of God.
At the same time, throughout our scriptures – and throughout human history – all too often people make the more immediate future the object of hope. We describe all kinds of hopes for what will happen soon, in our lifetime, if not in the next week. We hope the economy will turn around. We hope war will end. We hope our political party will be elected. We hope our loved ones will be healed or our grief will end. We hope for a child. And on and on.
Our writers challenge us to think beyond these short term hopes, because what they know is all short term hopes are limited and fall short of the ultimate hope of the coming of God’s realm. And if our lives are driven only by these short terms hopes, instead of the ultimate hope, our actions and faith will inevitably be distorted. Our choices will be affected by lesser goals, rather than the only goal that matters.
We’re not alone in this. The Israelite people made this mistake – hoping only for their own fortunes rather than God’s realm, and their actions led to their own downfall. The disciples did this, hoping for a king to rule over their people and their land and so trying to make Jesus into that king, rather than the very incarnation of God. We are in the same boat, so often looking to short term ends and expedient means, and so the prophets and the author of Luke speak to us as much as the people of their day. Yet each of these writers gives a different picture of “the end” and how that will come about. Our job is to measure those pictures against what Jesus said about the coming of the Realm of God, and then act accordingly.
By the time Jesus was born there were many, many different understandings of what the end times would look like – the one common thread was that virtually all Jews were waiting for the Messiah, who would usher in this end. Some believed this would happen in their lifetime; others believe it was a distant dream. Most, however, believed it would include a divine, wrath-filled judgment of their oppressors and it would be a bloody event.
When Jesus was born, some Jews believed he was the Messiah – that he came to judge the wicked and institute a violent battle against the oppressors that would leave him king of a united Israel. We all know now that was not the Messiah Jesus would be. Yet even after his death, many still saw Jesus this way – only now the bloody apocalyptic moment would be when Jesus comes back…the “2nd coming”. They thought Jesus was coming back soon – very, very soon – to finish the job he started.
Obviously by the time our gospels were written, 50 – 90 years after Jesus death, they were having to deal with a very uncomfortable delay. Jesus had not returned. Their pictures about the end times were once again proven inaccurate and so they rethought what Jesus’ life, death and resurrection meant generations later.
We can see that very rethinking in the gospel of Luke. We see in his writing a shift from the bloody apocalypse to that envisioned by Jesus. We see this shift within the gospel itself – a progression. Our passage retains some of the old ways of thinking, including some disturbing images of Jesus’ 2nd coming; then in the birth and life of Jesus Luke develops a new vision of the end times.
Luke lived after the destruction of the temple and the bloody war that accompanied it. This took place in 70 AD – 40 years after Jesus died. For Luke, this was the 2nd coming. When Jesus is making his prediction in our scripture passage today, Luke intends this as a prediction of a future event for Jesus, but a past event to Luke and his readers. Now, from Luke’s place in history, he believes there is to be an interim period of time of unknown length in which the church is to live as God’s people until Christ comes again; not in his lifetime, but at some indefinite, unspecified point in the future.
This shift from an imminent to indefinite and violent to peaceful eschatology affected Luke’s theology and ethics. An imminent eschatology brings extreme ethics. If the end is near and inevitable, the only thing left to do is to ready oneself to be on the right side of God’s judgment. An indefinite eschatology, on the other hand, supports an ethic that is engaged with the world. No longer expecting their or their children’s lives to be interrupted and the world as they know it brought to an end, the Christians had to figure out how to live in the meantime.
In the coming weeks we will see what Luke believed such a life should look like. For now, what’s important is that in Luke the bloody picture of an immediate end became a future possibility based not on popular messianic hopes, but rather on Jesus’ own understanding of end times: namely the full completion of God’s Realm here on earth. “The realm of God is near,” Jesus says. And then his life became a glimpse of that promised future, and it is that future that shaped Luke’s understanding of who the church needs to be in the present.
We too are left to figure out what to do in the meantime. And what we believe about the “end” – the goal of human history – affects what the “meantime” ethic should be. If it’s a violent, bloody judgment of those left behind after the true Christians are taken up into heaven, we will live as an exclusive club requiring assent to specific creeds and moralistic codes for membership…which is the only way to salvation. On the other hand, if it’s the end of this era and the beginning of a new world order found not through violence but through the creative actions of human kind living as best they can like the realm of God now, we will be a community that embraces the principles of Jesus’ life: nonviolence, inclusion, healing and compassion.
In a culture where the ends justifies the mean, we need to be clear about what the “end” is that we Christians seek so our means are always and only justified by the Realm of God. Sometimes this will coincide with shorter term goals, but sometimes it won’t. In fact at times the ultimate end might indicate actions in the present that will work directly against some of our dearly held short term desires. We need to challenge the notion that the future is a set event, like a movie already written with the dramatic ending. Instead, there is something of a blue print found in Jesus’ life and his vision of God’s realm. But he leaves it to us to complete what he has started.
Like Luke and Jeremiah, we are waiting. And in the meantime we have decisions to make about what it means to be the church – the people of God. We, like the early Church, must sustain the hope of God’s realm through our actions, even though it seems at times that such a realm is in the distant future. If we give up on that, accepting an ethic that serves a lesser, more expedient “end”, we deny God’s promise and destroy both the present and the future hope.
There are a lot of worthy goals, but none ever supersedes the Realm of God. When we speak about the coming of God’s reign, we are concerned about the longest terms interests of the plant or species, or really universe. Such a view precludes a utilitarian ethic where we use people as pawns or violence as a tool in order to accomplish a short term goal. We seem to abandon this perspective all too easily when we are afraid or even just angry. But we know how destructive short term goals can be. The short term goal becomes that which justifies all manner of evil.
This season, as we join the prophets and the gospel writers in asking the question of what we should do while we wait for the Realm of God, let’s ask ourselves what we are working toward and how that affects our ethics and decisions. Is it success, security, invulnerability, power, happiness? What are we willing to do for our short term goals and how does that square with what life looks like in the Realm of God; in the end…the only one that matters. Amen.
