Sermon for December 1, 2024 - The First Sunday of Advent
After hearing our gospel story this morning, you may be thinking to yourself, didn’t we just hear something like this two weeks ago from Mark’s gospel? Something about temples, wars, famines, and birth pangs…it seems like we are picking up where we last left Mark’s gospel. It should sound familiar because we are essentially hearing the same conversation with the disciples on the Mount of Olives about the temple, the widow, the apocalyptic coming of the kingdom of God, but from Luke’s point of view, rather than Mark’s. So that means that today we find ourselves, once again, sitting opposite the temple in Jerusalem as Jesus prepares his disciples for his coming passion and resurrection.
You may also be wondering why we are starting Advent and a new church year with the end of the Luke’s gospel? At first glance, there is some dissonance with hearing this reading at the start of Advent and it seems even paradoxical by beginning our entry into Luke’s story of Jesus at the end of his gospel. The reading highlights cosmic catastrophe, apocalyptic urgency, and warnings of peril to come. With a kickoff like this, it is no wonder some might be happy to skip Advent for more of a Hallmark Christmas. However, if we look a little more deeply, we can see that the beginning and the end are intertwined with Jesus, who through life and death, through the Incarnation and the Resurrection is the Alpha and the Omega, the beginning and the end.
Starting the season of Advent by reading this passage from Luke brings multiple contrasts into view: The “signs” that will come before the risen Jesus are juxtaposed with the “sign” that is the infant Jesus himself, whom we will read about in just a few weeks’ time. Our understanding of power and glory on the one hand are set against humility and helplessness on the other. A warning that the “nations” will be “distressed” and “anxious,” set alongside a message from the angel Gabriel of “good news of great joy for all the people.” As odd as it might seem to draw these contrasting images together, there is wisdom in it.
As renowned teacher and activist Parker Palmer writes in his book The Promise of Paradox, “The way we respond to contradiction is pivotal to our spiritual lives.” Paradox requires “both/and” instead of “either/or” thinking. Keeping space for paradox is difficult, especially in our society today. The world is more polarized, often reflecting either/or logic: “If you’re not with us, you’re against us.” We encounter the other, recognize our differences and at once become defensive, without considering another way, without seeing ourselves in the other.
What makes this more difficult is that the Gospel is full of paradox. In Luke, for example, the infant Jesus is more than a baby born in a manger. He’s also “a Savior, who is Christ the Lord.” Both infant and Savior. Jesus teaches “Whoever seeks to preserve his life will lose it, but whoever loses his life will keep it.” Both losing one’s life and keeping it. He says to his disciples, “Do you think that I have come to give peace on earth? No, I tell you, but rather division,” yet when he returns, he declares, “Peace to you.” Both division and peace. On a theological level, Christians affirm paradox all the time: Jesus’ crucifixion led both to death and to new life. Jesus was both fully God and fully human. It is this both/and understanding of Jesus and what God is accomplishing through the Incarnation and Resurrection that connects the beginning and the end. Through the coming of Christ, the world as we know it will, both, pass away and be reborn. The chaos and disruption promise hope of change, hope that things can and will be different.
So, it is then, that we begin a new year, a new immersion into a new narrative of the life of Jesus, by reminding ourselves of the ultimate promise that is delivered to us by God through Jesus; “Heaven and earth will pass away, but my words will not pass away.” Amidst all the trials and tribulations of life, with all that will come and go throughout the course of human history, only God and God’s word will endure. That is the hope that we have clung to and continue to cling to when it seems like all hope is gone. Hope for change, hope for the world to be different, hope that God’s reign will triumph is inherent in this apocalyptic message from Jesus to his disciples. Amid a world filled with chaos and a future marked by uncertainty, Luke’s Jesus reminds hearers: “Stand up and raise your heads, because your redemption is drawing near.”
This is the message that begins this Advent season. Nothing lasts forever, but God. Jobs come and go. Administrations will come and go. Church leaders come and go. Ideas come and go. People come and go. That’s life, right?
That is indeed the cyclical nature of life, but that doesn’t make it any easier when we find ourselves in the many places and spaces of impermanence. We could all do with a little more permanency in our lives these days, a bit more enduringness amidst the dysfunction and discord that comes from our hyper-politicized and hyper-polarized world. And there is a good deal of discomfort that comes with the regular realizations that we have less control over what happens in our lives than we want.
Both Jeremiah and Jesus lived during a time when they and the people they served were not in control. Jeremiah lived in Jerusalem during the Babylonian captivity; after Babylon swept through the land like locusts, pillaging cities, destroying the first Temple in Jerusalem, and displacing all but the poorest residents. Jeremiah was attempting to find reason and meaning in their hopeless situation. Generations later, the gospel writers recorded the stories of Jesus after Rome sacked Jerusalem and destroyed the temple again, suppressing and erasing any independent Jewish identity. In the midst of the violence and suffering, the words of Jesus, the promise of love and life, sustained the early followers as they too tried to find reason and meaning in their hopelessness.
With wars raging in Gaza and Lebanon, in Ukraine, in Sudan, and in other places we only hear of on the news, we see a world that bears awful resemblance to the times of Jeremiah and Jesus. We sit and watch in real time as rockets rain down on innocent people, displacing and destroying lives. It is hard to see hope as these conflicts continue to grind on, chewing up human lives and spitting them out as if they mean nothing. It all feels like too much. What can I do? How can I help? How can I make it stop? Where is the hope? The anxiety and desperation are all too much.
Sitting in that discomfort for a bit made me recognize that “heaven and earth will pass away” articulates an aspect of Advent that I had not thought about much before: that Advent counteracts impermanence with promise. Advent does not let the transience of life take over our hearts, but fills our souls with holy transcendence. Into the ephemerality that is so much of what life seems to be, Advent brings hope. This is why we are starting at the end. This is why we once again hear the hope that goes hand in hand with the apocalyptic vision of the coming of the Kingdom of God. Jeremiah comforts his people with the hopeful return of the messiah, a righteous branch from David’s lineage that will usher in a time of justice and peace.
Nothing lasts forever, not even the trials and tribulations of the present age. Nothing lasts for ever, except Jesus’ words, the Incarnate Word; who was, and is, and is to come. What does it mean to hear this truth, this promise in the midst of impermanency?
It means that hope really can matter. It means we can have confidence amidst shifting sands. It means life will be different because hope changes our perspective; hope inspires us, strengthens us, motivates us to keep moving forward when everything else tells us to stop and give up.
Advent anticipates the event that upended “nothing lasts forever” forever. When God decided to become flesh, God took on our transitory nature so as to give us eternal life. God took on transiency to give us a permanent home with God. God took on certain mortality to give us resurrection. Because, with God, forever means forever.
So, as we prepare for Jesus to be born into our lives once more, let us hold on to both ends of the string; keeping in mind the both the beginning and the end because they are forever bound together in hope and love through Jesus Christ.