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Come Again?
Sermon by Cynthia A. Jarvis December 3, 2006, Presbyterian Church of Chestnut Hill Jeremiah 33:14-26 Luke 21:7-11; 25-36
My earliest memory of any theological import has always embarrassed me. I tell it to you this morning, contrary to my usual instincts, because I have nowhere else honestly to begin before a subject whose reality has been harder for me to get my head around than the virgin birth! This was not always the case. I must have been four or five and riding unbuckled in the backseat on the way home from church when I leaned into the front to ask my parents a question that surely had its origins in the morning’s church school lesson. “When Jesus comes again,” I began, “will you take me to see him?” Given that the faded photographs of my visits to Santa Claus never failed to catch me wailing in terror, I cannot explain this desire to see Jesus who, like Santa, knew if I had been bad or good. In response to my question, I imagine my father gripping the steering wheel in silence and my mother replying wryly, “Come again?” Perhaps I repeated the question, thinking she had not heard. In fact, I do not know what she said to me that day save that she likely offered some idle word of assurance in the hope that I would drop the subject altogether. Liberal Presbyterians did not speak of such things. Drop it I did and have for some fifty years! Scripture, on the other hand, does not drop the subject. All but three books in the New Testament make mention of the Second Coming. Even when it had become clear that Jesus would not be returning anytime soon, hope in Christ’s royal visitation, what is called in the New Testament the parousia, persisted. So in 98 A.D., Clement of Rome, an early church father, warns Christians to be “prompt in well doing,” connecting ethics to eschatology [connecting how you order life in the present with what you believe about God’s promised future]. Almost a century later Irenaeus emphasized God’s judgment against the Antichrist in the end times. The Lord, he said, was coming from heaven in the clouds in order to send the Antichrist and those who follow him into the fire. Tertullian, writing in the late second and early third century, imagined persecuted believers caught up in clouds that would meet their returning Lord in all of His glory. What you notice in Scripture and in the writings of the early church fathers, if read in their historical context, is this: personal salvation is not the point! That has been accomplished on the cross. Rather the return of Christ signals the final victory of God’s reign over every despotic and demonic power in the social and political order. Specifically for the early church, Rome was the beast and those who were martyred for their faith held on to the belief that human history, in the end, belonged not to the powers and principalities but to God. This was the beginning, as Jesus had himself said, of the time of persecution that would end only when the “times of the Gentiles [which is to say the time of ungodly rulers] are fulfilled.” I think of the Hungarian galley slaves at the end of the 16th century whose hymn we are about to sing: 41 out of some 400 Reformed preachers and teachers who were tortured by the Habsburg Monarchy [on behalf of the Jesuits!] because they refused to recant their faith. Marched to the Adriatic Sea, they were chained to oars and cast upon the waters. “Though in chains thou now art grieving,” they sang, “though a tortured slave thou die, Zion, if thou die believing, heaven’s path shall open lie.” The witness, if it is a witness to the Christ who is coming to redeem the world, can only be heard as a threat to every reigning power, ecclesial or political, in any age. Nevertheless, somewhere in the fourth century, around the conversion of Constantine and the establishment of Christianity as the religion of the empire, says Princeton theologian Ellen Charry, everything changed. The persecution of Christians ended, the “struggle between good and evil turned inward…and Rome was transformed from the enemy into an instrument for the spread of the faith.” Taking the imagery of this morning’s text, then, Augustine set out to translate Scripture’s combative apocalyptic language in the service of peace because the “day of the church was at hand…and…a gentler reading” was needed. To this end he “domesticated” the signs portending Christ’s Second Coming by redirecting them from the political to the personal and final judgment that awaited each individual. “This had the effect,” she goes on, “of both moralizing and spiritualizing [the imagery surrounding Christ’s Second Coming] and of setting the day of judgment in the distant future. Rather than focusing on tyrannical state regimes outside the church, [Augustine] turned attention to the day Christians would have to take account of themselves.” No doubt many on this morning will hear just such word, a word about personal morality and the final judgment; hear that the season of Advent, like the season of Lent, is a time for introspection and spiritual temperature taking. I think this is why the commercial version of Santa Claus works so well with the Constantinian