Sermon: "Our Lenten Journey"

Ash Wednesday Service

February 17, 2010

“But when you fast, put oil on your head and wash your face, so that your fasting may be seen not by others but by your Father who is in secret; and your Father who sees in secret will reward you.” (Matthew 6:17-18)

"Our Lenten Journey"

Welcome aboard fellow travelers.

This is our departure point on our Lenten Journey.

Our tour will begin here on Ash Wednesday and along the way we’ll be making stops at Palm Sunday, Maundy Thursday, Good Friday, Holy Saturday, and we will end our journey at daybreak on Easter Sunday. I suggest that you tighten your seat belts, secure any loose belongings and keep your hands inside the car at all times because it’s going to be a roller coaster of a ride.

We’ll begin here in the dimly lit entryway of Ash Wednesday where we’ll leave behind any unneeded baggage and receive a symbolic marking that will grant us access to all areas of the Lenten Journey.

I pray that you ate well before arriving here, as fasting is encouraged from this point onward.

As we move forward from Ash Wednesday we will gradually descend through the long, darkened tunnel of Lent. Here it will seem as if the walls are lined with mirrors - as we’ll be encouraged to look deeply at the images that we project to the world and examine how we might change the direction in which we’ve been moving - To move closer to love – love of self, love of neighbor, love of God - and further away from fear – fear of failure, fear of change, fear of our own mortality.

After 40 days and 40 nights of fasting and reflection we’ll gain altitude once again and ascend to the plateau of Palm Sunday. Here we will briefly emerge into the light of day and raise our hands in triumph at the arrival of Jesus, our beloved brother and guide, before dropping down once again into the darkened tunnel of Holy Week.

As we descend, we will quickly gather momentum until we hit bottom on Maundy Thursday. You are forewarned that on this day, water may splash over the sides of the car and your feet may get wet.

At this point on the journey we will share a meal together and remember the last night that Jesus spent on earth. As we exit Maundy Thursday the few remaining lights inside the Lenten tunnel will dim to black, and we will press on in silence.

As we move into Good Friday our tour will then slow to a crawl.

This section of the journey is not for the faint of heart.

The sights and the sounds that we’ll experience there are not pleasant but I encourage you to resist the urge to cover your eyes and plug your ears,

for we cannot truly experience the thrill and the joy of the height that is to come unless we first know what it is like to go through this valley.

The painful images, the cries of anguish, the metallic taste of fear in our mouths, and the smell of death will all converge and overwhelm our senses.

But then, just as abruptly as this torment began, it will end.

And the world will fall silent.

On Holy Saturday, our tour will come to a complete stop. We will sit in the darkened stillness of the tunnel. And we will wait.

We’ve been told that the exit lies just around the bend, but we can’t know for sure. At this point we will feel disoriented and lost.

It will seem as if our beloved guide has abandoned us, leaving us to find our own way home.

But as the sun rises on Easter morning we will see a thin shaft of light glowing in the distance, and we will begin to move forward once again.

Soon this pinpoint of light will grow to illuminate the walls and the floor and the ceiling around us.

As we exit the Lenten tunnel and emerge into the light of Easter morning, feel free to let loose with shouts of joy and to sing Halleluiah - as we feel the warmth of the sun on our skin and smell the sweet scent of freshly tilled earth all around us.

There we will get our first glimpse of new creation, new life, the resurrection of all that is good and holy.

It is there that Jesus, our beloved brother and guide, will step forward once again to greet us, to welcome us home after our long and tiring journey, and to offer us rest in the loving arms of God.

But we can’t get there, unless we begin here.

Here in the dimly lit entryway of Ash Wednesday.

It is here that we scrub our faces clean and anoint our heads with oil.

It is here that we offer alms and pray to God for forgiveness.

It is here that we begin our fast.

A fast that has little to do with depriving ourselves of what we want or desire, and very much to do with letting go of what we no longer need.

Our sins. Our sorrows. Our guilt. Our shame.

The pain and regret we feel for having wronged another.

The anger and resentment we feel against those who have wronged us.

The fear we feel when we contemplate our own mortality.

The emptiness we feel when we’ve distanced ourselves from God.

It is here on Ash Wednesday that we make a conscious effort to take all these things and lay them at our feet.

To spread them out on the ground so we can get a better look at them.

To say to our self, “These are the burdens that I’ve been carrying.

What is it that God wants me to carry?

