First Sunday of Advent Yr C November 28 2021

First Sunday of Advent Yr C November 28 2021

Jeremiah 33:14-16, 1 Thessalonians 3:9-13, Luke 21:25-36, Psalm 25:1-9

 

Endings look a lot like beginnings, and beginnings look a lot like endings. Today, we begin at the end. Next week we move to the beginning. But as today we begin at the end, it will serve us well to remember some things we need to know. In this passage we read today, Luke, who is writing this in the later part of the 1^st century, has Jesus telling the people who are listening three very important things. First, Jesus tells them about the destruction of the Temple, the place where God is located. Secondly, Jesus tells them about the destruction of the whole of Jerusalem, the city that is home. That destruction happened around 70. Thirdly, And Jesus tells them about the coming of the Son of Man. Those first two things, the destruction of the temple and the destruction of the whole of the city of Jerusalem are historical, that happened. The third thing, the coming of the Son of Man, is how Luke tells the disciples and us, about who Jesus is. 

 

What we are reading today is called apocalyptic literature. Now, that may seem a big, scary word, but it’s not really. Apocalyptic means revealing. In Jewish and Christian Apocalyptic, it means, God is being revealed. And God is being revealed in an absolutely new way, it is big, but not so scary. 

 

If you were a Jew at the time, it would be big and scary. Your place of worship, and your home, are destroyed by the Roman Empire. Everything you know to be true is gone, there is no stone left upon stone. The question asked in those times was, where is God located if not in the Temple? As you and I listen to the entire story, we know that God is now located in the flesh and blood of Jesus, that is incarnation, God with us, God in our midst, Emmanuel, all names for Jesus. And in this passage, Luke also calls Jesus the Son of Man. 

 

But it must have been like the beginning of the end of the world to them. Those who surrounded Jesus wonder what would happen next, what would their lives be like, would they even live to see the next day? This looked like the end. And the end seems scary. This seemed like God is no longer present. It seemed like chaos was overtaking order. 

 

And it seems like all those post-apocalyptic stories I love to read. As humans we are always searching for God, and our stories are filled with the possibility of an absent God, or an abandoning God, that’s what the people in Jerusalem were wondering, did God abandon them? What we are reading today is a post-apocalyptic story, as wild and fearful as any post-apocalyptic story written today. 

 

I think the question that we ask today is how do we boldly go where no one has gone before? Where is our hope after this storm, this destruction, this apocalypse of pandemic? To whom does the future belong? And as we embark upon Advent, how do we prepare, how do we anticipate the inbreaking of Jesus in the midst of the chaos that we may be feeling in these days? And how do we wait in faithful anticipation?

 

Part of waiting is in anticipation of what life will be like when the waiting is over. As we wait, we may have the opportunity to reflect on life as it is and possibly to come to appreciate the glimpses of the wonder and beauty of life as it is. Maybe, we begin to see life differently, more clearly. Maybe, all the things we thought were important aren’t so important anymore. Maybe, the falseness is being stripped away, and what is left is a truer person, a person who wants to plunge into every moment of life, no matter what, instead of sleepwalk through it. Maybe there is actually transformation in the waiting. At its deepest, Advent waiting transforms us. We are shown a glimpse of “what if.” What if we approach our Advent waiting as a radical time of transformation? 

 

The Good News is that Advent transformation isn’t born out of fear, fear of the end of the world, fear of war and destruction, fear of those who are different than us. Advent transformation comes from joy because the promise has already been given. Advent transformation comes from the hope that Love wins. For those with the eyes of faith, “what if” has already happened. God is already with us. The reign of God is at hand. Heaven is already here. And nothing will break God’s promise.

 

Our Advent waiting may then be about making the world look more like the heaven that we already see by faith. We do this by focusing on the essentials—the basic things every human needs in order to reflect the divine. The poor have to be cared for, the hungry have to be fed, the homeless have to be sheltered, the refugee has to be welcomed, and the sick need to be healed. Forgiveness has to be offered, those at war must stop, and peace must be our legacy.

 

It’s almost as if Advent calls us to faith in the Real Absence of Christ—to believe in Emmanuel even in our darkness, in God-With-Us even when we hear no answer, and in the Incarnation even when we feel nothing at all. And so during Advent waiting, we may abstain from the flurry of Christmas not as a penitential punishment, but as a way to train our eyes to see God even without the angels and trees, crèches and stars. We focus instead on the basics of light in the darkness, silence in the chaos, and stillness in the turmoil. Advent waiting is waiting for Love to be born, again.

 

The promise in all of this in Luke, in the midst of the distress in our scripture reading today, in the midst of the terror and chaos that the Jews of the 1^st century were experiencing, is that the end of times reality is that the end is not the end, our end is a person. The alpha and the omega, the beginning and the end. You see, Jesus is our end, our end is in the living Christ and the end is filled with new possibilities. And because you and I are living in this in between time, after Jesus was born into our world, after Jesus lived, died, resurrected from the dead and ascended, and before the fulfillment of all things, you and I are living in new possibility, new hope, new life.