First Sunday in Advent
November 29, 2009
Luke 21:25-36

Heads Up

For some reason the season of Advent always sneaks up on me. Not Christmas. I can see that coming. When it’s 80 degrees in Tallahassee and you go to Home Depot looking for lawnmower parts and can’t find them because they’ve been replaced by artificial Christmas trees, you know that Christmas is coming.

Advent is a different story. Advent always seems out of place. Especially this year. Perhaps that’s because, given the slow economy, merchants are desperate to move inventory now, lest they get stuck with it on December 26^th. Perhaps it’s because, as an antidote to grim times, we are already salivating for gingerbread cookies, chestnuts roasting on an open fire, and the treacle-sweet sentiment that accompanies the season.

Or perhaps it’s because Advent is such a downer. My family accuses me of having too much in common with Ebenezer Scrooge, but even I do not welcome the harsh tone of today’s reading from the Gospel of Luke.

I mean, how depressing can you get? "Signs in the sun, the moon, and the stars, and on earth distress among nations confused by the roaring of the sea and waves." People fainting right and left, clinging to their copies of the Left Behind series. Unkempt men on the street corners bearing handwritten signs that read, "I told you so." People pounding on the door of First Presbyterian Church, shouting "Let me in! I want to join up after all."

Not a pretty picture. Then, to top it all off, the "Son of Man coming in a cloud with power and great glory." Not the babe in the manger. Not the "holy child of Bethlehem," accompanied by placid barnyard animals and a little drummer boy, but a figure straight out of a fever dream.

When those Christians of Luke’s church heard "Son of Man" they did not think "gentle Jesus, meek and mild." They thought "Avenger Jesus, loaded for bear." All this time the Romans and even their fellow Jews had been kicking sand in their faces, taunting them, throwing them out of the synagogues, and now it’s almost payback time.

"You just wait till the Son of Man comes. He’ll fix your wagon."

How different is this Advent expectation from the usual stuff of Christmas. In W. H. Auden's "For the Time Being: A Christmas Oratorio," Herod the King prays:

O God, put away justice and truth for we cannot understand them and do not want them. . . Leave the heavens and come down. . . Become our uncle. Look after Baby, amuse grandfather, escort Madam to the Opera, help Willy with his homework, and introduce Muriel to a handsome naval officer. Be interesting and weak like us, and we will love you as we love ourselves.

Later, Herod explains:

I asked for a God who should be as like me as possible. What use to me is a God whose divinity consists in doing different things that I cannot do or saying clever things that I cannot understand? The God I want and intend to get must be someone I can recognize immediately without having to wait and see what he says or does. There must be nothing in the least extraordinary about him.

Produce him at once, please. I'm sick of waiting.

Christmas -- at least the Christmas of Jingle Bell Runs and Black Friday sales – produces just such a God. That’s why the church needs Advent and the culture has absolutely no use for it.

Advent calls us to hold back for a few weeks and focus less on the first coming of the Christ and more upon his second coming. In Advent we are called not to speculate about who will be left behind and who will not, but on how we are living our lives as though the future depended not upon us, but upon God.

The God who made the heavens and the earth.

The God to whom we shall be accountable.

The God who is not likely to be amused by the shrinking polar ice caps or the rising sea level.

The God who numbers not only the hairs on our heads and the stars of heaven but also keeps account of the carbon dioxide we are spewing into the atmosphere and the size of our carbon footprint.

We tend to separate the God of Christmas from the God of Advent, but the truth is, they are both the same God. The child of Bethlehem is also the Son of Man. Jesus was not killed for encouraging people to shop early for bargains, but for welcoming the poor, the weak, and the sort of folks who get hassled by security guards in the mall for looking out of place.

Advent reminds us that you can’t get really get ready for Christmas without also getting ready for Advent. The child of Bethlehem and the Son of Man both go by the name Emmanuel.

Those early Christians came fairly quickly to grasp the concept that Christian discipleship is a matter of living in between – between Christ’s first coming and his second, between the already and the not-yet of God’s dealing with humanity.

The world of the first century was a scary place – plagued by wars and rumors of wars, by floods and earthquakes, by leaders who could not see past their own self-interest and by religious systems obsessed with maintaining the status quo. Our world is not much different.

Back then Christians had to make a choice. They could retreat from the world or they could embrace the world in the light of God’s promised future. They could become paralyzed by anxiety, awaiting the worst, or they could seize the hope offered in the gospel. They could live not in passive waiting, but in active waiting, doing the work God had called them to do, not fleeing from, but living into God’s future.

You would think that, given those images of imminent peril – roaring seas and distress among nations – those early Christians would have looked toward God’s future with fear. But fear is not the theme of this text. At the heart of this passage is hope. And that’s what Advent is about, as well.

It’s because we place our hope in God that we are able to "stand up and raise our heads." The future of the world belongs to the same God who has already emptied himself into the world. The Son of Man who will come in "with power and great glory," is also the son of Mary, born to love and save.

In the words of Jürgen Moltmann, Christian hope is not "’the opium of the beyond,’ but rather the divine power that makes us alive in this world."

To put it another way, without Advent, Christmas is merely the remembrance of a time long ago when God was with us as Emmanuel. With Advent, Christmas is the promise that God is still Emmanuel, present now and also yet to come.

Therefore we live in hope, alert and working for God’s kingdom. "Stand up and raise your heads, because your redemption is drawing near."

　

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