And what is it that God wants me to leave behind?”

The point of receiving ashes is to remind us that eventually it will all be left behind.

Returning to the dust from which it was created.

Yesterday afternoon, as I watched the snow falling on the Andover Newton campus and sat mesmerized as the large yet delicate flakes drifted slowly to the ground - it was not hard to imagine that it was not snow that was falling, but ash.

As it blanketed the grass and weighed heavily on every branch of every tree, the world took on an eerie mono-chromatic silence.

The greens and the browns and the reds and the yellows, were obliterated under a layer of ashen white.

I was struck that on the eve of Ash Wednesday, nature had chosen to paint over what God had created, as if to prepare the canvas for something entirely new to appear.

Normally when I gaze out my window on campus and I see one of my classmates walking in the distance, with just a glance I can tell you who they are. Even if they’re too far away for me to see their face, I find familiar clues in their gait, their build, or even the color of their clothing.

Yesterday, their identities were a mystery to me. Bundled up in hats and heavy coats, moving quickly through the falling snow, each person looked just the same as the other.

It was as if nature was using the ashen snow to paint over us as well.

And why not.

We are part of creation.

We are not exempt from the cycle of life and death.

In Genesis, God said to Adam “You will return to the ground for out of it you were taken. You are dust, and to dust you shall return.”

From this we learn humility, for we die just as the leaves on the trees die, but we also learn that we are not above creation, but a part of it.

And God aches to be in relationship with creation,

God aches to be in relationship with us,

and we ache to be in relationship with God.

And all that stuff we’ve spread at our feet, all the stuff that we’ve been carrying around for years, this is what is getting in the way of our relationship with God.

So every year on Ash Wednesday, we come together in community and receive a smudge of ash across our foreheads.

To remind us that we’re not going to live forever, and the time to unburden ourselves and move into the loving embrace of God is now.

Now understandably, contemplating our own mortality and taking a good hard look at our shortcomings, is not something that we are eager to do. Which is why many of us choose to skip this stage of the Lenten journey.

In choosing to walk with Christ we’re often tempted to walk just part of the way. To skip joyfully by his side during the celebratory times and to run on ahead during the painful times.

Perhaps because spending 40 days in the wilderness picking at our scabs is too much for us to bear.

Perhaps because contemplating Jesus’ suffering reminds us too much of our own.

Perhaps because witnessing his death forces us to face the fact that we too will one day die.

But if our focus is only on the living Jesus, and the risen Jesus, are we missing the point of the incarnation? Are we neglecting to see that God so ached to be in relation with us that God became one of us - so we might know God better and God might know us better. And part of becoming one of us is to know what it is like to suffer and to die.

As we leave here and continue on our Lenten Journey I encourage you to see it through to the end.

To resist the inclination to fast forward to the high points, moving from Christmas to Palm Sunday to Easter Morning, touching only the mountain tops and avoiding the valleys below.

To take the time to visit Ash Wednesday, Maundy Thursday, Good Friday, and Holy Saturday.

We know the resurrection is coming, but lets not be in such a hurry to get there.

Let’s walk along with Jesus as he trembles in the shadow of the cross.

Let’s spend some time in the wilderness pealing off the layers that prevent us from moving closer to God.

Let’s invite nature to take its ashen paint, and brush it across our forehead,

preparing a fresh canvas for God to create anew.

Amen.

Beam me up, Scotty.

I'm supposed to be writing a pastoral prayer for worship tomorrow.
So I thought I'd creak open the rusty door of this blog instead.

My second year in seminary has been much more demanding then my first, and most of that demand is coming from outside the classroom.
I feel as if I'm trying to keep 4 different trains on their respective tracks at the same time. I started the spring semester two weeks ago but I feel as if my classes are just buzzing in the background right now. Field Ed has me hopping: I'm co-leading and preaching at the Ash Wednesday service this week; I've designed a Lenten series that I'll be leading every Sunday in March; in April I'll be leading an entire service on my own (not new for me, but a big deal for my Field Ed church which has never before let the 'newbie' take full hold of the reigns); and I just finished my mid-year review with my supervisor and the Teaching Parish Committee that oversees my Field Ed. I had to review their performance as a teaching site as well, which forced me to confront some issues that have been frustrating me all year. I felt as if I was being underutilized and I was not being included in particular aspects of ministry that I knew my classmates were fully involved in at their field ed sites. Thankfully, the conversations I had with the TPC and my supervisor went well, as they were surprisingly open to listening to what I had to say and have pledged to make changes going forward. Ask and ye shall receive....

