This sermon was preached for the First Sunday of Advent, December 1, 2024. The texts for this Sunday are: Jeremiah 33:14-16, 1 Thessalonians 3:9-13, Luke 21:25-36, and Psalm 25:1-9.
One of the small joys of homeownership for my father is what he affectionately calls anti-gardening. It’s where he goes out into the bushes in the back of his yard and takes a chainsaw and machete to the vines and weeds that have grown up over the last season. He’s always quite gleeful about it - it’s easy to see he finds it extremely cathartic.
As any experienced gardener or landscaper will tell you, of course, that’s not actually anti-gardening. It’s just gardening. Pruning, weeding, ripping up - it’s all part of the creative process. You have to destroy some parts of the garden in order to let other parts thrive.
We are used to praising God as God the Creator. But God is Destroyer, too. God has to be. As Christians, we look forward to the coming of the kingdom of heaven, ushered in by the second coming of Jesus - one of the Advent this whole new season of the church year prepares us for. But the process of that new creation coming into being - Jesus is letting us know in this passage today that it’s going to be rough. The world will come apart in distressing, horrifying ways.
It’s a lot more fun to talk about building the kingdom of God. About creating and planting and tending. Frankly, dwelling on that aspect of being a faithful Christian lends itself nicely to parish ministry, too. After all, we are collectively - you and I - devoting quite a bit of our lives and investing quite a bit of our capital into the maintenance of an ancient institution. It’s less fun - at least I’ll speak for myself here - to focus on the tearing down of the kingdoms of this world. All that must be destroyed for the kingdom of God to be established on earth.
Dismantling is terrifying. It’s painful, too. There’s uncertainty, there’s grief - there’s anger, of course. And I have to say that it feels like a difficult moment to be speaking about the Good News of dismantling. A few of you have shared with me recently about worries you have that the institutions you’ve spent your careers building up - healthcare, education, environmental protection groups - may be on the brink of decimation.
Read Jesus’ words again. He is not reveling in the tearing apart of creation, or even the downfall of the powers of heaven. He does not gleefully celebrate the distress of nations. And neither should we.
Texts like these, apocalyptic texts, remind us that Christianity itself was born in the rubble of the Second Temple and incubated in the so-called Age of Chaos that began the decline of the Roman Empire. Early Christians witnessed the terror of quelled revolts, violent persecutions, and profound uncertainty about the future of civilization itself. Our faith learned to speak truthfully about the horrors of the human experience and the limitations of human frailty. Our tradition carries the capacity to withstand chaos, suffering, and terror within its prayers and scriptures. We do not turn away when the world falls apart; we do not faint from fear. We stand up and raise our heads.
What Jesus offers us here is the ability to see God at work not just in the building up but in the tearing down, too. God is Creator, but God is Liberator, too. God is the breaker of yokes and the smasher of chains. We are also called to be dismantlers alongside God, confronting the forces of death, corruption, and exploitation. We are to listen with God’s ears to the voices that cry out against the structures and systems that are holding the vulnerable back, keeping the forgotten out, and dragging the least even further down. Even if that means unraveling what feels like our life’s work.
There was one bush in my parents’ yard at their house on Block Island that was particularly distinctive - a mark of my father’s quirky landscaping techniques that we all grew fond of quite quickly. It all came about one Valentine’s Day they’d had to spend apart for some reason or another - my dad on the island and my mom travelling somewhere else. My dad spent the weekend anti-gardening, and on an uncharacteristically romantic whim, he trimmed the bush into the shape of a heart and sent her a photo. He trimmed the bush into that shape every year thereafter – a big heart right on their front lawn. Recently, though, after getting pretty involved with the Block Island Nature Conservancy, my dad learned that this particular bush was an invasive species. So last summer he took a chainsaw to it one final time and cut it down. Once he knew its true impact on the local ecosystem, he could not, in good conscience, let it stand.
The bush had brought my family a lot of joy - it used to be the first part of the yard I’d see as I drove up the road, right before I started turning into their drive. It had become a symbol of marital devotion and my parents’ love. But once my father knew the truth about its origins, its root system, and the harm it could cause to native plants and the island he’d grown to love, he knew it needed to be dismantled. We could find other ways to decorate, to express our love.
There’s a term these days for the dismantling of one’s belief system: deconstruction. Back when I was deconstructing my faith in my early twenties that wasn’t what it was called, but it certainly was what I was doing. What studying religious texts academically at college and living abroad in a Muslim-majority country was doing. I remember the pain of that process quite clearly - how much it hurt to lose my faith in God, to become disillusioned with the church and Christianity. I remember it felt like thirstily reaching into a well where I used to find water, only to find it completely dry. My well was taken apart brick by brick, but no eternal spring of living water was uncovered. A couple of years later, encountering Christ in the Episcopal Church, I began to think of my newly emerging faith in a new way. I found myself doodling images of an underwater volcano - not water springing up but lava - a powerful, fierce, Holy-Spirit faith spilling from my inner depths to form a new mountain of hardened obsidian.
After years of prayer and discernment, I know now that God dismantled the faith of my childhood - the simplistic Sunday School doctrines - so that I could form a stronger foundation of faith, one could withstand the complexities of adulthood and my new vocation. I am grateful for that faith and the strength it gives me. And yet, I would not wish the pain of losing one’s faith on anyone.
Both can be true - God can be at work in the world dismantling, liberating, tearing down - and we can still lament the collateral damage. We can anticipate the new creation - even catch glimpses of the kingdom of God breaking into this world - while we still grieve what it will cost.
Our greatest hope lies not in what human hands can build. Our tradition, after all, reminds us that everything human beings make is tainted by sin and therefore inherently flawed - even what we craft and use with the best of intentions, even what we find a way to use for good. Our salvation does not depend on humanity finally figuring out how to create a perfect society made up of perfect institutions. Our ultimate hope is anchored in God’s new creation that is still coming, redemption and justice beyond our own imaginings.
More than that - Advent is the time of preparation for the first and second coming of Christ, and therefore the good news of Advent is twofold. Jesus is coming again at the end of time. This is not the world as God meant it to be. Nothing lasts forever, everything ends, everything except God's love. Every bit of this world will be dismantled someday - all our life's work, our institutions, our legacies. There is real pain, real grief, and real uncertainty in that destruction, and there is holiness, too, because destruction is a necessary part of the remaking. The Good News is that Jesus will be there to guide us when it all comes apart and only love is left - when love is all in all. But the other good news of Advent is that first coming on Christmas. The astonishing miracle of Christ’s arrival in the middle of the timeline, too. God-with-us in the midst of our suffering. We don't have to do this alone.
The hole where my parents’ bush used to be has become a symbol in itself, a reminder of my father’s commitment to the health of the island he loves. My husband also pointed something else out to me as I was writing this sermon. Without the large, thorny bush taking up a chunk of my parents’ yard, our family has been slowly wearing in a new, more direct path through their lawn. Now when we are struggling up the hill with a stroller full of toddlers impatient to see Nana and Grampy, we can make a beeline straight right for their front door.
There are different, holy experiences waiting for us on the other side of deconstruction and dismantling, even though we can’t quite see them yet.
There will be pathways where there once were bushes. Volcanoes where there once were wells.
Amen.
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| My father and a wagonful of toddlers making a new pathway where the bush used to be. |
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