In the twenty-first chapter of Luke’s Gospel we enter into a world of confusion and distress and fear and foreboding. Sadly, it is a world we know all too well. Some of this may even feel as if it’s ripped from the headlines when we consider out-of-control fires in California and earthquakes in Alaska and tear gas on our southern border.
Like many of you, I live in the city of Worcester. As a member of Bishop Fisher’s staff, however, some Sundays my travels across this diocese may take me as far as the Berkshires, to Pittsfield or Sheffield or Williamstown on a Sunday morning. Other days I’m headed north to Fitchburg or south to Milford. In my encounters there, as well as my experience as the former rector at St. Francis in Holden, I sometimes hear people saying, “I don’t come to church for politics.”
And I get that. But I think what folks usually mean, upon reflection, is that they don’t want the preacher to be as partisan as the politicians. They don’t want the preacher to tell them how to vote. And I promise you that I am not going to do that. But we cannot escape the polis – literally the city. Politics is about our common life and our faith is meant to help us to navigate that together. Jesus may not have been a Democrat or a Republican but he wasn’t apolitical either.
Sometimes it feels as if the polis, and our world, are coming apart at the seams. In the Bible, this kind of literature that we heard from the 21st chapter of Luke is called “apocalyptic.” It’s about endings, to be sure. But it’s also about how we act in such times and also about our hope in new beginnings.
As I said, the 21st chapter of Luke is a world of confusion and distress and fear and foreboding and sometimes we can get sucked into all of that fear. It can dominate our days and more significantly our nights, and our nightmares. We may worry about the planet and climate change or wars, or rumors of wars. Closer to home, gun violence in our streets and even in our schools tears us apart and we may pray with Isaiah for swords to be beaten into plowshares and spears into pruning hooks. We may worry on a smaller scale about transitions in our own lives: taking the bus to school for the first time or heading off to college, or walking down the aisle, or selling the family home to move into assisted living. Or saying goodbye to a beloved pastor. Confusion and distress and foreboding can eat away at us from the inside out. There is a part of us all that just feels like just closing our eyes to all of that, especially in December. It’s just too much to deal with on top of everything else.
In Luke’s story, we are in the city of Jerusalem, only a few verses away from the Last Supper and the final night of his earthly life. Jesus is continuing to prepare his disciples for the days when he will not be with them in the flesh, not just the immediate future but ultimately for the end of days. Along the way, there will be much struggle and days when being his disciple will be hard, Jesus says. Because life is hard. And some days you’ll feel like giving up or giving in. But in those moments, he says, be strong; take courage; be on guard and alert and stand up and raise your heads. And pray…
That’s what I want to say to you today, St. Matthew’s. I’ll say it a couple of more times in the hope that it will sink in and a couple of different ways. But this is the good news I want to share today: in the midst of fear and of endings: Be strong. Take courage. Be on guard. Keep alert. Stand up and raise your heads. And pray.
Today marks the first Sunday of a new liturgical year, a new beginning as we gather here to begin our preparations for the birth of Christ: one wreath, four candles. Today’s gospel reading may feel out of place. It may seem as if Luke didn’t get the memo that we are here to get ready for a birth!
But here is the thing: this holy season of Advent invites us to live our lives between the first advent of Christ—when Jesus was born in Bethlehem and laid in a manger because there was no room for him and his family in the inn—and the second advent of the risen Christ who is “king of kings” and “lord of lords, the One who shall reign forever and ever.” This season means to convey this double-meaning so that it’s not primarily about looking back to first-century Palestine. Nor is it our job to try to figure out a future that belongs to God, a future that even Jesus says is known “only by the Father.” It’s about living with faith, in fearful times by knowing that Jesus is Lord. That, my friends, is a political statement.
Since we cannot change what happened yesterday and since we cannot control what will happen tomorrow, Advent calls upon us to live and to fully participate in what Paul Tillich once called “the Eternal Now.” We are called to live today in the midst of a world that sometimes feels like it coming unglued as faithful people who put their whole trust in God. Advent hope is characterized by alert and awake living that calls on us to do the work we have been given to do: in our homes and in our church and in the wider world we share with people from every tribe and language and nation.