Behind the Field Ed layer I have a slew of other stuff clamoring for my attention as I move forward in my MDiv program. The school requires us to participate in a "Border Crossing" experience that takes us out of the environment that is comfortable and familiar to us, so I'm scheduled to go on a 12 day trip to Appalachia in May to learn about rural/poverty issues - the application is due next week. My plan is to do my CPE unit (hospital chaplaincy internship) during the fall/spring of next year, and those applications, which involve the writing of multiple reflection essays, have to be sent in now. I'm also due for my mid-program review as I now have 45 credits and I'm half-way through the MDiv program. This involves even more writing and the assembling of representatives from the school faculty, my denomination and my peers, all of who have to be available on the same day and be willing to sit around for two hours discussing my progress and my strengths and weaknesses. Fun, fun, fun!

Behind all of this is the layer that's looming on the horizon this summer. In mid May I begin filling in for my home church pastor while she's on sabbatical. And since I start 2 days after returning from the Appalachia trip, which itself begins a week before the actual end of the semester AND thus has forced me to hand in final papers and take a final exam a week earlier than I had anticipated.....(breathe)....AND I have ton of class stuff due in April wich will now have to get worked on even earlier because of the early finals....(breathe again).....this means I need to get at least the first 2 weeks of sermons/bulletins for the summer services done BEFORE all of this because there won't be time in the craziness that's coming at the end of this semester.

Floating behind all of this is a bunch of personal stuff...
My sister was diagnosed with breast cancer and just had surgery this week (please send prayers); some friends of mine back home are negotiating some difficult relationship issues and they are very much on my mind right now; and....I'm just going to come right out and say it...being away from my wife for months at a time REALLY SUCKS! Not including the week I was home on Christmas break, I think I saw her a total of 5 days last semester. The end of this semester is going to be really crazy but it can't come soon enough.

On the plus side, I attended a UCC Search and Call event yesterday at school that walked us through the process of writing a profile to find a job once we graduate. While looking through a sample church profile from an actual church that is searching for a pastor, I reviewed the list of qualities/abilities that they were looking for in a pastor, and for the first time, I thought, "I have these skills, I can do this."

While just a year and half ago a similar list had me hemming and hawing and backing away from such a claim, I'm really starting to feel that I'm growing into my call.
There are still plenty of things about being a pastor of a church that are unknown to me and thus still have me saying, "Am I crazy for wanting to do this?" but at this point they are outweighed by the things that have me saying, "I can't wait to be able to do this."

I still have a mountain to climb to get to where I want to be, but at least I'm beginning to feel that I have the right equipment to get there.

Now, if I could just clone myself to ensure all the writing I need to do gets done, AND invent a Star Trek style transporter so I can go home every night, then I'd be set.

Sermon: "Once Upon a Time...."

West Newton Massachusetts

January 3, 2010

I wish that there were some wonderful place

Called the Land of Beginning Again,

Where all our mistakes and all our heartaches

And all of our poor selfish grief

Could be dropped like a shabby old coat at the door,

And never be put on again.

- Louisa Fletcher Tarkington, The Land of Beginning Again

Scripture Lessons:

Jeremiah 31:7-14

John 1:1-18

Once Upon a Time…

Two years ago, as I finished up my college degree and prepared to enter seminary, I took a job working in a bookstore in a local mall. The best part of the job was watching the faces of the children as they entered the store and ran to the Kids’ Section in the back, screeching in delight.

This was a section I could never keep in order. Often a child would enter in a frenzy and leave with a pile of books left scattered all over the floor. But I didn’t mind. For the kids it was like digging for treasure. After pulling everything off the shelves, they’d carry the book they’d chosen to the register and reach up on their tippy toes to set it on the counter, their eyes stretched wide with excitement.

Their frazzled parents would often complain about how many books the child already had at home and how quickly they’ll read this one before requesting yet another. Too often, the child never made it to the register, and instead was carried screaming from the store as the parent rattled off a list of errands they needed to run, and places they needed to be.

“We don’t have time for stories,” they’d say.

But their children knew better.

There is always time for a story.

We are a people who love stories.

When we hear the words:

Once upon a time…

In a land long ago…

In a galaxy far, far away…

We can’t help but prick up our ears and stop what we are doing.

