Poolesville Presbyterian Church
Rev. Dr. David Williams; 11.29.2015
Scripture Lesson: Luke 21:25-36
LISTEN TO SERMON AUDIO HERE:
It’d be great, really great, if this particular bit of scripture didn’t seem quite so dead on lately.
I mean, here we are, just a few days past Thanksgiving, and we’re supposed to have been taking time to catch our breath. It’s a time to chill out, to take it easy, the long weekend equivalent of a deep cleansing breath.
And it’s Advent, that season of preparation for Christmas, and our candles are lit and the sanctuary is soft and as quiet as a manger. Well, quieter, hopefully, and with less of that wet cow smell.
As the temperatures decline and the days grow short, it feels like the right time for stillness, for contemplation and finding places of warmth by the fire.
But the world seems not to have gotten that message. It feels like discord is the rule of things, as tensions rise and our capacity to be thankful has faded away to nothing. The world seems agitated, riled up, and the farthest thing from at ease.
The news is full of darkness and anxiety, bombings and shootings and terror both overseas and here at home, and it seems like every day brings new forms of darkness and stress. War seemingly without end or reason in the Middle East, rising racial tensions, diminishing material resources, the weather getting crazy, and the recently released Pixar movie isn’t supposed to be any good, and technically, Princess Leia is a Disney Princess now, and that’s just too hard to wrap your head around.
Things seem to be falling apart, in ways that feel more than a little bit apocalyptic. The other day, when every picture I saw was that Russian plane going down in flames, shot down by a NATO member state, I went online to see if there was any uptick in the legendary doomsday clock, a measure set out by a group of concerned scientists during the cold war. There wasn’t, as it happened. It’s just kind of stuck at three minutes to midnight, meaning no-one has been updating that website for years.
Just for funsies, I went and checked the rapture index, too, a bit of internet bizarreness that tracks the likelihood of a biblical apocalypse. It’s the “prophetic speedometer of end times activity,” or so it declares itself. It presents forty-five metrics that its creators insist are all markers of the end-times, each in a neat little five point Likert scale. Floods and Earthquakes and Global Turmoil were all maxed out at five, and Liberalism and Peace Process and Civil Rights were all dangerously high at four, although I’m not quite sure why peace and civil rights are negatively correlated. Interest Rates are also apparently a factor, and are at historic lows, so maybe things aren’t quite as bad as anticipated.
And The AntiChrist is only at a three, which would seem like...um...the most relevant metric.
Silliness aside, it’s hard to get around that pervasive anxiety about the purpose of things this time of year, as our hopes for the arrival Christ’s gracious kingdom prang up against the churning mess of our ongoing history.
In the face of that, Luke’s Gospel today serves up a little apocalypse. The word “apocalypse” in the Greek comes from the root words “apo, “meaning “un” and “calypsis” meaning “veil.” It’s 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, and totally not at all what we’re looking for as we approach Christmas. 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? Jesus is saying, or appears to be saying: “All this crazy stuff will go down while you are still alive.” Meaning the people listening, all the way back when, nearly two millennia ago. 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 those seem like weaselly outs to me. A generation in Hebrew thought was a discrete reality. It meant either a particular group of individuals or a forty year timespan, because, well, that’s about how long you could reasonably expect to live back then. Jesus is talking directly to particular generation. The language he’s using is clear. He’s talking to them, and about them. There’s no complex parsing of meaning, no evidence of Jesus saying, “When I say ‘this generation,’ I actually mean ‘that generation,’ meaning, of course, the Baby Boomers,” to which Peter would have raised his hand and said, “The what?” And Jesus would have said, “Oh, I’m talking to people who aren’t around yet and who live so far in the future that the language we’re speaking won’t even really exist any more then.”
That’s not what Jesus was doing.
The point of Christ’s teaching at the dawn of 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. 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 will shift in the lives of those who stand in relationship to Jesus of Nazareth.
Each and every year, that happens. It just doesn’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 endless drumroll of human suffering, 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?
We want it to be big and immense, to be some grand-scale apocalypse, and so we often look for things that are huge and unmistakable.
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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