Reflections for my sermon on the First Sunday of Advent, December 1, 2024.
“There will be signs,” Jesus said. All around us there are signs, indications that the season has fully changed. The leaves have turned and fallen, the weather is very cold, and here in our sanctuary, in the church the colors of the vestments have changed and greenery has been hung from the rafters.
Now, I will be the first to admit that I already had Christmas music on in my office and the car two weeks before Thanksgiving. We had picked out our tree at the farm in late October and we’ll be picking it up right after services today. I loathe the short days and long nights, yet I love the lights, smells, and happiness of Christmas. So, we light the fire, put on the music, and start soaking the dried fruit in bourbon for the fruit cake. We know that we have turned a seasonal corner, and we are now rapidly approaching…Christmas! Yet Advent is not Christmas, Advent is not even about preparing for Christmas. It is about preparing for the end of this world.
Advent is from the Latin term that means “to arrive, to come” and in the Church calendar, it denotes this season when we are to reflect and prepare for the coming of the Messiah. In this sense, it is a liturgical companion to Lent, when we spend 40 days in prayer, contemplation, and repentance to prepare for Good Friday and Easter. Of course, in many ways, the Advent that we experience today, even the Macy’s Parade on Thanksgiving version, is a preparation for Christmas, when we remember how Jesus, the Messiah, was first born on earth, but Advent is about the Messiah’s secondcoming, when Jesus, the Son of Man and the Son of God, will return to judge the world.
That is why in our Gospel reading today, the First Sunday of Advent, Jesus is talking about the apocalyptic signsof the final days. “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. Then they will see ‘the Son of Man coming in a cloud’ with power and great glory.”
Hardly what you might have been expecting from a Gospel reading just three weeks before Christmas Day. I can’t really imagine Linus, blanket in hand, walking across the stage into the spotlight, saying “Lights, please” and declaring, “Be on guard so that your hearts are not weighed down with dissipation and drunkenness and the worries of this life, and that day catch you unexpectedly, like a trap.” Can you? Yet these are our readings of the last few weeks and during the season of Advent, the reminder that the Day of the LORD, the Day of Judgment is to come. The reasonable question to ask is, “what is the Gospel here, where is the Good News in that?”
This message, the vision of the Son of Man coming in glory and the end of this world, is the very heart of the Gospel: it is the message of redemption, freedom, and peace.
The first thing we need to understand, and I want to make this very clear, Jesus does not mention these signs so that we can decode them to determine when the Final Days will arrive. When I was growing up, we used to listen to various preachers on the radio; my father was very fond of southern preachers, J. Vernon McGee, in particular. There was one preacher I remember coming from Waxahachie, Texas and he would teach about “today’s news in light of biblical prophecy!” Even when I would hear old, replayed sermons in the early 2000s, late at night on the AM radio station driving home from work, he was telling us how Gorbachev (long out of power by then, he didn’t die until 2022!) had the mark of the beast on him. He would declare that the events in modern Israel and the Middle East marked the sure sign that Armageddon was upon us. The efforts to read and interpret events around us are as old as humanity and Jesus even warns against it! He says, “No one knows the day or the hour, not even the son!” (Matthew 24:36)
This week Andrew McGowan, friend and dean of the Episcopal Berkeley Divinity School at Yale, reminded us in his reflections on these readings, “Jesus’ words guard against simplistic contemporary correlations, and refuse to see even the worst political or natural disasters as anything but reminders of the real end. That final stage is presented not as a matter of human events but of cosmic ones, “signs in the sun, the moon, and the stars” (21: 25). Yet still, often people will read the events of today as a roadmap to the End Times. That is not what Jesus intended nor, for that matter, the Revelation John receives and records in the last book of the Bible. These apocalyptic visions are words of exhortation and encouragement.
There will be “wars and rumors of wars” Jesus said in our reading from Mark two weeks ago. That, he said, “is but the beginning of the birth pangs.” I mentioned then that this is the way of new life, it comes through pain and struggle and sometimes even death, but the result is a new creation. Jesus warns his disciples, warns us, of the coming destruction to exhort us to remain faithful and prepared for the coming of the Son of Man. That is the Good News itself, because the Son of Man brings judgment and justice which brings new life and reestablishes the order that God intended in Creation. This world, the old world, passes away so that the new world, the Kingdom of God, may be established.
This is the promise the God made to Israel through his prophets, and we find it in the Isaiah passage that Linus famously quotes, as well as in our reading from Jeremiah today.
Jer. 33 14 See, days are coming—declares the LORD—when I will fulfill the promise that I made concerning the House of Israel and the House of Judah. 15 In those days and at that time, I will raise up a true branch of David’s line, and he shall do what is just and right in the land.
All of these signs and expectations are about the true branch, the Son of Man, the anointed one of David, in other words, the Messiah, who will come and do what is just and right. Why was that so important to Israel? Why should that be important to us? Because we know, we see with our own eyes, we experience it in our lives, that things are not just and right in the land.
While we may not live, as the Jews of Jesus’ day did, in a homeland occupied by an overbearing empire, we do live with other forces that oppress us and tear us down. Addiction, poverty, people in power abusing their authority, people without power using that as an excuse, unhealthy relationships, in other words, in a word: SIN. That is where all of the suffering of our world begins and it ends in the suffering of the Messiah on the Cross.
Jesus speaks of the end of this age even has he came to the end of his earthly life. This passage we read this morning is just before he enters Jerusalem to celebrate his last Passover with his disciples and offer up his life as a sacrifice for the whole world. Yet he looks beyond his death and resurrection, to that final day.
Luke 21.26 People will faint from fear and foreboding of what is coming upon the world, for the powers of the heavens will be shaken. 27 Then they will see ‘the Son of Man coming in a cloud’ with power and great glory.
Jesus is still talking about that future day, whose time of arrival no one but the father knows, when the Son of Man will come (adventus!) in clouds from heaven to be granted by God dominion over all peoples and all nations forever. Jesus is that Son of Man and he will come again, as the angels tell the disciples after watching the risen Jesus ascend into heaven, “this Jesus that has been taken up from you into heaven will come in the same way as you saw him go into heaven.”
Adventus: Jesus will come again. Meanwhile we wait… And waiting can seem hard, especially if we think of it as just sitting around. Yet that is most definitely not the kind of waiting that Jesus expects from us. It is a simple point but consider the other way in which we use the term “to wait.” When we “wait” upon a guest, we are serving them, being attentive to their needs, in a very active and proactive way. Throughout Jesus’ ministry he spoke of the way in which we are to care for others, to be meek yet stand up for justice, to accept grace and to offer it to others, to ensure that the hungry and homeless are fed and housed, to be the Kingdom of God here on earth now even as we await his advent, his coming to fully establish his Reign.
Frederick Buechner states is succinctly. “So to wait for Christ to come in his fullness is not just a passive thing, a pious, prayerful, churchly thing. On the contrary, to wait for Christ to come in his fullness is above all else to act in Christ’s stead as fully as we know how. To wait for Christ is as best we can to be Christ to those who need us to be Christ to them most and to bring them the most we have of Christ’s healing and hope because unless we bring it, it may never be brought at all.”
Rest assured, Christ is coming, Jesus will return in glory to judge the living and the dead, this is the Good News. In the meantime, we have work to do.
Let us prepare for the coming of the Lord.
Amen.
