28 November 2010

“Hope”
1st Sunday in Advent – cycle A
28 November 2010


The days are coming.
The Scripture readings are pointing the way.
The hymns and carols lead us there, anticipation written in song.
The words of our liturgy bring us to the very gates.
To what are we drawing so close?
Jesus’ return to earth, of course!
Oh … you thought I was going to say Christmas.
At this time of year, everything points the way to Christmas … everything, that is, except these days in the liturgical year, these Sundays in the season of Advent.
Today we begin this season of hope with a word of hope. From our prayer of the day … “Stir up your power, Lord Christ, and come …” to those words from Isaiah and Matthew … to our hymns and songs … we stand together in a counter-cultural moment … because what we’re focusing on today is not Christmas, but the return of Jesus to earth … what we confess in the Creed, what Jesus promises to his disciples … that final Advent for which we long and hope.
But … I don’t think that many people, people of faith or not, Christian or not, I don’t think that many people truly look forward with longing and expectation to Jesus’ return to earth. Especially on this day. Especially at this time of the year. We would, more likely, rather jump right in to the Christmas anticipation celebration going on all around us … rising at 3 am to go shopping! … rather than stand and sing, “The King Shall Come,” or “Lo, He Comes With Clouds Descending,” as we look forward to our redemption drawing near.
Advent carols such as those aren’t what we most often hear this time of year. Hundreds of radio stations have already switched their formats to all-Christmas music this year, 24 hours of constantly repeated “Home for the Holidays” and “Grandma got run over by a Reindeer.” Many of them started their non-stop holiday extravaganza right after Halloween. What’s driving this? A music director at a Philadelphia radio station says, “Maybe it’s the mood of the country, people want an early pick-me-up.”
Christmas is a pick me up, at least the way we view it.
But Jesus’ return, well, that’s a real downer.
For starters, we have no idea when it will be. We all know when Christmas is, we can circle the date on our calendars, make plans, buy lots and lots of presents and food, make a big deal of it, our mid-winter party and celebration.
But how do we prepare for Jesus’ return?
Jesus doesn’t exactly give us a lot of clues in that Gospel reading.

But about that day and hour no one knows, neither the angels of heaven, nor the Son, but only the Father. For as the days of Noah were, so will be the coming of the Son of Man. For as in those days before the flood they were eating and drinking, marrying and giving in marriage, until the day Noah entered the ark, and they knew nothing until the flood came and swept them all away, so too will be the coming of the Son of Man … Keep awake therefore, for you do not know on what day your Lord is coming … therefore you also must be ready, for the Son of Man is coming at an unexpected hour.

