THE FIRST SUNDAY OF ADVENT
Zechariah 14:4-9
I Thessalonians 3:9-13
Luke 21:25-31
Year C
George Frederick Watts, a
Victorian artist, painted a picture once called “Hope”. It shows a blindfolded
woman sitting with bowed head on a globe. The harp she holds in her hands has
only one unbroken string. In the dark sky behind her only one star shines. The
artist has puzzled many people who do not think as easily in symbols as did
One wonders if the majority
of the world is equally puzzled by the church’s observance of Advent. According
to the world the Christmas season is the time to loosen up and party; the time
when overeating and overspending is not just allowed, but encouraged. The road
to Christmas is paved with sugar plum fairies – except in the church that
faithfully observes Advent.
Today we enter into Luke; the
gospel in which we will spend the majority of the next liturgical year. The
world of Luke is a world of journeys and dinner parties. Jesus spends a lot of
time with his disciples in Luke telling them stories in parables that have
become dear to us. But today Jesus tells the disciples the world is coming
unglued.
The prophet Zechariah predicted
a time when
Jesus promised that the Son
of Man would come upon a cloud with power and great glory. Paul too, spoke of
the Lord’s return with great anticipation. In that same way Advent calls us to
look with hope for God to enter the bruised realities of the world, as well as
the dark recesses of our lives. The problem is we don’t expect God to do
anything earth shattering anymore. We don’t wait with the urgency Christians
did in the time of Paul.
A cartoon, published after
the world did not end as predicted in September of 1988, shows a bookstore
owner replacing a sign that said, “The
book that proves Christ will return in September, 1988. The new sign read “The book that proves that Christ will
return retroactive to September 1988”.We come to this place every year and
have to admit that apparently God hasn’t shared the plan or the time chart with
us and that frustration often means we miss the whole point.
In a sermon preached several
years ago in Southwark Cathedral in
In that same way Advent comes
to remind us that God is always to be found in the dawn of new light and new
beginnings. Religion, as Jesus pointed out, often tries to hold on to the past
with a kind of death grip, bolting down everything in sight so that nothing is
disturbed. But the good news of the gospel reminds us, even uncomfortably so,
that we are called to live into the future as opposed to the past. This is
difficult because it’s so easy to look back to the ‘good old days’. Whether
those days be the ‘good old days’ of the church or your own life, we have an amazing
ability to block out much that made some of those days not so good after all.
Because of that it is no
wonder we often have fears about the future. As Harvard Chaplain Peter Gomes
writes: “If we have something, we fear
losing it all; if we have nothing at all, we fear more of the same in the
future, and so we live in a world so fearful in the present that we are
tyrannized by the past, so fearful of the future that we idolize the present.”
Advent then comes to us as a
shock, for its only direction is forward. It’s only word speaks to the future
and it will tolerate neither fear nor idolatry. No one in the New Testament
looked backward; only forward, because it is in the future, your future, the
church’s future, where God is to be found. And so it is always to the future
that we are called. That’s why Advent always begins with words about endings,
because the purpose of endings is so that
something new might take place.
The days before Christmas are
meant to be an attitude toward life, not a carnival. They are meant to be
arrived at slowly. Advent is here to transform those days into a time of
contemplation. Everyone is free to avoid this road and many do, but that does
not change the fact that at least one of the truths that Advent brings to us,
both as warning and as gift, is that our time on earth is short.
Barbara Brown Taylor writes:
“…you cannot get well until you admit you are sick…you cannot put your
life back together again until you stop pretending it is not broken…you cannot
find your new beginning until you say out loud, to anyone who will listen, that
you have come to the end of your rope.”
You see the fig tree in
today’s gospel is a symbol of promise, not a warning of impending doom. Jesus
says the worst of times can be the best of times, because God is always
involved in redemptive beginnings.
When Harry Emerson Fosdick, noted minister of
Leaving the shade down on the
places in our lives that are painful is not the call of Advent. Advent says to
raise them to the light of God. In that way not only does the light of God
increase even more, it is in this way that the light of God flows in and shapes
the future.
We are all familiar with
approaching storms. We see a blinding flash of lightning and know that within a
few seconds a crash of thunder will follow.
They are part of the same event. They happened at the same time. But in
that experience of a few seconds, between lightning and thunder, the same event
is both present and future. The
As Bishop William Frey once
said, “Hope is the melody of the future:
faith is the courage to dance it today!”
And as theologian Jurgen
Moltmann reminds us, “Let us reach out
beyond our limitations in order to find a future in a new beginning. Let us take
no more account of barriers, but only of the one who broke the barriers down.
He is risen. Christ is risen
indeed. He is our future.”
And because of that he is,
this day and every day, our hope.
AMEN
The Rev.Virginia L. Bennett,
D.Min.
St. Andrew’s Episcopal Church