Our full attention is given the source of these words.

Whether we read them on the printed page, see them scrolling across a movie screen, or hear them tripping off the tongue of a wizened elder, an exuberant child, or a stranger on the street.

One thing that all human beings have in common is the love of storytelling.

Before we even had language our species was scratching stick figure images onto cave walls because we couldn’t resist the urge to tell the story of our existence.

We drew pictures of the people we lived with and the animals that fed us, and the first hunters told tales of the one that got away. Storytelling was so easy, a caveman could do it.

With the development of language came not just the ability to give commands and express wants and needs verbally, but the ability to take those images off the cave walls and bring them to life in the minds of others using words alone.

Now some 35,000 years after the first cave drawings appeared, we’re still enamored by the art of story telling. In the form of books, movies, television, or theatre; and in good old-fashioned oral form – from stories passed on from generation to generation, to a simple retelling of what we did over the weekend.

Whether tales of truth or fiction, it is through story that we put aside the harsh realities of our own lives, and live vicariously through the experiences of others.

When we hear a story, we often put ourselves in the place of the characters involved and imagine how the plot would unfold with us in the driver’s seat, or we see our own lives mirrored in the stories of others and we feel a little less alone in the world.

You each have a book in front of you right now that is said to contain the Greatest Story Ever Told. If we got around to cracking its pages every once and a while we’d see that there’s stuff in there to rival even the most gripping of mystery novels, the most exciting of adventure movies, and the most voyeuristic of reality TV.

The Bible is the collective effort of a people living in a particular time and place, to explain how our world - how WE - came to be.

“In the beginning, God created the heavens and the earth. The earth was formless and void, and darkness was over the surface of the deep…Then God said let there be light, and there was light, and God saw that the light was good.” (Genesis 1:1-4)

These are the opening words of the Torah, the beginning of what we Christians call the Old Testament.

In the New Testament, we hear an echo of this creation story in the opening words of the Gospel of John:

“In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God.” (John 1:1)

While the opening words of Genesis tell the story of our beginning, the opening words of the Gospel of John tell the story of Jesus’ beginning. This, believe it or not, is John’s version of the Christmas story.

This is not the story we’re accustomed to hearing.

While Matthew and Luke tell the story of Jesus’ birth using imagery that is identifiably from the human experience, John has another story in mind. In John’s version of the Christmas story there are no shepherds, no traveling wise men or guiding stars. Instead, John takes us all the way back to the formless void that we encountered in Genesis.

In the beginning there was God, AND in the beginning there was the Word.

For John, the Word, or Logos of God, did not enter into our history when the baby Jesus drew his first breath in a cold and lowly manger. The Word has been with us, with God, since the beginning.

Now truth be told, for many of us this is point in the story where our eyes usually glaze over.

We can relate to stories of shepherds, overcrowded inns, and newborn babies. And while some us struggle with the idea of angelic apparitions and virgin births, Matthew and Luke’s Christmas stories are at least told in a language that we can understand.

In comparison, John may as well be speaking in a foreign tongue.

As one seminary professor told his students:

“'In the beginning was the Word and the Word was with God and the Word was God?' How do you explain this in a sermon? You can't. You could say those words every day for the rest of your life and still not understand them."

Which is probably why Richard left the preaching for me today.

In reality, the author of John’s gospel WAS speaking in a foreign tongue.

He was speaking to a Greek audience who lived in the waning years of the first century.

In John’s time the philosophy of Hellenism was in vogue, and thus he employed the language of Hellenism – using words like Logic, light, and life - to tell the story of Jesus to a people who would have found it difficult to relate to the older, culturally specific language found in the earlier gospels.

In contemporary terms, we can imagine that Matthew and Luke were writing for rural farmers and blue-collar city dwellers in the 1950’s, while John is a modern day professor of Philosophy writing for an audience of university students and college professors.

And yet while many of us here, are now or have been university students or college professors, our eyes still glaze over when we read the Gospel of John.

The passage from Jeremiah that we heard this morning, while also written for another time and another people, is much easier for us to comprehend.

Because it tells a story that we recognize and can relate to.

Jeremiah 31 is essentially the story of the prodigal son told on a national scale.

Those who had been scattered to far away lands were to be gathered back together.