spin on the second coming of Jesus and why I conflated the two in the car that day. It all comes down to whether you personally have been naughty or nice. Mostly we are hoping for a nice holiday. “Come again?” says my mother at this point, wondering what any of this has to do with Christmas. Yet it is likely that Luke could only have written his appended story of Christ’s first coming from the vantage point of his hope in Christ’s Second Coming, could only have offered the tender signs spoken to the shepherds by the angels [to wit: you will find the babe wrapped in swaddling clothes and lying in a manger] because his faith was fixed on the tough signs spoken by Jesus in the midst of Jerusalem’s now destroyed temple [wars and insurrections, earthquakes and famines and plagues, dreadful portents and signs in the sun, the moon and the stars]. That is to say, it is always at the null point, where there is no reason to have hope, that God’s Word speaks hope to those who walk in darkness: “Though the moving signs of heaven wars presage on every side…Stand up and raise your heads because your redemption is drawing near.” Or put another way, even as Christ’s first coming accomplished our salvation [ended the distance we have chosen to keep between ourselves and God such that Christ accompanies us in every valley of the shadow], Christ’s Second Coming will consummate the redemption of all creation, will signal God’s victory over the chaos that, from the beginning, has resisted God’s will. Therefore there are two faces of Advent, writes preacher and author Fleming Rutledge: one of rapturous expectation and the other of apocalyptic hope. To wit: “In 1968,” she recalls, “the Catholic Interracial Council of the Twin Cities produced a remarkable Christmas card. The outside of the card was red-orange, and featured the words of the Benedictus: ‘From on high our God will bring the rising Sun…’ Then,” she says, “you opened the card to find a stark black-and-white photograph of a small African-American child caught by a ray of sunlight as he sits listlessly in the shadows of a slum courtyard. Along with the photo was the rest of the verse: “to give light to those who sit in darkness and the shadow of death.’” The next year the front of the card had the words of John the Baptist in red: “There is One among you…” and inside another black-and-white photograph, “this time of a young Vietnamese girl with the blank, stunned expression of a child in wartime, and the rest of the verse: ‘…whom you do not recognize.’” Under pressure the third year, the Interracial Council “started making cards with smiling, beautiful white and black people celebrating peace. As far as I know,” Rutledge quips, “the Council was not heard from again.” “Advent, however, remains,” says Rutledge and, she repeats, the season has two faces: the face of joyful expectation and the face of the apocalyptic woes, “the tribulation that overtakes all who stand their ground as the Age to come pushes against ‘the rulers of this age, who are doomed to pass away.’” I think that must be why the lectionary pairs the words of the prophet Jeremiah with the words of Jesus in Luke’s gospel: “The days are surely coming when I will fulfill the promise I made to the house of Israel and the house of Judah….I will cause a righteous Branch to spring up for David; and he shall execute justice and righteousness in the land.” We imagine Jeremiah’s words to anticipate Christ’s first coming when, in fact, his words point to the Second Coming, to our redemption. They were words spoken to exiles and so spoken into the time of nation against nation, kingdom against kingdom, earthquakes and famines and plagues and dreadful portents. Jeremiah is surely the other face of advent. “His discernment of his historical moment under the rule of [God] caused him to dismiss in judgment much that was valued and to discern in hope possibilities where his contemporaries recognized none.” Did Jesus not intend his followers to bear witness in just this way. Speaking in the temple that lay in ruins by the time Luke wrote his gospel, Jesus said the time between any given present moment and our redemption is the time of bearing witness. The word the church tries to get said is precisely the word abandoned by Constantinian Protestants: word of Christ’s Second Coming. “The church is thus,” says Robert Jensen, “a standing conspiracy in society on behalf of society’s own future. There is no need,” he says, “to be romantic about this. Whenever the church looks big enough and potentially influential enough to make it worth the trouble, the state and current ideology will try to co-opt the church as a religious auxiliary—and probably succeed. Then this recognized church will, like other religious societies, be a conservative force. But so long as the church remains at all the church, the word by which it lives will evoke disquiet…will bring forth disturbers of the peace for Jesus sake. Every Eucharist,” he concludes, “is a subversive gathering—in any nation—and a potential school of dissidents.” Therefore it must be no coincidence that the oldest prayer spoken at table by the earliest of Christians was “Marantha!” that is “Come, Lord Jesus!” Thanks be to God! |