Doesn’t sound like a lot of fun, does it?
And so the popular interpretation about Jesus’ words here, what he says about his return, are … gloom and doom. Negativity. Depression. Something we’d rather do without, especially now, here, today, when we’d probably rather be looking at a fully decorated Christmas tree than lighting one puny Advent candle.
But why is that?
How did this vital part of the good news ever get so laden down with bad feelings?
Because it sure didn’t start out this way.
The first hearers and readers of Matthew’s gospel, back in the early centuries of the Church, would have heard Jesus’ words here as promise and hope. To those who still had the memory of Jesus fresh before them … in those first decades after his crucifixion and resurrection … these words were radical, and full of grace and hope.
For these verses said to them that the One whom they had rejected, the one whom they had killed on a cross, was going to come back – not for revenge, not to punish and destroy all of creation, but instead … to deliver it from the end that would naturally come without his intervention … total destruction.
So, being a person of faith in Matthew’s time meant living in three Advents at once …
… first, with the memory of God’s promise throughout history, to come and save, to redeem his creation … as we heard in the proclamation of the prophet Isaiah …
… second, with the more immediate memory of Jesus, living, serving, healing, calling, suffering, dying … rising from the dead … Jesus, present for them in the water and promise of baptism, in the bread and wine promise of Holy Communion, and in the flesh and blood promise of the gathered community of believers …
… and third, living with hope in the final advent promise … which we hear in the words of Matthew’s Gospel, that Jesus will come again to return and rescue, to save those who follow him.
This was radical news … as radical as the resurrection … and so the two central rallying points for the early Christian Church were points of hope …
… the hopeful message of Easter resurrection, and the hopeful message of Jesus’ return to earth in power and glory.
That’s right, hopeful message … these words provided our Christian ancestors with hope … hope for them that, in spite of the persecution, the arrests, tortures and killings that followers of Jesus had to endure, that indeed Jesus would come back to earth and set everything right, rescuing and redeeming them.
But we don’t hear these words as words of hope, today, we twenty first century people who say we believe in Jesus … do we? Not that way, not at all.
And why is that?
Could it be that the very stuff Jesus is warning his hearers about in these verses has happened to us … that we are too occupied with the same things as those people “in the days of Noah” so we act like we know nothing about Jesus’ return to earth?
A bloated people, with too much stuff, too much comfort, and too, too much of everything having to be “fun” or else it’s “boring.”
All of which leads us to being insulated and removed from the harsh realities of life.
After all, no one persecutes us for being here.
We don’t even have to tell anyone about Jesus, let anyone know we’ve been part of corporate worship, even let on that we might be a Christian, for that matter.
Hmn.
So maybe the reason we hear this good news, no, this best of all news, that the one we rejected, the one we killed – for we all share in the guilt of this act, we are of the same generation, the same flesh and blood, the same sinfulness as those who actually did the awful deed of hammering his hands and feet to the cross … this One we rejected and killed, this Jesus, is coming back to earth for the rescue and redemption of those who follow him … maybe the reason we hear this good news of Jesus’ return as bad news, as judgment, is that there is still something in us that needs to die.
Yeah. There is.
Our pride. Our self-absorption and self-centeredness. Our lie that we are somehow better than everyone else, whether that’s because we’re Americans or Pacific Northwesterners, as 21st century Christians, as Lutherans, or as congregants of Nativity Lutheran, whether we’ve been here for 30 years or 30 minutes.
Our avoidance and denial of suffering and death … as we keep trying to buy our way to happiness, surrounding ourselves with more and more stuff.
Our belief that, somehow, some way, we know better than God in Jesus Christ – as we see and hear and experience him through the Word of Scripture, Baptism, Communion, the proclamation of the sermon – that we know better than him and how he calls us to live our lives in this world as humble servants and messengers of peace.
It all comes back to that First Commandment – whoever and whatever we fear, love and trust the most is our god.
What’s yours? What’s mine? What’s that thing or person that we would just die to live without?
If it’s not Jesus, then we’re just dead wrong.
And so we are called to see ourselves as we truly are, to view our lives through the shadow of Jesus’ Cross, and what we see from there is not pretty.
What we see is that we are sinners in hopeless bondage to a way of life that leads to death … that we, too, are people in need of a Savior, just as much as anyone else throughout history. Maybe, even more.
We need his forgiveness. We need his salvation.
And we need Jesus to come again, we need our redemption from all the distractions that make us no better than the people who lived “in the days of Noah,” everything that pulls us down, that turns us inside ourselves, that keeps us from living life the way our God intended it for us … selflessly free in love and service and care for each other, especially those who are poorer or sicker or weaker or needier than us.
We desperately need this word of hope … “The Son of Man is coming at an unexpected hour.”
We need this Good News … the word of Christ’s advent … God’s promises for us, kept in the past … promises lived out here and now, in Word and Water, Bread and Wine … people brought together by God’s promise, people brought together in God’s hope …
And we also hope for that future in Christ … the blessed Advent which is to come, the fulfillment of the promise that “Jesus will come again,” not to destroy, but to save. Us.
… and so the word on our lips this day shall be the same prayer as our early Christian brothers and sisters of so long ago, words of deep longing and hope …
… Marana tha! Come, Lord Jesus!
Come, O Lord to us … may that day not find us “deeply wailing,” but in “endless exultation,” as we see you “high on your eternal throne, claiming the kingdom as your own.”
Come, O Lord, to us … make us like children, faces pressed to windows in the cold of winter, rubbing the steam off the panes, hearts in their throats as they await grandma and grandpa, relatives coming from afar, happy to see them again … may we anticipate your coming again to us with that same gleeful joy and happiness.
“Yea, amen, let all adore you, O Savior, our Messiah, our rescuer, our redeemer, you who have promised to come again and reign forever and ever!”
Marana tha! Come, Lord Jesus!
And come soon! Oh, come soon!