God told Jeremiah:

“With weeping they shall come,

and with consolations I will lead them back” (Jeremiah 31:9)

Jeremiah 31 carries a message of hope. It comes near the end of a book that consists primarily of dire predictions of the evil that would befall the nation of Judah over its refusal to follow the covenant of Moses. But in chapter 31 a ray of hope bursts forth – although Judah’s people will have to face exile and punishment for their misbehavior, God makes the promise that once the punishment has brought about the desired humbling effect, the people of Judah will once again be restored to their beloved Promised Land. The end of the story will read: “And they lived happily ever after.”

Like many of the ‘happily ever after’ tales found in the Bible, Jeremiah 31 is a promise for the future. We read these stories and identify with the suffering and the isolation and recognize that although we, like the people of Judah, are still living in the middle of the story there is hope to be found in the end yet to come. But how does the promise of a happily ever after help us in the here and now?

How does a promise made to a people living some 2600 years ago, a promise of a utopia that has yet to be realized, have any bearing on how we live today?

For one possible answer, lets return to the opening words of the Gospel of John.

“The Word was God…and the Word became flesh and lived among us.” (John 1:1,14)

All four writers of the gospels agree that Jesus is the embodiment of the hope that is yet to come. Jesus is the Happily Ever After. Jesus is a physical manifestation of the divine presence that we are meant to be, the example that we are meant to follow, the vehicle by which we are meant to come to know God. It is through following Jesus that we make our way to the Promised Land.

In literary terms, the birth of Jesus is the climatic moment in the Christian story. Everything that came before, from Genesis onward, was merely foreshadowing of what was to come.

But while Matthew and Luke have Jesus entering in the middle of our story, and returning at the end, John writes him in at the beginning.

While it can be argued that this was John’s way of blatantly expressing a belief that the other gospel writers merely danced around – the belief that Jesus was in fact God incarnate, I would offer another interpretation.

One that relies not on the language of philosophy but on the language of story.

Once upon a time, in a land long ago, a baby is born.

A baby that in many ways is just like you and me, and in many ways is the personification of who we are meant to be. This baby embodies the hope and potential that each new life has to offer the world. Yet this baby does not come into this world alone. This baby has guardians, teachers, companions and friends. This baby is born helpless just as we all are, and without the gift of human love and compassion, this baby will never grow to be the guiding light that many will come to rely on. This baby is the expression of God’s love and grace entering into the world, and it is up to us to nurture it to fruition.

One way of interpreting the opening words of the Gospel of John is to recognize that this baby is not one life but ALL life. Genesis tells us that God spoke the world into existence; Creation itself is the Word of God. John tells us that the Word is the conduit by which God enters humanity and writes sacred history into our history. John writes:

“The Word was in the beginning with God. All things came into being through him, and without him not one thing came into being. What has come into being in him was life, and the life was the light of all people.” (John 1:2-4)

For John, the human being that we came to know as Jesus was the ultimate personification of the Word, but the Word has been with us from the beginning. We might say, the Word is the life in each of us.

Admittedly, this is not the traditional way to interpret John’s gospel, as John most certainly believes that Jesus alone is the personification of the divine Word. In fact, in this respect John’s portrayal of Jesus is radically different then the other gospels.

John’s Jesus knows who he is and is not secretive at all when it comes to making sure everyone else knows it too. John’s Jesus performs a multitude of miracles; he teaches using truth statements rather than parables; and while he expresses emotions as evidence of his humanity, characteristically he is more God-like than he is human.

Personally, I prefer Matthew, Mark and Luke’s portrayal of Jesus. The Jesus who upset the status quo by telling stories and asking pointed questions; the Jesus who cried out in anguish in the garden as he prayed; the Jesus who questioned God and asked to be let off the hook when the time came for him to fulfill the divine plan. I prefer the Jesus who came into the world the same way that we do – wide-eyed and screaming, and who left the world the same way that we do – with a mixture of joy and pain, and uncertainty and hope.

The reality is that none of the gospels gives us a complete picture of who Jesus really was. Journalistic accuracy, while important to us, was of little concern to the writers of the gospels, the point was to tell the story of Jesus in a way that would resonate with the audience each was addressing. The point was to make the story come alive for the listener, with poetic license fully invoked.

Ultimately, it is through story telling that we look to the heavens and ask:

“What is the meaning of life?” “What is our purpose?” “What ending are we working towards?” And it is through storytelling that we explore all the possible answers. Through religion, science and philosophy we craft different stories containing a multitude of answers to these questions.

As individuals some of these stories resonate with us, while others do not.

