Jeremiah 33:14-16
1 Thessalonians 3:9-13
Luke 21:25-36
God be in my words and in my speaking; God be in our hearts and in our understanding. AMEN.
This Sunday is the First Sunday in Advent. It’s also the first Sunday of the new Church year, and we mark the change in liturgical season with such things as the purple hangings and vestments, the Advent wreath, and the use of the Great Litany. We know that the intention of the Advent season is that it should be a time of prayerful waiting and preparation for the celebration of the Incarnation at Christmas; but in our hectic and busy lives, it’s very easy for Advent to devolve into the more frazzled secular mindset of however-many shopping days left until Christmas.
Perhaps that’s why there are apocalyptic themes in the lessons appointed for this celebration: to take us far, far away from the tinsel and glitter, the bright holiday lights, and the plastic lighted reindeer and Santa Clauses that have begun to appear in people’s yards. “The days are surely coming, says the Lord, when I will fulfill the promise I made to the house of Israel and the house of Judah” (as we hear in the lesson from Hebrew Scripture) is certainly a long way from “Santa Claus is coming to town.”
As I meditated, this week, on these apocalyptic themes and our Advent prayerful waiting, I found myself considering a conversation I had had with someone, recently, in which we talked about whether or not we really believed in the Second Coming as described by Jesus, by the book of Revelation, and by other apocalyptic writers. For both of us, the sense was that, while we could intellectually accept the idea of the end of life as we know it, here on this “fragile earth, our island home” — even stars like our Sun have a lifespan, after all — it was much harder to believe that there will be a time when (as Paul would have it) we need to be “blameless before our God and Father at the coming of our Lord Jesus with all his saints.” It’s clear that the Hebrew Scriptures, the Christian letters, and the words of Jesus as recorded in the Gospels all express a belief in a time when God acts to change the shape of the known world, when God — or the appointed Messiah — appears “’in a cloud’ with power and great glory,” and establishes a perfect world, a Kingdom where justice prevails and the ancient wrongs are all made right. It’s also clear that Jesus and the early Church believed that those events were immanent. “Truly I tell you,” Jesus says in today’s passage from Luke’s Gospel, “this generation will not pass away until all things have taken place.”
Well, clearly, that prediction was never borne out in any expected or envisioned way. But the fact that the Apocalypse didn’t occur on schedule wasn’t enough to destroy people’s faith in the message of Jesus, or in the Resurrected Christ; and gradually, the Second Coming stopped being something people expected to experience in their own lifetimes, and became a vision of the distant future.
For me, personally, the descriptions of the Second Coming bear very little resemblance to my own experience (and expectation) of the workings of God in Creation. The imagery, the metaphor, of God — or Christ — coming as a warrior to impose a reign of justice upon all of us is not one that resonates in a good place, for me. But rather than simply reject the entire concept of the Second Coming, I find myself looking for the truths that underlie the distracting imagery and metaphor of the Scriptural version of events. In my thinking, the scriptural myth of the End Times belongs in the same place as the scriptural myth of the Creation: the events the stories recount express a truth about God, rather than a description of what has “really” happened, or will “really” happen. When the Sun, at the end of its unimaginably long stellar lifetime, goes supernova, and the Earth and other planets are consumed in radiation and fire, the truth the End Times myth expresses is the conviction that God has some new thing in mind for her mortal children. What it is, what it will be like, I have no idea; but I don’t really need an idea, either. We don’t know; we can’t accurately imagine the new thing God has in mind. It’s like Heaven: there’s lots of speculation, but no one living really knows what happens after we cross the threshold we call death. Nonetheless, we embrace the truth, the hope, the conviction that death is not the end, and that in some inexpressible way, we will continue in the sight and mind and heart of God.
