Anticipation

Scriptures:  Isaiah 2:1-5, Psalm 122, Romans 13:11-14;  Matthew 24:36-44

Anticipation

 

I’m glad to see everyone here this morning – because the fact that you’re here means that you survived Black Friday.  Seriously!  The traditional big shopping day after Thanksgiving is a time of hope and dread for shoppers everywhere – hope that the store will have that perfect present your child has been asking for every hour on the hour since roughly Halloween; dread of the crowds, and worry that someone else may get the last item in stock.  The feelings of dread, at least, are justified:  at Franklin Mills mall, a fight broke out between several patrons that was said to involve the use of a stun gun.  And it’s not just a Philly thing – in Garfield, New Jersey, two shoppers who were fighting over a TV at a Walmart were pepper-sprayed by police.   In Chicago, a suspected shoplifter who drove his car while dragging a police officer was shot by another police officer.  Stabbings took place at various other stores around the country.  According to the website Black Friday Death Count.com – yes, there is such a website - casualties for Black Friday 2013 included 1 death and 15 injuries – which is a significant improvement from 2011, when two pepper spray attacks, one in North Carolina, one in Los Angeles, pushed the injury total up near 50 nationwide.  It’s beginning to look a lot like Christmas.  Like the old sergeant on the TV show Hill Street Blues used to tell the officers at the beginning of each shift, “Be careful out there.”  Just as an aside, I’m grateful to report that yesterday’s auction here at Emanuel was free of casualties – nobody shot or stabbed or even so much as tased - and I’m very grateful for everyone’s hard work that went into a successful auction.

 

Hope and dread – these emotions also characterize this morning’s Scripture readings.  Similar to our readings from two weeks ago, involving passages from Isaiah and Luke, today’s readings for the first Sunday in Advent set images of hope and dread side by side – Isaiah’s beautiful images of the nations coming to Zion for instruction, images of swords beaten into plowshares and spears into pruning hooks – and Matthew’s ominous images of one person taken, another left – part of a larger apocalyptic section of Matthew’s gospel.  Many TV preachers interpret the Matthew passage, and similar passages in Mark and Luke, as prophecies of Christian believers being raptured away off the earth – as in “beam me up, Scotty” - before the coming of a time of great tribulation that will usher in the end of the world – although if you read the passage carefully, while Jesus says “one will be taken and one will be left”,  Jesus says nothing about where those taken are taken or why those who are left are left, and there’s a line about “where the corpse lays, the vultures will gather” which was left out of our reading.  Much of the imagery in the Matthew reading is based on the destruction of the Temple in Jerusalem by the Romans in the year 70 AD – which many Jews saw as the end of the world – certainly the end of their world as they’d experienced it to that point.  Some of the imagery looks back even further, to the desecration of the Jerusalem Temple by the Greek emperor Antiochus IV in roughly 170 BC, when Antiochus sacrificed a pig on the altar of the Jerusalem Temple.  But the passage also looks forward to the return of the Messiah, while cautioning that along the way there will be many false Messiahs and false attempts at trying to set dates and locations for the return of the Messiah – the kind of false attempts at date setting that Harold Camping got spectacularly wrong when he predicted, not once but twice, that the world would end back in 2011 - the kind of false almost-but-not-quite date setting that has kept Hal Lindsey re-writing and adjusting his predictions of the end of the world since the publication of his book “The Late Great Planet Earth” in 1970.  To look back at the original 1970 edition of the Late Great Planet Earth, with its predictions of the involvement of the old Soviet Union and “Red China” in the Battle of Armageddon, is like stepping into a time capsule of Cold War-era paranoia.  But Lindsey is still writing, still adjusting and updating his predictions every few years.  Hey, if nothing else, it’s good for book sales – “what in God’s name (literally) is Lindsey gonna predict this time” - and Lindsey’s readership has had his books virtually flying off the shelves for the past 40 years and counting.  Maybe you found some on sale while you were avoiding Black Friday’s stabbings and stun gun fights.  And then, of course, there’s Tim LaHaye’s “Left Behind” books, which spin tales of end-time tribulation that makes Black Friday at Walmart look like Kumbayah around a camp fire.  At Franklin Mills, the worst weapon involved was a stun gun; in the Left Behind books, even the good guys carry Uzi’s, and you don’t want to know what the bad guys are carrying.  Praise the Lord and pass the ammo.