Like children rummaging through storybooks on a bookshelf we choose the one that has the most colorful pictures and the plot line that makes us want to hear it again and again.

We choose the story that speaks to us.

In the story that resonates with me, God answers our questions by becoming one of us. In this story, the purpose of Jesus’ incarnation, the Word made flesh, was not just to point to a future hope, a far-off happily ever after, like the one that God promised Jeremiah many years ago.

God became one of us to show us that living was our purpose.

The meaning of life, is life itself.

Complete with the joy and the pain; the laughter and the tears; the beginnings and the endings.

In this story God says: ‘The Promised Land is the land on which you now stand. Make of it what you will, and I will be right there with you offering strength and assurance.’

God created us to live out the story of creation. In a way, we are the Word made flesh. Just as God spoke us into existence, we speak God into existence through our actions and our words.

As we come together today to celebrate the continuation of the Christmas story, the birth of a new year, and the baptism of a new member of the body of Christ, it’s as good a time as any to think about the story that resonates with us.

What story do we choose to take off the shelf and read again and again?

And just as importantly, what story are we helping to create?

What plot lines would we like to begin, and which ones do we need to bring to an end?

How do our stories intertwine with those around us, and how might we interject some of our God given love and compassion into the stories of those who find it lacking?

What world do we imagine when hear the words: “Once Upon a Time…”

And how can we work together, to write our own, “Happily Ever After.”

Amen

Sermon: "People Get Ready"

West Newton, Massachusetts
November 29, 2009

“The house lights go off and the footlights come on. In the orchestra pit, the violin bows are poised. The conductor has raised his baton. In the silence of a midwinter dusk, you hold your breath to listen. You are aware of the beating of your heart…The extraordinary thing that is about to happen is matched only by the extraordinary moment just before it happens.
Advent is the name of that moment.”
— Frederick Buechner, Whistling in the Dark

Scripture Lessons:
Jeremiah 33:14-16
Luke 21:25-36

“People Get Ready”

When I was six years old, it was during Advent that I became well acquainted with the word anticipation.

In church every Sunday we’d watch the lighting of the Advent wreath, eagerly counting how many candles were left to burn.
A few weeks before Christmas, my father would bring home the tree and lean it against the back of the garage, and we'd wait for the day when we would haul it into the living room, cover it with lights and tinsel, and pull out the tattered box containing my mother's fragile glass ornaments from the 1950's, marveling at how much prettier they were then all the others.
And like many children of the 1970’s, during Advent I spent an inordinate amount of time pouring over the pages of the Sears and Roebuck Christmas catalog. Imagining how complete my life would be if I found a Barbie Dream House AND a GI Joe Headquarters under the tree.

Yes, when I was six years old it was during Advent that I became well acquainted with the word anticipation.

I have a vivid memory of lying awake on Christmas Eve night. The cold wind rattling against the windowpane, while the old radiator in the corner of my bedroom clanked and clanged filling the room with a dry hissing heat.
I lay perfectly still under the covers. Not daring to move.
My eyes clenched shut but my ears wide open.
Straining to hear beyond the rattling and the clanking, to every sound that did not belong. Every creak, every knock, every thump on the ceiling above had me convinced that St. Nicholas and his reindeer had arrived, and Christmas had finally come.

Oh, if only we as adults could await the arrival of Christ with the same anticipation and excitement of a six-year-old waiting for Santa Claus.

Advent for many of us is unfortunately a time of hurried business, as we prepare for Christmas day with shopping, cooking, decorating and traveling. We pack our schedules with visitations, parties and pageants, and while we enjoy the ride we can’t wait for December 26th to arrive, when we can stop, put our feet up and exhale for the first time since Thanksgiving Day.
The anticipation associated with Advent is there humming in the background as we make our holiday preparations, but we have to ask ourselves, what is it that we’re preparing for?

Now, lest you think this is going to be yet another Advent sermon bemoaning the fact that we’ve lost the true meaning of Christmas to the evils of consumerism, think again –
That’s a road that’s been trod down too many times before,
and in the enduring words of Robert Frost:
Two roads diverged in a wood, and I
I took the one less traveled by…

Advent is when we typically talk about anticipation and hope as we await the birth of the Christ Child, but this week’s scripture readings have something ELSE in store for us.
Before we head off running down Main Street toward yet another Christmas, decking the halls and singing songs of joy as we go, we’re going to take a little detour down the road less traveled by - as we talk not about the first advent, but the second advent.

