Advent 1 Text: Luke 21: 25-36
When passages like the one we’ve just heard come up in the proposed readings for the day, I confess I’m inclined to give them a pass. Who wants to hear about the world coming to a crashing end? When there’s so much more in scripture to turn to, that encourages and guides, even if it challenges us, exposing truths we’d rather not see about ourselves, why would we linger with these frightening end-time pronouncements?
Maybe the first thing to note is that it’s texts like these that have been seized and used to ramp up violence, as though these were literal predictions of how God’s future will play out … and any violent help we might give to it, well that would only be forwarding God’s agenda, right?
Wrong!
These are not literal descriptions or attempts to predict the future. In fact if anything, we hear Jesus flat out discouraging speculation about the future and urging instead getting on with being faithful in the present. Of course life brings times of fear and chaos, but here we have Jesus speaking about these things to his disciples- and to us-- not in order to terrify us, but just the opposite -- to encourage us. He doesn’t say run for your lives, get out while you can, but rather, know that troubles and trials will come, but don’t let that throw you off course. They are signs telling us that it’s a good time for God’s people to be present and accounted for. These are the times when the witness of the faithful matters greatly, when leaning in with all our might to the promise that nothing can separate us from the love of God is so needed.
It’s in these times Jesus imagines something other than panic … “your redemption is drawing near,” he says. You can hear him can’t you: “be of good courage … you are not alone.” Call it a certain calm. Call it endurance. Call it hope. Especially in times when fear runs high, courage, endurance, calm can curb violence and open the way for another outcome altogether. [1]
Where we might have imagined it a contradiction, or out of touch to enter this season of Advent --that by the Christian calendar marks the beginning of the year -- where we might have thought it odd that we would begin the new year with texts about the end, the end of the world no less, now maybe we’re beginning to get it … the way it dares to have us imagine that amidst what seems unyielding disaster, another outcome is on its way.
For myself there’s a particular poignancy to that this year, with the climate emergency so top of mind. The end of the world we have known is a real possibility … and in some dimensions is already a reality. So on the one hand there is the fear of that sort of catastrophic end. AND, at the very same time another outcome is emerging … which itself is made possible by the ending of the way we currently inhabit this planet. We don’t have to carry on business as usual. We don’t have to settle for the world as we know it. We can look at the signs of our times and realize they are telling us that now is the time for us to be present and accounted for.
Now is the time that faithful witness matters greatly … that leaning in, with all our might, to the promise that nothing can separate us from the love of God is so needed. We can imagine, as Jesus imagined, that something other than panic is called for … even possible. Those young people who were taking the lead in Friday’s Climate Strike … this is exactly what they embody as they stand up, and raise their heads to see a vision of a new world on the horizon, and so raise their voices, raise their signs. I hear them telling us, encouraging us, to see it with them … that our redemption is drawing near!
Now, if life in our own local personal kingdom is going alright at the moment, news of redemption, of our liberation won’t necessarily strike us as welcome news. If all is more or less as we like it, we’d sooner not have our patterns, our expectations, our world disrupted by the new way of life Jesus called the Kingdom of God. But for the 10 people, for example, that Amnesty International has identified for this year’s Write for Rights campaign, it’s a different story. I hope you’ll consider sharing in this letter writing campaign next Sunday or Tuesday, in conjunction with Human Rights Day, where we write letters to advocate for people like Sarah and Sean, two beautiful young people, both of them avid swimmers, who in their risky work with a humanitarian organization helping to rescue refugees arriving by boat to the coast of Greece, were arrested on charges of human trafficking, spying, being part of a terrorist group. A year after their arrest, with the possibility of years in prison hanging over their heads, they await their trial. They long for their liberation … their redemption. It is their dream, their need.
Just as the First Nations people of Grassy Narrows, who for 50 years have been living with and affected by mercury in their drinking water are longing for their redemption.
Just as Marinel, this young woman, 16 years old, whose coastal village in the Philippines was so utterly destroyed by Typhoon Yolanda is longing for the redemption of those who survived, and others around the world who are so vulnerable to the same devastation.
You see even if we ourselves don’t long like they long with every fibre of their beings for their redemption, this is what Advent does … it connects us with the fearsome reality of endings -- the end of our own worlds, the ending of others' worlds -- not to scare us out of our skin but to call us more deeply into these vulnerable bodies in this fragile world … that we might awaken to our true selves, to our relationship, our kinship, our belonging to one another, that their longing may kindle our own, that we become a people of wild hopes and dreams, susceptible to the hopes and dreams of that Jesus child who came and comes again and again into this same world in flesh like ours, who knows our vulnerability from the inside, and who assuring us that we are not alone, helps us to be of good courage.
As Advent comes around to us yet again, we are given to start the year afresh, start from the beginning … which by God’s grace will take us through whatever endings we must endure to make way for the new world of God’s conceiving to be born among us.
Who would have imagined that HOPE would arrive this year riding on the tales of endings?
[1] With thanks to Anthony Robinson, in his book What's Theology Got to do With It? Herndon Virgina, Alban Institute, 2006, pp206,207.