Many of the apocalyptic writings express the idea that faithful people need to be on their guard and waiting — watching and alert — for the Second Coming. In the passage from Luke’s Gospel, Jesus says: “There will be signs in the sun, the moon, and the stars, and on the earth distress among nations confused by the roaring of the sea and the waves. People will faint with fear and foreboding of what is coming upon the world, for the powers of the heavens will be shaken… Now when these things begin to take place, stand up and raise your heads, because your redemption is drawing near.” He also says, “Be on guard so that your hearts are not weighed down with dissipation and drunkenness and the worries of this life, and that day catch you unexpectedly, like a trap. For it will come upon all who live on the face of the whole earth. Be alert at all times, praying that you may have the strength to escape all these things that will take place, and to stand before the Son of Man.” For me, this conjures up an image of someone watching so expectantly for some particular event that she or he is completely oblivious to whatever is really going on. It’s a closed kind of waiting, a closed sort of expectation: one “knows” what one is looking for, so one stops being open to anything else. But I don’t think that’s the stance we’re really called toward; I don’t think that is at all the point of our Advent prayerful waiting and preparation.
As I struggled with this insight, another piece of the passage from Luke came into my meditations: “Then he told them a parable: ‘Look at the fig tree and all the trees; as soon as they sprout leaves you can see for yourselves and know that summer is already near. So also, when you see these things taking place, you know that the kingdom of God is near.’” And it struck me that all the things Jesus mentioned as signs are not unique; celestial events like eclipses, comets, meteor showers — all kinds of things ancient peoples might not have been able to explain — occurred then and are still occurring; there is certainly (still) distress among nations — that one is pretty constant; and tsunamis, typhoons, and hurricanes are also fairly ubiquitous in history. Even in his parable, Jesus uses an example that is common and cyclical; every year, trees leaf out; every year, summer comes, the seasons change, and people know to expect that. “Now when these things begin to take place, stand up and raise your heads, because your redemption is drawing near.”
It’s one thing for Jesus, before the Resurrection, to say, “…your redemption is drawing near.” But after the Resurrection, redemption is already here. One of the problems for the early church was that there wasn’t some big, cataclysmic reorganization of life as people knew it. The Resurrection transformed people, but not on the scale of nations and governments and the entire fabric of social order and daily life. Basically, life in general went on pretty much as usual; an individual or their household might experience the transforming presence of God in Christ, but the Romans remained in power (at least for a while), and the kingdoms of Judah and Israel were not restored to their ancient glories. So they waited for the Apocalypse, the Second Coming. The early Christians figured out (eventually) that they couldn’t wait in idleness, but the idea that Jesus’ transforming work won’t be completely finished until Christ comes again to complete what was begun in the Incarnation persists in many Christians’ minds. Personally, I have more faith in the Incarnation than that. Through the Incarnation and the Resurrection, we are redeemed. In all our imperfections, in our weaknesses and foibles, in our strengths and gifts, we are — already! — an Easter people: loved, forgiven, redeemed, and empowered for ministry.
“Look at the fig tree and all the trees; as soon as they sprout leaves you can see for yourselves and know that summer is already near. So also, when you see these things taking place, you know that the kingdom of God is near.” If we read this passage with an Easter people’s mind instead of from an apocalyptic viewpoint, then the message is subtly different. An apocalyptic viewpoint would suggest that if the kingdom is near, we should tidy things up and get ready to have it imposed upon us. But as Easter people — empowered, transformed, loved, inspired — the message that the kingdom is near should act on us like an energizing breath: it’s near, it’s within reach; so let’s roll up our sleeves and get to work in ways that will draw the kingdom ever closer.
This Advent, it is my prayer that we will, each and all, expose ourselves to the nearness of the kingdom, and be listening for and open to the unexpected insights and unimagined actions the Spirit lures us toward; and that as we prepare to celebrate, again, the remarkable gift of love God gave us in the Incarnation, we will be moved and inspired toward new ways of making that Love real and present to all our sisters and brothers.
In Christ’s name, AMEN.
Sermon preached by Beth Hilgartner
at St. Barnabas’, Norwich, Vt.