The word Advent means “arrival” or “coming.”
Every year on the first Sunday of Advent the lectionary gives us a text that deals not with the first coming of Jesus, but the second coming. Right off the bat we’re reminded that the anticipation we feel as we prepare for the arrival of the newborn babe in the manger is only part of the story.
Before we get to the beginning, we have to look at the ending - and as modern day Christians, particularly here in the United Church of Christ, we tend not to dwell too long on the ending

We love the story – During Advent we spend a whole month preparing for Jesus’ birth, and in the spring, during Lent, we spend another month preparing for his death, but there’s a whole other part of the story that we would prefer to just skim over, if we give any attention to it all.
But in reality this is the part of the story that we’re preparing for, this is the Advent - the coming - that we’re anticipating.
The first Advent, the birth of Christ, has already happened. It’s a past event for us.
It’s the Second Advent, the return of Christ to this world - this is the event that lies in our future.

Yet we can’t bring ourselves to talk about it.
Because it involves a cataclysmic change that we just can’t wrap our minds around.
It involves terminology and theology that for many of us is not part of our every day vocabulary or our confessed beliefs. It’s where we encounter words like Eschatology - Armageddon – Apocalypse – and Parousia (which is just a fancy word for ‘second-coming’).
Words like these often catch in our throats as we say them, or need to be proceeded by qualifiers like “some people believe” or “the tradition has it.” But no matter what words we use to describe this future event, the result of the cataclysmic change that both Jesus and Jeremiah predict in our scripture readings today involves the end of the world as we have come to know it.

Perhaps the reason why we’re reluctant to talk about it is because we don’t quite understand what “the end” means. But as any good storyteller knows, endings often lay the groundwork for extraordinary new beginnings.

The prophet Jeremiah tells us:
“The days are surely coming, says the LORD, when I will fulfill the promise I made to the house of Israel and the house of Judah. In those days and at that time I will cause a righteous Branch to spring up for David; and he shall execute justice and righteousness in the land.” (33:14-15)

And in the Gospel of Luke, Jesus says:
“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.” (21:25-26)

This is apocalyptic language.
Apocalypse is another word for “unveiling” or “revealing.”
Apocalyptic writings revealed the things to come.
Viewed in its historical context, this is the language of a people who are experiencing a cataclysmic event or pain that they have no other means to comprehend. It is the language of a people who feel persecuted and small, to the point where they express their hope for deliverance, and their trust in the God who is really in charge of everything, by speaking in large, dramatic terms. How else would God upend the power of something as mighty as the empires of Babylon and Rome than by doing big things in big ways, even bringing down the heavenly bodies from their orbits?
For people in need of a dramatic reshuffling of the cosmic deck, metaphorical images like the moon and stars falling out of the sky signify the end of one age and the birth of another.

In our time we may leave apocalyptic language such as this to the writers of the Left Behind series or to our Christian brothers and sisters on the opposite end of the theological spectrum, but seeing worldly events as having apocalyptic meaning was fairly common in first century Jerusalem, as it was in Jeremiah’s time some 600 years prior.

Jeremiah’s words sent a mixed message to the struggling nation of Judah. In the aftermath of the destruction of the first Temple, his words were both comforting and distressing. The people liked the parts about Yahweh’s protection and coming reign. They did not like the part about exile and laying down their strategies of resistance against the power of Babylon. Jeremiah’s words offered hope, but not the kind of hope they were looking for.
They wanted to act, and he was telling them to wait.
Be patient for just a while longer – a Messiah will soon come to set us free.

600 years later, the author of the gospel of Luke offered his first-century readers a similar message. The apocalyptic passage that we heard today from Luke is also found in the gospel of Mark, but in Mark it carries a greater sense of urgency. In Mark’s gospel, the destruction of the second Temple in Jerusalem was to be a sure sign that the end times had begun. Yet, unlike Mark, who wrote his apocalyptic predictions soon after Jerusalem fell to Rome, the author of Luke wrote his gospel some 15-20 years later.
If the destruction of the Temple was to be THE sign that the end of the world was soon to follow, why had the end not yet come? Why were the people of God still suffering when Christ had supposedly set them free?

This is a question that has echoed down through the ages.
Jesus said, “Truly I tell you, this generation will not pass away until all things have taken place.” Yet twenty years later, the generation who had heard Jesus’ claim with their own ears, began to die off, and the people began to ask, “Why has the end not yet come?”

