Advent Reset

Luke 21:25-36

‘There will be signs in the sun, the moon, and the stars, and on the earth distress among nations confused by the roaring of the sea and the waves. People will faint from fear and foreboding of what is coming upon the world, for the powers of the heavens will be shaken. Then they will see “the Son of Man coming in a cloud” with power and great glory. Now when these things begin to take place, stand up and raise your heads, because your redemption is drawing near.’

Then he told them a parable: ‘Look at the fig tree and all the trees; as soon as they sprout leaves you can see for yourselves and know that summer is already near. So also, when you see these things taking place, you know that the kingdom of God is near. Truly I tell you, this generation will not pass away until all things have taken place. Heaven and earth will pass away, but my words will not pass away.

‘Be on guard so that your hearts are not weighed down with dissipation and drunkenness and the worries of this life, and that day does not catch you unexpectedly, like a trap. For it will come upon all who live on the face of the whole earth. Be alert at all times, praying that you may have the strength to escape all these things that will take place, and to stand before the Son of Man.’

I’ve made it sort of an Advent tradition to include a certain Dietrich Bonhoeffer quote in my first-Sunday-in-Advent sermons. I feel like it’s been a little while since I’ve quoted Bonhoeffer, so just a quick reminder that he was a Lutheran pastor during World War II and was the leader of the underground Confessing Church, organized the oppose the Nazi regime and its attempt to unify all churches for their own agenda. He also was a part of a failed plot to kill Hitler, and was killed by the Nazis just before Europe was liberated. Bonhoeffer truly believed he was going to hell for taking part in this plot, but believed it was worth it to try to stop Nazism. He was a brilliant theologian and preached about cheap versus costly grace, about the sacrifices one must make to be a Christian—about the cost of discipleship. Bonhoeffer is more relevant now than ever—we are living in a time when we really have to think long and hard about what being a Christian, what being a follower of Jesus means—what kind of risks we will have to take, what kind of sacrifices will we will we have to make in order to protect the most vulnerable from whatever might be coming. And of Advent, Bonhoeffer writes,

Jesus stands at the door and knocks, in complete reality. He asks you for help in the form of a beggar, in the form of a ruined human being in torn clothing. He confronts you in every person that you meet. Christ walks on the earth as your neighbor as long as there are people. He walks on the earth as the one through whom God calls you, speaks to you and makes his demands. That is the greatest seriousness and the greatest blessedness of the Advent message. Christ stands at the door. He lives in the form of the person in our midst. Will you keep the door locked or open it to him?

Christ is still knocking. It is not yet Christmas. But it is also not the great final Advent, the final coming of Christ. Through all the Advents of our life that we celebrate goes the longing for the final Advent, where it says: “Behold, I make all things new.” Advent is a time of waiting. Our whole life, however, is Advent – that is, a time of waiting for the ultimate, for the time when there will be a new heaven and a new earth, when all people are brothers and sisters and one rejoices in the words of the angels: “On earth peace to those on whom God’s favor rests.” Learn to wait, because he has promised to come…

This quote has really made me think of Advent in a different way. It can still work for the inner child in all of us; it reminds us of that excited anticipation we had waiting for presents on Christmas morning, of gathering with grandparents and aunts and uncles and cousins to celebrate the joyful, sacred day for which we’ve been waiting all month. But it’s also a reminder that that anticipation of Advent should hold year round, should hold our whole lives: “our whole life…is Advent,” Bonhoeffer says.

The passage Tom just read for you is from the end of the gospel of Luke, right before the Passion begins. What a strange passage to be chosen as a one of the traditional ones for the first Sunday in Advent—it’s an apocalyptic passage, one that also appears in all three of the synoptic gospels, but the ending of Luke’s is unique, and beautiful. “be on guard that your hearts are no weight down with…the worries of this life, and that the day does not catch you unexpectedly,” Luke writes in verse 34.

So there are two suggestions here, two pieces of advice— and they’re crucial, though it proves a pretty thin tightrope to walk— Luke is telling us to both not let the worries and anxieties of this world paralyze us; but also to be ready so that we aren’t caught off-guard when this end, the second coming, when this “great final Advent” as Bonhoeffer says, comes at long last.

This is a time of compulsive doom-scrolling for a lot of people—it’s a time of falling prey to internet algorithms promising us they know what’s coming and telling us what we need to do… and buy to prepare; it’s a time when the media tries to wind us up for more views and more clicks. Make no mistake, regardless of which way any media networks lean politically, they are going to take full advantage of people’s fear and anxiety, and they are going to milk that for all it’s worth, they are going to give the most screentime to the most shocking and sensationalist stories. It’s hard to escape all this in a 24-hour-news cycle, when we have the internet at our fingertips. This, church, is what we have to be on guard against. We can’t get stuck in cycles of despair. But, we also can’t get stuck in complacency, we cannot be resigned to what’s coming and therefore be taken by surprise when he arrives. We can’t let our hearts get bogged down by worry, but we also can’t shrug the injustice of the world off—a little worry isn’t a bad thing; it's necessary, in fact.

Quite a balancing act Jesus is calling us to perform. But it shouldn’t be too hard. It should be something we’re used to… remember, out whole lives are Advent.

