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While We Wait
Sermon by Brigid A. Boyle November 30, 2003, Presbyterian Church of Chestnut Hill Jeremiah 33:1-16 Luke 21:25-36
We are now in Advent, “which is a big time of year for my Jesusy people, “ writes Anne LaMott. The new church year begins and a new note is struck: It is a time of preparation and waiting, because even though as autumn grinds to a dark and murky halt, everything is dying and falling asleep and falling off, something brand new is coming … The belief is that enough hope and tenderness will lead to world peace, one mind at a time … Advent is about the coming of Emmanuel, ‘which means God with us,’ and so as the fields outside our window go to sleep, we stay awake and watch, holding on to the belief that God is with us, is close and present, and that we will be healed…” And later she continues, “I want that belief, and that patience; I have checked to box on the form choosing it. But it has not been forthcoming ... and “I want it now, or at least by tomorrow afternoon, right after lunch.” LaMott is right about the definitions that surround this particular time of the church year. Advent is a time of waiting and watching and holding on to hope. She is also delightfully earnest and articulate in her desire to get a grasp on the belief and patience this season requires of us. Yet, even with her words that speak to human hearts weary of the dark and murkiness of these days, still we are at a loss when we ask after the real meaning of these four weeks just before Christmas. Of course, we stand in fierce competition with a profoundly pagan culture that would mark our preparations with consumer spending, sweet sentimentality, and manufactured cheer. Of course, we live in a time when active commitment to the church and to Christian education seems at an all time low and certainly takes a second seat to soccer and baseball and scouts and the like. Nevertheless, much as I could go on, I am ordained not simply to offer commentary on American culture, but to proclaim the gospel of Jesus Christ and so I think that a part of the reason that we struggle with understanding this season so, is that we have little, biblically speaking, to guide us. We don’t know much about how the first generations of Christians “did Advent.” There is no narrative to give meaning to the season year after year, as with Christmas’s stable in Bethlehem, and there is no story to wade through Sunday after Sunday, as with Lent’s passion. So, in this season when most, like LaMott, have checked the little box on the form asking for belief and hope, and without a single story to guide, we look to prophecies here and there, in this book and that, read and heard and believed by those who waited for the coming God, the coming savior long ago. With words like unto what we read from Jeremiah, “I will cleanse the guilt of their sin against me, and I will forgive all of the guilt of their sin and rebellion against me,” along with other texts that speak of the sin and transgression of the people of Israel, these texts looked forward to the coming of a Savior with a pointed focus on confession and repentance, on the purification and re-ordering of one’s life. The fist time ’round, the, preparing for Christ’s advent was about penitence and self-reflection. It was about expectant waiting for this Savior who had been promised. Two thousand years after his promised birth, Advent seems to have taken on a changed meaning and purpose. The change is that while long ago God’s people looked forward to something that had not yet happened, we tend to look back to something that did happen, and spend this time re-iterating the story of the coming of Jesus Christ into the world as a tiny babe in a manger, thereby turning this season into celebration and remembrance, rather than penitence, preparation and longing for something else. It is sweet and it is easy to look back to that something that did happen, to that silent and holy night, in the little town of Bethlehem, where the little lord Jesus lay down his sweet head. So we go back, December after December, trying to imagine ourselves waiting for this messiah so long ago, but knowing, all through our imaginings, that the Messiah did come, that the little child would lead centuries of followers through this messy thing called life. And so, it is most tempting to spend the weeks of Advent holding prophecy proclaimed and promise revealed hand in hand until that night 24 days from now when we will gather again, our waiting at an end until next year when we do it all over. The trouble is that this backward-looking perspective, looking to something that already happened, is problematic because it robs Advent of its ability to provide bright vision and new focus for the future. It is quite simple: If we only look backward, we cannot see where we are going, where we ought to be going, or what God might have in store for us down the road. So Advent, this season of waiting on Christ, and longing, like Annie LaMott, for the belief and patience that it takes, bids us look not only backward to his first coming, but forward to his second. Ah, the second coming. Words given to ever terrify a congregation of well-intended WASPs. “Come Lord Jesus!” is one of the most ancient prayers in Christian tradition. It looks forward to a future that is in Christ’s hands and with Christ’s second coming. It ought be a hopeful word. Yet, lo these last two millennia, we have somehow narrowed that future into the “last judgment,” hence our terror. Theologian Jan Loch writes of the way in which, ‘that day of wrath” so filled the medieval world view, “to a large extent, Christian piety was dominated by contemplation of ‘the day’ .. The last judgment is vividly depicted as a final reckoning and separation, the artistic imagination usually dwelling with particular care on the well deserved torments of the who the world’s judge sets on his left hand.” With hellfire and damnation literally painted with artist’s brush and virtually painted by many a preacher’s words, with sermons calling all to repent lest they be a wolf and not a sheep, a tare and not the finest wheat, why wouldn’t we want to stay safe near manger’s glow looking up into the starry night sky? But it is not that easy, for it denies so much. It is not that faithful, for it turns from so much of what that to which scripture points. And, in the end, it does not do us any great service. Unsettling though in some sense it may be, Advent is a season for us to wrap our hearts and minds, as much as we are able, around both a first and a second coming and to hold the two together as best we can. That is where, I do believe, meaning and hope are to be found this and every Advent season. “For Christians,” writes Robert Cornelison, “Christ’s first coming only makes sense in light of his promise to come again … without a first coming, there would be no second coming; without the second coming it becomes difficult to believes that current existence if somehow