Stand Up!

Scripture:  Jeremiah 33:14-16,  Psalm 25:1-10,  I  Thessalonians 3:9-13,  Luke 21:25-36

Today is the First Sunday of Advent, and the first Sunday of the church calendar.  Advent, and especially the first Sunday of Advent, is always a reminder that the church and the world have different agendas, that calendar time – the Greek word is chronos – and God’s time – the Greek word is kairos – are out of sync.   On one hand, in some ways the church is ahead of the calendar – our year begins the first Sunday of Advent, usually the last Sunday in November but this year the first Sunday in December, while calendar year 2019 doesn’t start until January 1, more than a month from now.  On the other hand, in some ways the world’s agenda pushes ahead of the church’s agenda.  Momentum for Christmas sales has been building for some weeks now, and with the coming of the retail calendar’s holiest day – Black Friday – it’s all Christmas, all the time, with Christmas music across the dial on the radio and as background music at the mall.  But in the church, we don’t just fast-forward to Christmas, but celebrate Advent – a time of waiting, a time of anticipating, the coming of the promised Messiah.  And so we do not begin Advent with Christmas carols, but with the plaintive Advent hymns – O Come, O Come Emanuel – requesting God to come and be with us.  We sing hymns of anticipation – “Watchman, Tell Us Of The Night”.   We sing, believing that while God’s fulfillment of our requests and anticipation do not come on our schedule,  they will come at the right time, which is not calendar time, not chronos time, but kairos time, God’s time.

And if Advent in general throws our sense of time out of sync with the world, today’s Gospel reading will really do a number on us:  “"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…..”   This doesn’t sound anything like “It’s beginning to look a lot like Christmas.”  Indeed, each year, the Gospel reading for the first Sunday of Advent comes, not from the beginning of the Gospel, but toward the end, when Jesus makes predictions of a time of dislocation and upheaval soon to come – predictions that began with Jesus saying that the Jerusalem Temple, glorious as it was in Jesus’ day, would be destroyed, with not one stone left upon another…and these predictions were fulfilled, at least in part, by the invasion of Jerusalem by Rome and destruction of the Temple in Jerusalem in 70 AD.  The destruction of the Temple, the center of Jewish life, would have been far more wrenching than the departure of a pastor or the closure of a church would be to us….because no matter how beloved, there are always other pastors and other churches.  But for the Jews of that day, the Temple was the focus of their religious life, the center of all that was good and holy in their lives, the house where God was literally thought to dwell – and Rome’s invasion of Jerusalem literally leveled all of that to the ground.  For them, it really was like the sun, moon and stars falling from heaven, and utter darkness prevailing upon the earth.

As we read this passage, with its graphic images of destruction and fear and foreboding, I think we can relate.  The world, the nation appears to be becoming increasingly unglued.  This year has brought numerous mass shootings, pipe bombs being sent to politicians, neo-Nazis and white supremacists marching in the streets.  California wildfires over the course of 2018 engulfed nearly 1.7 million acres  - and most recently, flash floods are now sweeping over areas most recently hit by wildfires, so that raging floods may carry away much of what the flames left behind.   While we haven’t seen signs in the sun, moon and stars, climate change is bringing the roar of the sea and waves to places that never anticipated being or intended to become beachfront property…and climate scientists tell us that absent very rapid and radical change on the part of human beings and human institutions such as corporations and the military over the next ten years, worse is to follow. So climate scientists tell us we’ve got roughly ten years to get our acts together, and the immediate outlook isn’t encouraging.   The possibilities for world war and for the destruction of life on earth are surely enough to make people faint with fear and foreboding, if we allow ourselves to be conscious of them. And yet, it is at this exact moment that, according to Luke, Jesus said, “Now when these things begin to take place, stand up and raise your heads, because your redemption is drawing near.”

