Jeremiah 33:14-16; Luke 21:25-36
First Sunday of Advent: December 2, 2012
Every
year at this time, not unlike other pastors, I suspect, I feel a little bit
like someone standing on the shore of the ocean trying to hold back the
tide. Christmas season is rushing in,
trying to overtake us, and every year I am the one who has to say, “no, not
yet. Hold on. Wait.”
Well, I don’t say that, our church calendar and liturgy says that. We don’t get to read about Jesus’ birth until
Christmas eve, and we don’t sing Christmas carols until Christmas eve “Wait,”
we’re told.
And
it’s hard. The Christmas season is about
joy, light, excitement, parties, music.
It’s about kids eating cookies and singing Christmas carols in the
basement of St. Mary’s church as money is raised to help the homeless. These things, we know because of our inner
experience, are not bad.
But
from the very first Sunday of Advent, we see in no uncertain terms that
something else is going on here at church.
While the rest of the world sings Christmas carols, we read about the
“end times.” It’s dark, ominous,
depressing, and otherwise un-Christmassy.
Why
do we do this? Why not ride the joy of
the season right to Christmas? Why does
the church have to be such a downer – a kill joy? Jingle bell holiday on Friday, apocalypse on
Sunday? Church: the great gathering of
Ebenezer Scrooges.
Well,
the reason we do this is that while the rest of the world says this is the time
when we wait and prepare to celebrate the birth of Jesus, and calls it all
Christmastime, we remember that we are waiting for even more than that. We remember that we are waiting with a world
that is groaning at times in the pain of violence, oppression, poverty, and
darkness, and Christmas trees, gifts, and eggnog will not fix it.
Writing
more than 500 years apart, both of the authors of our texts this morning were
addressing people who lived in this waiting world. Jeremiah wrote to people right around the
time of the destruction of Jerusalem and its temple by the Babylonians in the 6th
century before Christ. The author of the
gospel of Luke wrote to people living about 15 years after the temple in
Jerusalem was destroyed by the Romans in 70 AD.
As distant as they were from one another in history, both communities
were struggling with the same, fundamental question: Where in the world is God in all this?
They
believed God had promised them a new world order: one free of oppression, one
where they would be rulers over their own land, one where justice would reign,
the poor would be fed, widows and orphans taken care of, and peace would flow
like an everlasting stream. But all they
saw was destruction – destruction of their city; destruction of the very house
of God, the center of all they believed in.
All they could feel was God’s absence.
Both
of our authors speak to this reality by talking about “end times,” as we have
come to call it – or eschatology, or the apocalypse. Both speak of a day when all will be made
right, when God will come to reign on earth as in heaven. There will be a new Jerusalem, a new temple,
a new kingdom, a time when, as the prophet Isaiah says, “the wolf shall dwell
with the lamb,” and “swords will be turned into plowshares.”
Now,
2,000 years after the gospel of Luke was written, we don’t normally talk in
terms of “end times.” Most of us –
unless we’re a part of some cult or Hollywood producers – don’t spend much time
thinking about the imminent end of the world as we know it. So, when we get to Advent and hear about
these “end times,” it is easy to just write it off and move on with our
Christmas shopping and decorating.
But,
when we stop and think about it, don’t we too have the same questions as the people
Jeremiah and Luke are writing to. Don’t
we too ask, “if God is so good, why are there so many swords and not enough
plowshares?” Don’t we at times stop and
think, “If Jesus was so great, the Messiah who was supposed to bring about this
incredible world that the prophets envisioned, then why do the lambs still get
devoured by the wolves?
If
we can translate the idea of end times as Jeremiah and Luke saw it, it might
have something to say to these questions that endure in every generation. Talking about “end times” was the way Jeremiah
and Luke answered this basic question about what God was up to in the
world. It might feel like God is absent,
they tell people, but in fact, God is present now, has always been present, and
is already present in the future that we imagine.
In
other words, there is a purpose in all this, if we can uncover it. There is a purpose built in to creation and the world that is completely outside
ourselves and our abilities. The purpose
is God – it is a movement – drawing us all closer to the new kingdom, the new world
that is in the future if we join in the movement. That’s a pretty bold faith statement. Given the evidence around them, from where do
they get the gall?
Our
inclination these days is to hear these apocalyptic texts as predictions of the
end of the world in literal way. They
aren’t. They are meant as a faith statement.
Things are terrible, Luke says.
You have seen signs of terrible things: days and nights pitch black by
lack of moon and sun; earth in distress.
But, God has broken into this
world and shown us new life, new ways, a new kind of world where God is in
charge and justice reigns; God continues to do so, and will do so in the
future.
Theologian
Guy Sayles reminds us that these texts are not about some kind of literal “end
of time.” He says these authors remind
people that “when we have crashed into the limits of our knowledge, power, and
courage, God’s kingdom breaks into the here-and-now to startle and save
us. God isn’t waiting,” he writes,
“until the Son of Humanity comes to do these surprising and saving things. Jesus doesn’t just come twice: once in
Bethlehem as a baby and once “on a cloud” to wrap things up [spending the
meantime waiting in the wings somewhere].
By the Holy Spirit, Jesus comes over and over again.”
Luke
is not telling the people to be ready so that when Jesus “comes again,” they
will be swept up to heaven while everyone else suffers in the disintegration of
the world. Luke is telling people to
look now for God who comes into this world of darkness over and over and over,
making it new in every generation. These
things will happen before this generation passes away, Luke says: the signs of
destruction and God’s movement to
make things new again. This will happen
in every generation. But that’s the key,
he says: “Look!” When things feel as bad as they can possibly
feel, “Stand up! Raise your heads, and
look.”