 

So, turning away from our modern-day mongers of doom and gloom, what are we to make of troubling passages such as our reading from Matthew, and seemingly “too-good-to-be-true” passages like our reading from Isaiah. Believe it or not, both come out of similar circumstances, namely people of faith living under tremendous oppression and trying to make sense of their circumstances, given their faith that God is in charge – really, it’s the classic question that the faithful have always struggled with: “If God is in charge, why is there so much rotten stuff going on in the world.”  In the Isaiah passage, the Jewish people are suffering under their own corrupt political and religious leadership in the years leading up to Assyria’s conquest of the northern kingdom of Israel; during the time Matthew’s gospel was being written, Jews and early Christians are being ground into the dust by Roman oppression.  In both cases, the people are looking to the Lord for change – for the oppressors to be removed from power, for justice and peace to break out.  Today’s reading from Matthew is an example of what is called apocalyptic writing, which tries to look under the surface of all that’s wrong with our world to affirm that God is still in charge and working to set everything right, even in the midst of seeming chaos. Of course, in Biblical times there were no IMAX movie theaters showing 3-D films, so the writers of our Biblical texts struggled through their words to leave their readers with incredibly vivid mental images of what it would look like when God finally at long last stepped into the middle of life’s chaos and confusion to finally make things right.  The prospect of change – of God intervening in history to set things right – is a source of hope for some, a cause of dread for others.

 

What fills you with hope?  What fills you with dread?   Will your hopes be satisfied and your fears relieved by something on sale at the mall – probably not.  I believe we’re all searching in our own way for something more lasting, something more satisfying – a sense that our lives count for something, that all our work and worry and struggle and fear and hope amount to something beyond just scraping by from one day to the next, searching for evidence that we can be something better than a bunch of hostile strangers scrambling for survival like a bunch of crazed shoppers scrambling for the last item on sale at the mall.  I believe we’re searching for a sense of connection to other people – family, friends, neighbors, community - and to something beyond ourselves, searching for a sense that we’re not, in the words of A. E. Housman, “strangers and afraid in a world we never made.”    

 

Advent is a season of waiting.  At the beginning of our service Al lit the Advent candle of hope, reminding us that our time of Advent waiting is a time of hope, a time of anticipating.  We wait, not like death-row inmates awaiting our date with the electric chair, but like children waiting on Christmas Eve for something or someone better than anything we’ll ever find at Franklin Mills.  Or, perhaps waiting like prisoners of our own sins and failings, and the sins and failings of our society, waiting to be told that our sentence is over, that, in the words of Isaiah chapter 40, “that we’ve served our term, that our penalty is paid”, that we’re free at last.  While we wait, we can live in the hope of Paul’s words from Romans that “salvation is nearer to us now than when we became believers; the night is far gone, the day is near.”  And Paul tells us how we are to live during our time of waiting as he writes:  “Let us then lay aside the works of darkness and put on the armor of light; let us live honorably as in the day, not in revelling and drunkenness, not in debauchery and licentiousness, not in quarrelling and jealousy. Instead, put on the Lord Jesus Christ, and make no provision for the flesh, to gratify its desires.”

 

As we begin this season of Advent, this season of waiting for the coming of the Christ child, may we keep in mind these words from a familiar Christmas carol. 

 

O little town of Bethlehem How still we see thee lie
Above thy deep and dreamless sleep The silent stars go by
Yet in thy dark streets shineth The everlasting Light
The hopes and fears of all the years Are met in thee tonight

 

May the presence of Christ calm our fears and fill us with joyful anticipation in this season of hope.  Amen.