Signs

This Sunday is the first Sunday of Advent, the beginning of a new church year! As often happens, the church is out of step with the wider culture, and today the church calendar is doubly out of step, being both earlier and later than our daily calendar. Earlier, because we celebrate the beginning of a new church year more than a month before January 1st, our New Year’s Day. And later, because as far as our wider culture is concerned, it’s already time to dive into Christmas, while the church insists on Advent – a time of waiting and preparation that has nothing to do with shopping lists or trips to the mall. This reminds us that Kairos time – the right time, the appointed time, God’s time – is often out of step with chronos time, the time indicated by our calendar. Or, perhaps it’s more true that our calendars are sometimes out of step with God’s time.

And today it would seem that we’re doubly out of step, because our lectionary reading (Luke 21:25-36) is not about events leading up to Jesus’ birth, but about the eschaton – the last things – with, using imagery from the Old Testament Book of Daniel, “the Son of Man coming on the clouds.” As it happens, this is lectionary’s usual pattern for each year’s readings for the first Sunday of Advent: two years ago, the Gospel reading for the first Sunday of Advent was a similar passage from the book of Matthew, and a year ago we read from what is called Mark’s “little apocalypse.” As we enter Advent, as Christians we likely have expectations of who we’ll meet and what we’ll see – we’ll surely meet John the Baptist, and maybe we’ll see angels appearing to Joseph or Mary. And these meetings and sightings – some of them, anyway - are indeed waiting for us, but not this week. This week, the Gospel reading is unsettling, disturbing, perplexing, foreboding. What does it all mean?

What does it all mean? Glad you asked! That’s exactly the question confronting both Jeremiah’s and Luke’s readers. Our reading from Jeremiah, about God fulfilling the promise made to the house of Israel and the house of Judah, that a righteous Branch would spring up from David, who would execute justice and righteousness in the land. We read this passage, and for us as Christians, we see a reference to Jesus, whose lineage was traced to David’s line. But it helps to read the passage in context. At the time of Jeremiah’s writing, the city of Jerusalem would soon fall to Babylon; the siege ramps had already been rolled up, and the proverbial handwriting was on the wall – the city was doomed. And yet Jeremiah, who up to this point had repeatedly warned of the coming destruction of Jerusalem, now paradoxically offered hope. With Babylon about to destroy Jerusalem, Jeremiah….bought a piece of land. And while Zedekiah, the last king of Judah before the fall of Jerusalem, was taken into exile, Jeremiah said that this was not the end of the Davidic line, nor the “end of the line” in our colloquial sense for the Jews, but rather that a righteous Branch would come forth – after all the destruction would eventually come restoration.

What does it all mean? We’re told that Luke’s Gospel was written roughly 50 years after the death and resurrection of Jesus. Roughly 10-15 years before Luke’s gospel was written, the Jerusalem Temple had been destroyed by Rome, and the might of the Roman empire came down on Jerusalem like a ton of bricks. It’s hard for us to imagine how disorienting the destruction of the Temple would have been for Luke’s readers; perhaps we could imagine how shaken and distraught our Roman Catholic neighbors would feel if a bomb destroyed the Vatican – or perhaps we remember the sick, disoriented feeling we had watching the Twin Towers fall in New York City and hearing that a plane had been flown into the Pentagon. For Luke’s Jewish readers, their world had changed irrevocably, forever, and yet they had to find a way to make sense of this new world in which they found themselves. At the same time, among the first Christians there was the tradition that their generation would not pass away before Jesus returned – and yet by the time Luke was writing, most of those who were eyewitnesses to Jesus’ works on earth had either died or were well on in years, and Jesus had not returned. What did it all mean?

Each of the Gospel writers witnessed to Jesus in a way that made sense to their readers. The verses in Luke immediately preceding today’s reading deal with the destruction of the Temple. But in today’s reading, Luke quotes Jesus as talking in broader terms, about signs in the sun, moon and stars, echoing apocalyptic language from the books of Joel and Daniel. But – similar to Jeremiah – when everything appears to be falling apart and those around are fainting from fear, Luke quotes Jesus as telling his listeners to stand up and raise their heads, because their redemption draws nigh and the kingdom of God is near.

Jesus then goes on to talk about the fig tree – this is in Matthew and Mark as well, but Luke broadens it to include “all the trees” – when you see leaves, you know summer is on the way. In the same way, when everything seems to be falling apart, coming apart at the seams, while our neighbors are panicking and screaming and passing out from fear, we are to stand tall and be confident, for our redemption is near.

How are we supposed to, in the words of Kipling, keep our heads when all about are losing theirs? By being prepared – Jesus tells his hearers not to get weighed down by excess or drink or the distractions of life. If we’re swept up in the dailiness of our own lives, when that dailiness comes undone, comes unglued, comes apart at the seams, we’ll come unglued as well. We’ll panic, throw up our hands, faint. But if we are prepared, we will know that even when everything around us shakes, rattles, and rolls, our gracious God is still in charge – our redemption is drawing nigh.

So our Gospel reading today, more than anything, is a call to wake up – it’s as if Jesus wanted to grab his listeners – and wants to grab us, who live in a society suffering from some cultural version of attention deficit disorder - by the shoulders and shake us and say, “Wake up! Wake up! Pay attention! Don’t get distracted by shiny objects! Keep your eyes on the prize!” I don’t think it’s a call to engage in speculation about what year or what day Jesus will return. This passage isn’t about chronos time – isn’t about our calendars – but about kairos time – the appointed time, the right time, God’s time – about which only God knows for sure. Rather, it’s a call to be attentive at all times, and to trust that God is working out God’s purposes as God knows best.

What does it all mean? It’s hard to pay attention for days and weeks and months and years on end. It’s probably hard some Sundays to pay attention for a single hour, or less if our organist is away. It’s so easy to sleepwalk through life, to go through life on autopilot, to go through the motions. Even in the church, it’s easy to worship on autopilot. For longtime members, we’ve begun our worship with an opening hymn and then, except on communion Sundays, pages 4 and 5 in the liturgy for decades, maybe for our whole lives. It’s what we’ve always done. It’s what we know. And over the years we’ve sung all of the hymns at one time or another, except for the new ones Pastor Dave tries out now and then. Do we really expect God to break into a comfortable Sunday morning routine and shake us up? And if God did, what would it be like? Would it be a rude awakening? And yet Jesus assures us that somehow despite the familiarity, if we’re attentive, God can and God does break through. God shakes us up, causes us to hear even familiar words in a new way, causes us to change how we live, how we act toward God and neighbor.

“So also, when you see these things taking place, you know that the kingdom of God is near. Heaven and earth will pass away, but my words will not pass away. 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.” So may we not sleepwalk through our lives or our common life together, but live fully awake and fully alive to all that God is doing around us and in us and through us for others. Amen.