November 28, 2021 – First Sunday of Advent

“At that time Jesus said, ‘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.’”

And so the season of Advent begins, not with a nod to the coming Christmas season, but with dire, apocalyptic words speaking of conflict and crisis. The tenor of the season will shift as we move through these four Sundays, toward hope, promise, expectation, and preparation, but it always begins here.

It can feel a bit strangely out of sync with what’s happening in the other spaces of our daily lives. If you have spent much time in stores or restaurants, you’ll have been surrounded by Christmas decorations and seasonal muzak ever since the Halloween stuff came down earlier this month. For heaven’s sake, I saw eggnog in the grocery store in September! If you’ve already pulled out your boxes of decorations and put up the Christmas tree, I promise that I won’t chide you for it. But in this zone every Sunday, we will call ourselves back to Advent.  

But why in heaven’s name does the season begin with these images of crisis and urgency? And what to make of that verse in which Jesus says, “Truly I tell you, this generation will not pass away until all things have taken place”?—a statement C. S. Lewis once called “the most embarrassing verse in the Bible.” (Lewis, The World's Last Night and Other Essays)

We start here as a way of proclaiming that God has not yet finished with us and our world; that it is not as if in Jesus Christ God did this splendid thing 2000 years ago and then decided to spend time and eternity reading books. No, the whole of creation is yet unfulfilled, knowing brokenness and longing for completeness. As Paul writes in Romans, “We know that the whole creation has been groaning in labour pains until now; and not only the creation, but we ourselves, who have the first fruits of the Spirit, groan inwardly while we wait for adoption, the redemption of our bodies.” (8:22-23) To begin with a crisis gospel is to acknowledge that longing, and to assert that God is indeed faithful; that it will somehow all be brought home in new creation.

Now, it is important to note that most of the important biblical scholar believe that Jesus is speaking here of the destruction of the temple and the historic desolation of Jerusalem, which happened in the year 70. Yet that doesn’t mean he’s only speaking about that. There is, in this sometimes hard and even odd language of apocalyptic, an insistence that the horizon which is the culmination or completion of all of time and all of history yet lies before us; that we live in the time between the times, and much as we might like that to be peaceable and progressive and all those other good things, humanity is fractured, and lives in a fractured world. History does not roll easily, reasonably, and smoothly forward, as anyone who has any knowledge of the past hundred years can tell you. By some estimates, a total of about 123 million people died in the wars of the 20th Century; military and civilian causalities, along with those killed by genocide and war-related famine. No, as a whole humanity is not getting better every day or in every way. We struggle.

But what of that verse that C.S. Lewis called the most embarrassing one in the Bible, that “this generation will not pass away until all things have taken place”? Well, given that much of what Jesus had in view dealt with the temple’s destruction and the very real persecutions under the Empire, Lewis really should not have been embarrassed at all. That generation did see it take place, with Nero arriving as emperor some 20 years after Jesus spoke these words. No, Professor Lewis, don’t be embarrassed, but maybe do be troubled that so much still goes so badly awry in our world as we wait in this time between times. What sense to make of that, and how then to live?

There are a couple of verses a bit earlier in this same chapter that actually may sound to your ears as being even tougher to reconcile, as Jesus tells his followers that, “You will be hated by all because of my name. But not a hair of your head will perish.” (21:17-18) Odd, isn’t it, given how many people did perish, including those very disciples who received these words. And over the millennia many others have also gone to their deaths on account of the name of Jesus.

Many will be familiar with the story of Dietrich Bonheoffer, the German theologian executed for his part in the resistance movement against the Third Reich. He was certainly not the only one, and I was reminded as I pondered this crisis text this past week of the story of Fr. Maximilian Kolbe, the Polish Franciscan friar who died in Auschwitz in 1941. While of German background and able to sign his allegiance to the Third Reich, he refused and so was sent to the concentration camp where he continued, as best he could, to serve as a priest. During his time there three prisoners managed to escape, and as punishment the deputy camp commander had ten other men randomly selected to be starved to death in an underground bunker. One of those ten men cried out in horror, “my wife, my children!”, at which point Fr. Kolbe stepped forward to take his place; something I suspect might have both confused and rather amused some of the camp guards, so against the grain of their world’s sensibilities was his self-sacrifice. Kolbe survived two weeks in the bunker, watching the other nine prisoners slowly die, and in the end was taken out and killed by lethal injection.

Not one hair on your head will perish? Maybe literally, yes, but at a much deeper level Maximilian Kolbe was and is held whole and full in the hands of Jesus, utterly and completely re-membered. And I remembered him this past week, and we remember him here this morning. Death has not and will not have the final word; not when the temple came crashing down, and not when the Emperor Domitian mounted the persecutions of which John wrote from the Island of Patmos, and not when the needle was jabbed into the body of the exhausted Polish priest in Auschwitz. Even as we wait and watch and hope and long for the completion of the promise, death’s final sting has been defeated.

And so, as N.T. Wright says, “Welcome to Advent: a rich mix of politics, prophecy, prayer and perseverance. Oh, and holiness too: if the Lord, in his royal presence, will ‘establish your hearts unblameable in holiness,’ it would be as well to live in the present in the mode that is to be vindicated in the future.” As have so many who have gone before us, let us seek to live now in a mode that anticipates a restored and renewed humanity, an utterly new creation.