Reinhold Niebuhr (whom some of you may know by way of
the Serenity Prayer) also wrote these
words:
The
experience of Jesus upon the cross is not one of a dreamy pantheist who
imagines God in easy and magical control of every process in the universe. It
was the experience of a spiritual adventurer who saw life as a struggle between
love and chaos, but who also discovered
the love at the center of things which guarantees the victory in every apparent
defeat.
You and I are called to share an adventure. (Notice
that word begins with advent: advent-ure.)
We are invited to discover the love that is at the center of all things, even
in the midst of life’s struggles. Niebuhr calls our attention to the cross. That
may seem odd in this season of preparing for Jesus birth. But in fact it’s not
odd at all, because what we are in fact preparing for is a singular life of the
One around whom you and I have been called to re-orient our whole lives. We are
called to be Jesus’ disciples by bearing witness not only to his birth, but to
his life and death and to his resurrection, even as we await his second advent.
You cannot look back upon his birth (or his public ministry) without looking
through the lens of what happened on a cross outside of Jerusalem and then
three days later at the empty tomb.
Niebuhr claims Jesus of Nazareth as “spiritual
adventurer.” What would it would be like for us, as his followers, to take that
on more in our own lives? Not to be conformed into some mold of what we think a
good follower of Jesus is supposed to look like. Not to be fixated on right
belief. But rather, to allow our beliefs and our practices to unleash the Holy
Spirit within us, so that passion and energy form us as “spiritual
adventurers.” What would it look like for this parish to become more and more a
community of spiritual adventurers who see life as a struggle between love and
chaos, and yet are, together, discovering and rediscovering the love that is at
the center of all things?
Advent is a wake-up call. It’s about opening our eyes
even wider to all of it the world’s pain and keeping alert to struggle and
injustice. It invites us to be spiritual adventurers who really do know (not
just because some preacher said it, but because we have discovered for
ourselves) that love is stronger than fear. Advent hope is about living more
faithfully into this vocation we have been given in Holy Baptism by letting the
world see and know that we are Christians by our love.
Consider
the fig tree, says Jesus. Now it’s November in New England and not springtime in Israel so
we may need a second to get our bearings here. We now find ourselves once again
getting ready for winter and if we consider the maple trees and the oaks and
apple trees that are all around us we see them going to sleep and getting ready
for the chill winds that are already upon us. Sometimes we think that the end
of the world is like that, or the end of our own lives. Or the end of a
ministry: that spring gives way to summer and summer turns to autumn and then
finally comes the cold of winter.
But that is not what Jesus is saying in today’s
gospel reading. He turns the whole thing inside out and upside down. As he
speaks of endings he invites us to go even deeper into the meaning of life and
consider the fig tree as it is in springtime. He invites us to go deeper into
the heart of all things that is love and new beginnings and Easter morning. So
yes, there are signs of endings all around us to be sure. But can it be that
from these endings God is making all things new?
The faith of the Church is a resounding “yes” to that
question. By asking us to consider the fig tree in springtime even as we
consider the end of the world in December, Jesus invites us even as we read the
daily news in our own day to see cherry blossoms and apple blossoms and fig
blossoms. Not as an act of denial, but as a leap of faith in becoming spiritual
adventurers.
Jesus insists that even when the world feels like it
is falling into chaos there is, deeper still, at the center of all things, love
and life and hope and joy. That is not an act of denial: it is a deep truth
that has learned that only when things die and come to an end can new life
emerge. We know this, of course. It is what the journey from Good Friday to
Easter morning is all about. It is what the mystery of faith is all about: Christ has died. Christ is risen. Christ
will come again.
So, St. Matthews: be strong; take courage; be on guard
and alert and stand up and raise your heads. And pray. Come, O come, Emmanuel.
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