This sermon was preached on November 29, 2015 for the First Sunday of Advent at Grace Episcopal Church in Medford, MA. The readings for this sermon were: Jeremiah 33:14-16, 1 Thessalonians 3:9-13, Luke 21:25-36, and Psalm 25:1-9.
But then here's Advent. In a culture of skipping straight from candy corn to candy canes, here's Advent. In the Episcopal tradition, Advent is the season of preparation for the birth of Jesus marked by the four Sundays leading up to Christmas. The season of Advent deliberately asks us to pause and sink deeply into getting spiritually ready, to take a four-week long deep breath before diving headfirst into celebration. It's why we begin the church year not with the birth of our founder, confusingly enough, but more than four weeks before, on this day. Advent is here to remind us that the birth of Jesus isn't just the spark that ignites our new faith. The coming of Messiah is also the long-awaited fulfillment of a promise God made to David, a promise of a new kingdom of everlasting peace that prophets like Jeremiah, who we just heard, retold to God’s people for a thousand years.
This season invites us back to the moments of doubt and fear that the Hebrew people experienced in those thirty generations between the making of the covenant and its fulfillment. Advent asks us to remember what it meant for God’s people to sit in the dark and wait. What must it have felt like? How did they stay faithful for so long?
How do we? Advent comes to us as the nights grow longer, and colder, and our world literally becomes that much darker. This year, it also comes at a moment of tangible panic around the world as humanity faces rising threats of domestic and international terrorism, the plight of more refugees than the world has ever seen, and an impending climate crisis that will envelop the globe. How do we keep hoping at times like these? What are we hoping for?
As Christians, Advent reminds us that we are waiting for our own promise to be fulfilled. Today’s Gospel is from Luke, and again we are beginning near the ending, right before Jesus is betrayed by his friend and executed. In this passage, Jesus warns his disciples that the destruction of the temple of Jerusalem will be heralded by the persecution and martyrdom of his followers, by the fall of their nation, and by the shaking of the very powers of the heavens. Within that though, we hear Jesus offer a new promise, the promise of his triumphant return. The Son of Man will come again.
But we don’t get to skip ahead to celebrating the wonderful new kingdom of peace just yet. This passage is much more focused on preparing us for what comes before the end. Instead of imagining the joy of Jesus’s victorious return, the author of Luke’s Gospel wants to make sure that his original intended audience, the early fledgling Christian community, first knows how to look for hope in that desolate and frightening place. Be alert at all times, Jesus says. Be on the lookout for tiny, fragile leaves emerging into the midst of the chaos. Stand up and raise your heads. Yes, your worst fears will come true. And so will God’s promise.
So here we are, back at beginning of the ending of the story. Back to sitting in the dark and wondering whether God will come through on his promise. For me, stepping into that place of waiting is a difficult choice. Willingly planting both of my feet where the Hebrew people stood for generations and where the early Christians huddled together for strength, also means diving into petrifying doubt. It’s that tiny intake of breath right before I say that part in the creed about Jesus coming back, that scary feeling underneath the prayers you and I pray that we’re not sure will ever be answered. And here’s Advent, asking us to leap into those moments of terrifying uncertainty and to keep watch for the tender buds of faith within them.
So in today’s passage, Jesus gives us each a choice. When we feel the terror pressing in all around us, when the storm clouds threaten to engulf our horizons, we can faint from fear and foreboding of what is coming upon the world. We can close our eyes to the destruction and evil in our world and just slip away. Or even more familiarly, we can choose to weigh our hearts down with dissipation and drunkenness and the worries of this life, all that busyness and mass consumerism and careless distractions. Or we can keep alert, stand up, raise our heads, and stare the truth of what’s happening in our world right in the face.
Here’s the thing, there’s a lot to be said for the type of hope that focuses on the joyful beginning and the triumphant end. Sometimes that’s all we can do. Today, in the first Sunday of Advent, we are invited to step into the beginning of the ending, into the Advent type of hoping. The kind that thrusts us into the very things we fear the most in order to uncover the deepest seeds of faith. Later on in the church year, right before Easter, we’ll prepare for Jesus’s resurrection by confronting and overcoming the darkness inside ourselves during the forty days of Lent. In these four weeks before Christmas, we’ll prepare for the coming of God into the world by confronting the darkness of all around us and by overcoming the despair we feel when we truly open our eyes to what it all might mean.
We know that we can drive out the darkness with fluorescent lighting and strings of brightly colored blinking bulbs. We know, too, that we can also step out into the long, cold night, raise our heads and strain to see the stars. After all, how will we ever find those tiny points of light unless we are willing to sit the dark, take that long deep breath, and dare to hope?
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