Poolesville Presbyterian Church
12.02.12; Rev David Williams
It’s been quite a year.
Here we are once again at the end of a year, with only 2,157,324 shopping seconds left until Christmas, and 2012 is getting ready to draw to a close. But even in the blinding tinsel sparkle-marketing of this season, we can’t miss the fact that it’s been an odd year.
We’ve seen a drought that began in the spring and which continues unabated today, as the Midwest dries up as crunchy as a fallen leaf. We’ve had hurricanes and winter storms swirled up together like your two least-favorite flavors of meteorological soft-serv, doing the destruction do-si-do together all up and down the hunkered down East Coast. We’ve been hammered by storms so unusual and rare that most of us hadn’t even heard of them before. It’s the kind of year that makes many people wonder -- are these signs of something bigger? Is this the beginning of the end?
I mean, those Mayans, maybe they were onto something with that whole December 21st, 2012 thing. That’s Samuel L. Jackson’s birthday, after all, and the day he turns sixty-four. Surely, surely, that means something.
Then again, in 2011 we’d just experienced the most significant earthquake in East Coast history, and that felt very very pre-apocalyptic. But if you rewind ten years, back to 2001 and 2002, what did it feel like then? Remember when the Washington area was reeling from the September 11th attacks, which were followed by the anthrax attacks, which were followed by the relentless, gnawing fear that came with the sniper attacks? Things then seemed so off-kilter, broken, and fear ridden that surely they must have been an indication that the end of all history was imminent.
But what about the Y2K Bug? Remember that? All of our computers were going to come crashing down at the stroke of midnight on December 31, 1999, bringing about the collapse of the global economy and the fall of civilization. In an article in Christianity Today from January of 1999, the now-departed Jerry Falwell suggested that January 1, 2000 would be a day when God would “...confound our language, jam our communications, scatter our efforts, and judge us for our sin and rebellion...”
Go back another hundred and fifty years or so, and American was abuzz with excitement about the teachings of the Millerite movement, which taught that the world would end on October 22, 1844.
Then there’s a tablet that was unearthed by archaeologists, one written by the ancient Assyrians. Way back in the year 2800 BCE, almost five thousand years ago, an Assyrian looked around at the mess of the world and etched his prognosis into stone. “Our earth is degenerate in these latter days,” he wrote. “There are signs that the world is speedily coming to an end.”
So...what does this have to do with Advent? This is, after all, the first Sunday in the season of our preparation for Christmas? Why all the talk about destruction and apocalypse?
What we have encountered in Luke’s Gospel today is a little apocalypse. The word “apocalypse” in the Greek literally means to “remove the veil,” and what we’re hearing from Jesus are words that describe the coming into completion of God’s intent for creation. Almost all of this passage is likely drawn from the Gospel of Mark, the earliest of the four Gospels, which the author of Luke clearly had available as a source-text. The same passage can be found in Mark 13:24-32, and also in Matthew’s Gospel, from 24:29 to 24:36.
The imagery is striking. There are signs in the heavens, which themselves tremble. There is an angelic figure...the Son of Man...which is sometimes equated with Jesus in the Gospels, and sometimes not.
In all three versions of this story, Jesus then tells a short parable, about how we are to know the coming of the end of things. It’s a simple metaphor of a fig tree. When the leaves are budding, you know that summer is near. So when you see what he’s talking about, then...well...the time is at hand. So far, pretty straightforward.
And then Jesus says, in every single version of this story, “Truly, I say to you, this generation will not pass away until all has taken place.”
What? What does that mean? How can that possibly be true? It’s something that Biblical interpreters have struggled with, because it seems to fly in the face of history. Theories have included suggesting that “this generation” means Israel generically, or the generation that will actually experience the end of things. But Jesus is talking to people, and the language he’s using is clear. He’s talking to them.
The point of Christ’s teaching in this season is to remind us that God is at work in creation, and that our expectation that God will make things right is to be fulfilled. Despite what you may have heard, Advent’s primary purpose is not as a season for shopping. It’s a season of expectation, anticipation, and preparation. That’s NOT expectation and anticipation of the stuff you’re going to get on December the 25th.
It’s the expectation that God will transform our reality, just as the Gospel of Luke tells it. It’s the anticipation that something significant has shifted in the lives of those who stand in relationship to Jesus of Nazareth.
Each and every year, there are those who look to the signs in the earth and the signs in the heavens, and shout out to the people that God’s fulfillment is at hand. Everything will be destroyed and made anew. And each and every year they are proven wrong. The world didn’t end in 2011, or in 2000, or in 1844. It just didn’t happen.
Or perhaps it’s more accurate to say, it just didn’t happen in the way that anyone expected.
When God does act--and God does act--how does God act? God acts continually in ways that are difficult to miss, but that aren’t always quite what we’d anticipate. Like that year, for example, when God did enter the world. That arrival did not take the form that anyone would have anticipated. There wasn’t the arrival of a mighty and divine warrior, but a tiny newborn child. There wasn’t the descent of a vast conquering army dropping out of low earth orbit into the skies over Bethlehem, but a simple couple, bearing the miracle of a life.
Every single year, Advent begins with our own remembering of how God came into the world. It was gloriously simple, it was powerfully humble, so much so that we can miss it. As we enter this season of preparedness, though, we are challenged not to allow ourselves to become so distracted by the shine and sparkle of the season that we completely miss the purpose.
We can become so distracted, so consumed by the stress and the excess, that we can easily miss the subtle but inescapable signs of the kind of transformation that this season is all about. As we enter into this season of new birth and transformation, it’s important that we not miss the powerful potential that is brought by each moment. How has God shaped us? Where in the grace of our Maker does the reality of our redemption lie?
There will come that moment, for all of us, when God enters our world. It will change. It will be transformed, just as surely as a new shoot brings the coming summer, or that little child was born. It will come, and we have to make ourselves ready every single day, because we really don’t want to miss it.
Let it be so, for you and for me, AMEN.
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