Our reading from Mark’s gospel two weeks ago sounded very similar – it was Mark’s version of the same passage – and it included the words, “This is but the beginning of the birth pangs.”  And so it is – not the beginning of the end, but an ending making way for a new beginning, just as the end of pregnancy means the birth of a new baby.  Those who first heard these words were living in a time of transition – it was clear to Jesus, and would become clear in due course to his followers, that the order of things at the Temple at Jerusalem and the order of things in terms of the Jews’ relationship with Rome wasn’t going to stay the way it was, that it was unsustainable, that it would all come crashing down around them, and soon.  And we also, who read these words 2,000 years later, are also living in a time of transition, when much of what is familiar and comforting to us is passing away, and something new is being born.   And those of you who are mothers know that birth is neither predictable nor painless.    We are in the midst of the birth pangs of change, and for many, the pain is excruciating.  We’re used to the map of the world looking a certain way, and due to climate change and rising sea levels, it almost certainly will not look the same in the future…residents of long-inhabited islands are finding the sea lapping at their door fronts, and even here in America we’re seeing flooding of a kind we hadn’t seen in the past.  We’re used to the flow of our lives looking a certain way, organized around work and school and church schedules - and they may not in the future.   I’m reminded of the opening lines of William Butler Yeats’ poem The Second Coming:

Turning and turning in the widening gyre

The falcon cannot hear the falconer;

Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold;

Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world,

The blood-dimmed tide is loosed, and everywhere

The ceremony of innocence is drowned;

The best lack all conviction, while the worst

Are full of passionate intensity.

Surely some revelation is at hand;

Surely the Second Coming is at hand…..

The poem goes on from there, but with Yeats, we may well wonder, in the oft-quoted closing lines of the poem,

“what rough beast, its hour come round at last,

Slouches towards Bethlehem to be born?”

And as much as we may try to stave it off, life in the church is changing as well.  Religious writer Phyllis Tickle has written, looking back on church history, that every 500 years or so, the worldwide church has a giant rummage sale, as long established forms of worship and church organization are set aside and new ones emerge.  Around the year 400 it was Constantine converting to Christianity and the church becoming accepted – some would say coopted by – the state – and going through a process of standardization, by adopting the creeds – the Apostles Creed, the Nicene Creed - that we still use today.  Around 1100 it was the split between the Eastern Orthodox churches and the Western Roman  Catholic churches.  Around 1500, the Reformation.  And another 500 or so years later, we’re going through another giant rummage sale.  It doesn’t mean that the core of our faith will change, but the way we express it almost certainly will; the treasure will remain, but the fragile earthly vessels containing the treasure will crumble.  Many churches across the country, Protestant and Catholic, are closing, and we’ve surely seen this here in Bridesburg over the past five years.   And yet many younger people have a deep faith and spirituality and are yearning for ways to express it. What will the church of the future look like?  Will we go back to house churches, of the kind that nurtured the faith of the earliest believers?  Will worship take place online?  I think it’s safe to say that many of our current denominational structures and hierarchies will either change or go by the wayside…they were created in a different time to serve different needs when the church was in a different place.  I say this with some sadness, as I’ve been active for years in working in the wider UCC and cherish many relationships from that important work….but it’s also clear to me that our current denominational structures just aren’t sustainable in their current form for the future, that they will either change or die – and probably there will be both change and death.  What new forms of church governance may emerge, one can only guess.  The faith will go on, but the ways we express it may not look like what we grew up with. 

All this is deeply unsettling, but our Saviour tells us, “when you see these things, stand up and raise your heads, because your redemption is drawing near.”  When everyone around us is fainting and falling and generally freaking out, our faith tells us to stand up and to look up, to look to God.  And really, it depends where we put our trust.  If we put our trust in the systems of our day, invest our hopes in current political and economic realities, pin our dreams to the powers that be, we will learn to our sorrow what it is to have built our lives on sinking sand, what it is to see all we’ve lived for come crashing down around us.  But if we raise our heads and open our eyes to see what new thing God may be doing, we may indeed find that what looks like our worst nightmare may create space for our fondest hopes of redemption and salvation.