the kingdom of God … Advent not only points backward to the first coming, but forward to the second, thus providing Christians with a vision of the future and toward the future. Advent then, is a time of expectation; it is the acknowledgement of the fact that, although God has acted decisively on our behalf in Jesus’ birth, there is still much outstanding.” It is toward a future, where there is still much outstanding, that Advent sends us. We wait for God to complete what was begun in this babe in a manger, watching for signs that God is about to fulfill promises made in him and respond to all that is still outstanding and incomplete, longing for God to be present with us in the deepest and most real of ways. In this there is tremendous hope, I tell you. There is hope because it affirms that the God who created and redeemed the world in Jesus is still in control of the world and is leading the world toward his purposes, when so much out there would try to convince us otherwise. What that says to me, then, is that human history and human life have meaning and purpose. What that says to me that we do not have to do with a distant and vague God, but with one who in Jesus and the Holy Spirit comes to be very close to us and is actively involved in our world. He has revealed himself to us in the babe who came at Bethlehem as love and, as the reigning Lord of the universe, he is the one toward whom all things move. As David HC Read so aptly put it: "The first coming of Christ shows me what life can be. His second coming assures me that it is his way that will in the end prevail." The second coming, then, is not simply or all about some endless horror of separation between and good and the bad and terrible punishment of the later, but rather it is about the completion, the fulfillment, of what was begun when this Savior was born so long ago, it is about things going his way in the end, so toward justice and peace and reconciliation and all those things we only see as through a glass darkly. So it is that this Sunday, while we wait, we hold in one hand, Jeremiah’s prophecy, and on the other, Luke’s gospel. The earlier speaks of God’s promise to come to his people with healing and hope, the other promises that God will come to do the same yet again, when they will see ‘the Son of Man coming in a cloud’ with power and great glory.” Right between the two is the birth of Jesus, the personal presence of “God with us” but also and importantly, as Jurgen Moltmann suggests, “the kingdom of God with us in person.” This Advent season, each advent season, as much or more then it is about remembering and recalling the past, it about anticipating here and now that which has been begun by Jesus and will be completed when he comes again. And it is about being active while we wait, it is about being active not simply readying ourselves and our souls for this “end time” but preparing, readying our world for this “end time” ahead. What then does this mean for us? What does that mean for how you and I live and act faithfully in these days of waiting, in these days when we so long for God to be near, in this time when we see a glimpse of the kingdom in him and wait for its completion still? Well, it means waiting and praying, yes, but also, acting and serving and working in ways that are consistent with what we know this kingdom to be about. The kingdom for which we wait will be a kingdom of justice and peace. For us to anticipate that is for us to seek out and establish such in all segments of all of our lives. So from the most personal relationship, be it a marriage, a friendship, a parent and a child or anything in between, that bears the marks of inequality or disrespect, to the most political of relationships in the world order that compromise the rights of others, the the kingdom which Advent calls us to wait upon compels us to strive for justice for all. That means is treating all as though they matter, without regard to any opinion they hold, any history they bear, and genetic wiring that differs from our own, because in God’s kingdom they do. That means carefully counting the human costs of any society’s progress, be it toward economic growth or national security. That means is looking carefully and honestly at how it is we treat one another. I need not recite the ways in which you and I fail to do these things, scolding never suffices for proclamation, but simply say that we have plenty to do while we wait, my friends. Advent calls us, compels us, to center our lives and our work on this coming kingdom. It calls us to anticipate, to proclaim, and through our actions attempt to “bring liberty to the oppressed, human dignity to the humiliated and justice which is due to people without rights.” It seems a distinct call with a clear focus. But still we are so far away, still there are so many oppressed, even by our own structures and rules, who cannot live as they were created to live. Still there is so much human dignity diminished by the way we convince ourselves it is acceptable to other human beings, even in Christ’s church. Still there are so many without rights in this world. This season then, may we commit ourselves anew to being those who “bring liberty to the oppressed, human dignity to the humiliated and justice which is due to people without rights.” Such a way of looking forward to the second coming even as we look backward, is disturbing, but not in the sense of forecasting what it might be like when Jesus shows up. It is disturbing in the sense that it calls us out of inaction to action. It calls us to “Go!” (Heard that before?) That, my friends, is as much gospel as anything else I know. That, as much as anything I know, will grant us the belief and the patience for which we so long. To the point, writes Jim Kay, “If the gospel is good news, it is not because it predicts a bright, shiny future based on our morality or piety,” (or, I would add, a grim reality based on other’s lack thereof) “The gospel is neither a cocoon that insulates us from the sufferings of this present age, nor a pair of earplugs that shuts out the groaning of creation ...” much as we would like it to be and work so very hard for it to be so, “The gospel is good news not because it predicts a future based on our good behavior or other present trends; the gospel is good news because it promises a future based on God’s faithfulness to Jesus Christ.” It is this promised future toward which we are called to turn our eyes, and our hearts, and our minds, and out actions, this Advent season. We are called to turn our ears to the thrilling voice off in the distance, to lift our eyes to see the Lamb so long expected coming with pardon down from heaven, to sound out our prayers that this long expected Jesus may come again. With that promised future written our hearts, with our ears so turned, with our eyes to lifted, with our prayers so spoken, then we gather round this table, “to show forth the Lord’s death until he comes again.” Come Lord Jesus! O, quickly come! Amen. |