Another twenty years went by, Jerusalem fell, and Mark said surely this is a sign that the apocalypse has begun!
But again the people were left to ask, “Why has the end not yet come?”

Twenty years after that, the author of Luke said the fall of Jerusalem was NOT the beginning of the end, but the beginning of the time of the Gentiles, for the Gentiles were now invited into God’s covenant along with Israel, and both were called to hear the Good News that the Kingdom of God is near.
Fast forward through 2000 years, and a multitude of doomsday predictions that have yet to come true, and still the people ask: “Why has the end not yet come?”

Some would respond, when Jesus said “this generation” shall not pass, he was referring collectively to all the generations that will live between the first and second comings.
We are still in that time, the time in-between, the time of the Gentiles and the Church. The end will come when all have heard the Good News.

Others would say that it is not our place to even ask WHY the end has not yet come.
Jesus said that even he did not know when it would occur; only God was privy to that information. It is enough for us to know that we need to keep alert, to be on guard, for the Kingdom will come when we least expect it.

As writer and pastor Barbara Brown Taylor describes it:
Jesus will come like a thief in the night,
“with a wool cap pulled down low on his head and socks on his feet so that you do not even know he is there, until you wake up to the sound of someone breathing over you in your bed.
You can lock your windows and deadbolt your door, there is no way to keep him out. All he has to do is watch you, and you will show him the way in.”

But as Jesus tip toes in without a sound, the Kingdom of God will arrive with a mighty roar. As Luke tells us, just as the budding leaves on a fig tree announce the arrival of summer, the shaking of the heavens and the earth will announce the arrival of the Kingdom of God.
And there is no reason to fear when this happens, for it is Good News that this day will soon be here!

But for those of us sitting here comfortably or uncomfortably in the twenty-first century with our mortgaged homes, upwardly mobile careers, and 401K retirement plans, this is not good news; in fact it’s rather disturbing news. This is not the future that we are planning for.
Few of us have a ten-year plan that includes the Apocalypse.

But to the first century fishermen and artisans living under the oppression of Roman rule, to hear Jesus say that soon all of this will be gone - this was GOOD NEWS.
Soon, it would all be over, the persecution, the poverty, the pain. All of it will pass away and be replaced by a new heaven and a new earth. Where there will be no more gnashing of teeth, no more tears. Death itself, will be defeated, and humankind will be redeemed, restored to its original form as one who is made perfect in the image of God.

We don’t have to be a first century fisherman to welcome Jesus’ promise of the coming of the Kingdom of God. There’s plenty of poverty, persecution and pain in this century to understand why there is a need for an apocalypse – a revelation of things to come. There are plenty of us who are teetering close enough to the edge that we’d welcome the sight of Jesus descending from the clouds, as the world as we knew it crumbled beneath our feet.
Because we know the second part of the promise is that a new world will grow in its place.
A world free of war, poverty, and disease.
A world where greed, genocide, violence, oppression, and injustice in all its forms no longer exist. A world where love conquers fear, hope conquers despair, and light conquers darkness.

But isn’t this the world we’re already anticipating?
Isn’t this the world we’re working towards making a reality, right here, right now?
Isn’t this the world we see when we say our faith calls us to make the world a better place?
Isn’t this the world we help to bring into being every time we help our neighbor, love our enemy, give to the poor, spend time with the sick, visit the imprisoned, clothe the naked, and stand up for those who are oppressed, marginalized or suffering injustice?

As members of the United Church of Christ we may not spend much time thinking about the end times, or worrying about the impending signs of the apocalypse.
But we do know how to envision the Kingdom of God.

My suggestion during this Advent season is that we take the time to sit with our anticipation of the things to come.
To spend just as much time thinking about what the second coming might bring, as we do fussing over the details of what the first coming has already given us.
To step off the well-trodden path lined with Christmas lights and Nativity scenes, and take a stroll down the road less traveled by. To wander down the darkened road of what will be.

If we do this often enough, perhaps, just perhaps, we may find ourselves lying awake one Christmas Eve night, with our eyes clenched shut and our ears wide open, listening for the sounds that don’t belong.....the thump on the roof, the creak in the floorboard, the breath in our ear, the cries of joy rising up from the world outside, letting us know that the Kingdom of God has finally come.
Amen.




*Barbara Brown Taylor quote from Home by Another Way, 1999