For a person of my age, who was not around at the time, it’s interesting to look back on some of the pivotal moments in world history or in American history that our longtime members lived through – say, the time of Hitler’s reign in Germany or the McCarthy era, when paranoia over the “red menace” of communism destroyed so many careers and lives, or the civil rights movement – times when the actions of individuals and churches could really make a difference either in letting lives be destroyed or saving them, letting injustice continue or standing up for justice.  I can’t help wondering what I would have done had I lived in those tumultuous times. Would I have sheltered Jews in Hitler’s Germany, or turned them in – or turned my head and looked away?  During the McCarthy era, would I have named names and turned in my neighbors on suspicion of being godless commies, or boldly refused to testify – or would I have just kept my head down to avoid trouble?  Would I have marched with those advocating for civil rights, or been among the crowds attacking them - would I have been on the sidelines, in effect taking a stand by trying not to take a stand? Well, we need not wonder, because we are again living in such a pivotal moment, when “business as usual” will not be sufficient, when being a bystander will not save us, when our faith is being and will continue to be tested, whether our faith is made of gold or of fool’s gold.  The test of our faith will probably not be people holding a machine gun to our heads and asking if we are a Christian.  Nor will the test of our faith involve getting caught up in the annual wars over Merry Christmas…from where I stand, the whole thing is a lot of misdirected energy whipped up by TV pundits to distract from real issues.  The true test of our faith will more likely be members of unpopular and hated groups asking us for help and refuge and sanctuary, as Jews asked Christians in Germany during the Nazi era, and forcing a decision on us whether to go with what our neighbors want and turn our backs on those in need, or to do the difficult but Christ-like thing and help.  This might look like what our sister congregation, St Paul’s UCC in Exton, did in sheltering an undocumented Rom -the old term was “gypsy” - family in their church.  Churches are considered sanctuaries, and law enforcement such as ICE – Immigration and Customs Enforcement - generally won’t go after people living in a church, particularly if worship is going on….and some churches have gone to the heroic lengths of holding 24/7 worship marathons for days, weeks, sometimes even months on end in order to protect those living with them from ICE .  Actually, a few years ago, I was part of such an effort to protect a residential rehab program being held at what had been Healing Stream UCC at C and Indiana Streets, which our longtime members may remember as Kensington Congregational UCC.  The city was trying to shut the program down. A number of pastors, myself included, held rolling worship services every night for several weeks, far into the evening, to ward off enforcement from the city.   I brought my guitar, I preached, and we had church till 11 at night…and then I slept there, ready to pop up and start another worship service if the city came at 1 am or 3 am or whenever.   And it was successful….eventually the city backed off.  Sometimes this is what loving our neighbors looks like.

 “When we see these things, stand up and lift your heads, for your redemption is drawing nigh.”   Before unbelievers will keep Christ in Christmas, they need to see Christ in Christians.  If we want to keep Christ in Christmas, if we want to proclaim that Jesus is the reason for the season, the way to do so is by doing the things Jesus did – feeding the hungry, clothing the naked, bringing healing to the sick, welcoming the stranger, visiting the sick and those in prison.  Things we should be doing every day, but never more so than as we prepare for Christmas.  Words – even words about Jesus – are cheap, a dime a dozen.  The unbelieving world has heard more than enough of our God-talk, to the point of nausea.   And – news flash – they don’t believe us.  Put bluntly, they think we’re full of crap.  They need to see our God-walk before they will believe our God-talk.

We live in an in-between time, a time of “already” and “not yet” at the same time.  In Jesus, the reign of God has already broken into the world, and it is not yet fully accomplished.  And so we stand in the gap between already and not yet, witnessing to what we have seen and heard, and looking ahead to what will be.

I’ll close with Paul’s prayer for the church at Thessalonica, who also lived in tumultuous times:  “And may the Lord make you increase and abound in love for one another and for all, just as we abound in love for you. And may he so strengthen your hearts in holiness that you may be blameless before our God and Father at the coming of our Lord Jesus with all his saints.”  May it be so among us. Amen.