There’s a science fiction novel I read a few years back, called Sea of Tranquility by the author Emily St. John Mandel, and it’s about a pandemic, it’s about time travel, it’s about a lot of things. But there are a lot of musings in the book about the end of the world. In the story, one of the main characters says,

I think, as a species, we have a desire to believe that we’re living at the climax of the story…We want to believe that we’re uniquely important, that we’re living at the end of history, that now, after all these millennia of false alarms, now is finally the worst that it’s ever been, that finally we have reached the end of the world.

 Our passage for today is certainly one in which they believed the end to be imminent. This attitude continues after the death, resurrection, and ascension of Jesus— Luke’s people, by and large, believed the end to be around the corner. But when Luke quotes Jesus as saying, “Truly I tell you, this generation will not pass away until all these things have taken place,” he doesn’t mean his generation, the current living generation. He means the future generation that will live through this end-time, this apocalypse, this “revealing.” And Jesus never reveals which generation this will be.

Throughout history, so many different religious sects, different cults, thought the end was coming. Some of these apocalyptic attitudes seeped into popular culture— coming upon the year 2000, Y2K, people thought all computer systems were going to crash and it was going to be mayhem. Twelve years later, thousands of people were convinced the ancient Mayans were right and that their prophesy about the world ending in the year 2012 would come true. But that didn’t happen. So there’s something, I think, to what Mandel writes about the fact that we seem to want to be that special generation, convinced that it will only get worse during our time until it can’t anymore and then it’ll be up to us, the specially chosen people, to claw our way back, or in the case of the gospel of Luke, to be the ones to experience terrifying spectacle only to be rewarded with paradise.

This pro-apocalypse attitude is understandable. For those of you who were at our combined Thanksgiving service last week, I preached on the Old Testament book of Daniel, the best example of apocalyptic writing in the Hebrew texts. Daniel was about an end of the Jewish people’s suffering, the end of an oppressive royal regime, not the end of the world. Apocalyptic attitudes and stories are often, seemingly paradoxically, filled with hope. It’s about the hope of starting new, starting again. It’s a hope of no more suffering, only paradise. It’s no wonder we’re drawn to apocalyptic stories. They’re more about the hope and anticipation of new beginnings rather than the despair and the grief of the end.

In Sea of Tranquility, the same character mentioned above also says, “…we turn to [a] postapocalyptic [imagination] not because we’re drawn to disaster, per se, but because we’re drawn to what we imagine might come next.” We just want something better. We want better for our kids, our grandkids, our great grandkids. We want a better world, and sometimes this world feels so broken, it feels like we should just burn it all down and start from scratch. We’re waiting, not because we long for disaster or trials and tribulation; not because we want “distress among nations” or “people [fainting] from fear and foreboding,” as Luke writes. We want to see what comes next, because it has to be better than this.

But… we might be waiting a while. As tempting as it is to believe we are the chosen ones, that all the natural disasters we’re experiencing from climate change, that all the predicted chaos of incumbent administrations for democracies around the world losing their election because of the havoc that the pandemic and its aftereffects wrought, that this all means we’re the ones who get to see what comes next, we just. don’t. know.

And so we wait. We wait patiently. We wait with calm. We wait as to not allow the worries of this life weigh us down and paralyze us with despair and inaction. We will be aware enough to know when the time comes, if indeed it does come during any of our lifetimes, because it will be as clear as a fig trees leaves sprouting at the end of Spring. When I consulted my many scholarly books on the parables of Jesus to see what it said about this fig tree parable Jesus tells, it turned out, this parable was barely mentioned… because it’s very, very fool-proof. When the fig tree sprouts we know Summer is near. “So also when you see these things take place, you know the kingdom of God is near.” It’s going to be pretty obvious, is what Jesus is saying. So I guess we can take some solace in that.  

So being aware enough to know what’s coming will not require constant doom-scrolling every news site we can find. It will not require us to try to decode oddly specific numbers in the books of Daniel or Revelation. But this kind of waiting and patient awareness will require us to understand that “Jesus confronts [us] in every person [we] meet.” In the beggar, in our neighbor. When we’re so concerned with who we can and cannot trust in a country that will not feel less divided any time soon, we can lose sight of the fact that Jesus “lives in the form of the person in our midst.” If we are stuck in cycles of despair and catastrophizing, stuckin echo chambers online, we will not hear that knock of Jesus at our doors—that knock that will surely be quiet, humble, unassuming. What else would we expect from a savior come to earth in the form of a fragile human infant?

Regardless of whether or not the end is truly nigh, or, as I said just a couple weeks ago, regardless of who is in the white house, our work does not change. We will continue our patient, active waiting. We will continue to greet every person we meet as if they are Jesus. We will remain aware of what’s going on enough to protect those who need protection, enough to fight the battles that need to be fought, enough to keep Advent hope alive year round.

Our whole lives are Advent, and so the Advent season acts as a reset— as a reminder to us of our excitement and anticipation for the miraculous and humble birth of Jesus; as a reminder to keep that spirit alive throughout the year, as we wait for that great final Advent. This season is one to reset our hope in what can be, our hope in what comes next; be aware when your hearts are heavy with worry… and remember the promise of hope that Christ brings, the promise we are called to work for— an earth as it is in heaven. Amen.