This
is why Advent is important to us as people of faith during these weeks leading
up to Christmas eve. It’s our bold faith
statement. The “Christmas season,”
without Advent, can fool us into only looking for something that’s already
happened – the birth of Jesus. That is
supposed to make us happy – supposed to remind us that Jesus fixed everything,
made everything right, saved us all.
Which would be great, if indeed he had.
But if he had, then why is the world that is still so broken, hurting,
and groaning. Our faith tradition tell
us that Jesus – the great symbol of God breaking into our world – continues to save.
Christmastime,
in my experience, is such a dramatic mix of the profane and profound. We know it does matter that Jesus was born,
we know that Jesus somehow offers hope beyond what we can imagine, and we try
to express that with moving music, giving gifts, caring for one another,
emphasizing light and love – both to honor Jesus’ birth and to anticipate God’s
further action in the world.
But
these profound things are obscured by the profanities of consumerism,
exploitation of emotion, sentimentalism, forced happiness, triumphalism, and on
and on. Christmas, without an Advent
perspective, loses its grounding in reality, and so has nothing to say to the
real world beyond be happy!
Advent,
and its crazy stories of end times, tells us we are in the world of “already
and not yet.” God created this world,
was in the beginning, is already here, has always been here, came in the person
of Jesus, and continues to be with us in the Holy Spirit. But there is also a “not yet,” part. We know that all is not well, and for joy to
be real and mean something, we have to have something to say to that “not yet”
part.
And
Luke does. Stand up, raise your head,
look around. When we see signs of
distress, horror, destruction…when we wonder if God is anywhere to be found, if
there is any point to it all, if we are on our own, Luke tells us to lift up
our heads and look again. Rise up above
the fray. I imagine being buried in a
crowd of people, only able to see what’s happening right in front of us, the
rest of the world blocked by the bodies of crowds closing in on us.
Then
we climb up on someone’s shoulders, or find a rock or a chair, and we can get
our head above the heads of all those around us, and see a great distance. And when we do, we see signs that the kingdom
of God is, in fact, near – the green buds on what seemed like a dead fig
tree. Look for God’s activity in the
world, Luke says, and there lies the
purpose in the midst of despair.
We
can do this on two levels: First, these
“end times” passages from Jeremiah, Luke and other books in our scriptures
invite us to lift our heads above the fray of our own limited time in
history. See the larger story – both of
the past, where we see evidence of God’s activity in the world, and of the
future, where we can see that what we know is not the end of knowledge, not the
whole of history: we gain perspective.
When we can lift our heads above the fray of our own time in history, we
see that over and over again humanity has found itself in times so dark it
seemed the world was going to end. Yet,
time and time again, the world continued sustained by God’s creative movement.
God broke in to give hope and direction, and possibility.
But
for these next four weeks, we are also going to lift our heads above the fray
not just of our time in history, but of our immediate surroundings. We are going to use Advent in the church to
help us, from time to time, raise our heads above the fray of the Christmas
season. Not because we must resist it
entirely – declare war on all things secular and all Christmassy things that
come too early. But because Advent can
give us a way to see the profound amidst the profane. We can uncover God’s purpose that is often
obscured by the imposed false purposes of the world.
Consumerism
tells us we can buy a happy Christmas.
Glitz and glitter try to tell us we can make a perfect experience for
ourselves and our kids. Culture wars,
religious piety, and simplistic tales drown out the voices of the hurting,
searching, lonely, and shunned. We find
manipulative noise, false light, words that try to sell us something, music
that rings hollow and empty through the malls, and falsities about who we are
and are meant to be. And the result is
exactly what Luke says it will be: we
are weighed down by the worries of life, thinking Christmas is supposed to “be”
something that others tell us it is supposed to be. We feel stress, exhaustion, emptiness, and at
times even despair.
In
this space set apart each week, we lift our heads above the fray. In moments of silence, visions of soft light,
words of depth and meaning, music that draws us into the truth of what’s around
us, prayers for the world, honest confession of who we are and what’s true in
our lives, we can lift the veil created by the profanities and see the profound.
Finally,
we have to remember that it’s not our
responsibility to create joy – it’s not our responsibility to bring about the
new kingdom of God – we can’t force something that’s not ours to create. And that frees us from a quest that only
provokes anxiety. Instead, we affirm
that God is in control, and we lift our head above the fray to look for what
God is already doing.
The
horror of the world at times should not distract us from this truth. The horror is not proof that God is not
here. Instead, the truth that God is
here should transform the horror of the world.
And so we must look for God – for God’s movement and purpose, and we realize,
with Advent as our lens, we do see this
in some of what’s going on. There are things
right now, Christmassy things before Christmas eve, that do align with God’s purposes
– kids singing in church basements comes to mind – but these are no longer mere
events on the Christmas season schedule…one more thing to do. If seen as part of God’s purposes, maybe they can
have a greater meaning because they can point a hurting world to God’s in-breaking
of joy, love, and hope.
For
the next few weeks when we gather in worship, let’s raise our heads above the
fray of the holiday season – not to escape it entirely, but to see where God is
moving; genuinely creating, and renewing, so that when we come down off the
rock – back into the fray – we have a sense of where to head, which direction
to go – toward God’s purpose. Ten we can
join in the movement of true Christmas. Amen.
