St. Aidan’s Episcopal Church
First Sunday of Advent
Isaiah 2: 1-5
Romans 13: 11-14
Matthew 24:36-44
Psalm 122
Into the Future
It’s Advent. It’s a new year, a fresh year, a fresh start. The time is past for glancing backward over our shoulders, to view the regrets, the goals set and not reached, the dreams unfulfilled, the prayers, seemingly not answered, is over. We can remember the good, the bad and the challenging, some of which will exist into the future, and we can hope we have learned something more about ourselves and our relationship to God in the process. Yesterday’s doubts about who we are, why we are where we are, and the state of our faith are all gone.
Now it is time for looking forward, to new opportunities, new goals, new dreams and a new way of praying through new challenges and joys to come.
It is a new day, a new year, a time of assessment about where it is we want our journey to take us next, where and how we want to grow, and what spiritual tools each of us have been given in order to set our sights on a future that is bright with possibility for every one of us, as individuals and as a community of faith. Welcome to this new year.
Welcome to the Year of Living Dangerously, and on the edge of our seats, with St. Matthew. On this, his first Sunday of Advent, Matthew wants to be absolutely sure we are ready. Ready for Advent, ready to wake up, ready to get our act together, get moving, get ready for whatever comes next, be prepared, for the Son of Man can and will show up at any time.
Matthew wants to get our attention and get it right off the bat. No hearts and flowers until Lent. No. We are like the proverbial “little children” being hauled out of our comfortably beds and made to line up, calling out “present” when our names are called.
If his words are meant to make the faithful nervous, however, they fall short. His words are (big word) eschatological, meaning his words have to do with the final judgement of God, death of the body and the destiny of the soul and of all humankind. Nothing much to think about there, Matthew. We are so glad to welcome you to our new year!
There are all kinds of different ways of looking at the eschaton (another big word, meaning having to do with the end times) and it would take a year of seminary to delve into them all. But it’s enough for us today, to understand Matthew’s New Testament perception of the end of time following Armageddon, when God will judge us all according to the good and evil of each of us.
Really!?
If Matthew were alive today, I would want to ask him how he thinks Jesus’ words that he heard right from Jesus himself, could possibly translate into us shaking in our boots waiting for Jesus to come like a thief in the night. That’s a concept that pretty scary. Last night, I heard footsteps on the porch. Luke the Dog barked a soft warning and I slid quietly over to the window to see what I could see. There was nothing, only the morning paper that my highly efficient paper delivery person had left neatly at my front door. We all settled back own, realizing that not all that comes in the middle of the night is bad or scary. But we do need to be aware of what could arrive.
The fact is, Matthew was human, just like us and was entitled to his perceptions, and way of putting things, just as we all are.
We all live in a state of unknowing about what the end is like and what it is that God has in store for us at the end of life as we know it….as individuals or as part of the world. And on the spectrum of this unknowing, all religions and all varieties of self-proclaimed atheists share a mindset somewhere between total disinterest or apathy and more than a little anxiety about how the end for each of us and or for the world might look and feel when the Son of Man appears..
All faithful Christians, regardless of their denominational roots, live out their lives somewhere between these two extremes…..some cautiously dismissing the whole idea of end times with convenient and reasonable rationale or conveniently not even thinking about it at all, and some, living with a low level of guilt around misdemeanors they’ve added up in life….. wait in fear of an inevitable accounting which will not stand up too well on judgment day!
Given this, it’s not too hard to understand why every now and then, we hear of folks in various parts of this country and in other parts of the world, gathering to experience the “rapture,” which has Jesus coming down from heaven to sort out the sinful from the innocent. The innocent will be taken with Jesus to heaven and the sinful left behind. I’ve never participated in one of those gatherings, because I’m pretty sure I already know the outcome. I would fully expect to be one of those still standing after all the rapturous action is completed, and it seems somewhat arrogant and short-sighted of anyone to believe they wouldn’t be looking at each other in just same place as me, just as all of us were, before the “rapture” happened.
For the faithful heart knows that one day God will come in glory and we will all be welcomed to be with Christ in God’s heaven. The faithful heart doesn’t need to when …..doesn’t need to know the end of the one’s story, or the end of the world’s story, to believe it! Faithful hearts say the words several times a week……
“Christ has died. Christ is Risen. Christ will come again.”
One of the greatest gifts we can receive as we enter into this new year, is the sense of relief we can enjoy just by knowing that Christ not only doesn’t expect any of us to know anything about God’s plans for the future, because, as he readily explains, only God has that information.
With just this revelation alone, we can let go of any lurking guilt or confusion about what to expect in the end times, and we are set free to move into the First Sunday of Advent, and all its potential for opening hearts anew and for acceptance of searching spirits.
We can be at ease with the uncertainty of what God’s plan is for the future and we can be forgiven by asking how we are to wait and what it is we are waiting for…..a beginning or an end.
We are not to neglect our life as it is at the present. What is the now was once the future. Did we anticipate it? Did we worry about it? Could we have changed it? Would it have mattered? And how would our present have been influenced by our anticipation and awareness of its potential outcomes?
For all that, to wait for either does not mean we should not prepare ourselves to meet both a beginning and an end. While God has no expectation of us regarding knowing what is to happen next, we are still not expected to just sit there. Waiting is not an exercise in inertia. We are called to be alert, to be awake and aware…..to embrace a spirit of anticipation.
Jesus wants us to be actively involved in our lives, just as God is active in our lives in each moment, not off somewhere in some unknown future. Jesus wants us to be fully and completely intentional about how we live for it is in the here and now in which our faith guides us. We may not understand all to which our faithful promise leads, but we do know we are called to act with, and on, faith now.
No matter what is known or unknown, we are to examine our preparedness…..examine the truth about who we are and how we are living our lives. In what way are we loving God with all our heart, soul and mind….in what way are we loving our neighbor has ourselves? And how do we do that if we don’t love and accept ourselves with gratitude to be just as we are in God’s sight?
How have we neglected what we are called to do and be in the present? How have we mended the brokenness we have created with others in our families, our work and our various communities to which we belong? How to we intend to mend that brokenness now? How do we intend to celebrate its mending? How have we celebrated the other in the past and how will we celebrate the other now and into the coming year?
To examine these is to be doing the work of Advent. The work of being watchful…of being awake to the opportunities to love one another with a sacred kind of love rather than anything less. It means to recognize the greatness of each other. To nurture and support each other, rather than to leave those we perceive to be less deserving of receiving these ….to die metaphorically at the side of the road.
In our daily living, throughout the rawness and hard edges of the world, the faithful of the world keep on keeping on, with hope and strength and valor which are gifts given by God. God was present with us during the hard times of the past and wants us to be aware that God was and is and will be present during all that awaits us in the future.
To know that Christ will be with us during the hard times and during the times of celebration, brings with that knowing, a kind of peace that can only come from faith in Christ’s appearing. Peace in our hearts, peace at home or peace in the world….peace is always worth waiting for, preparing for, being actively awake for, entering into……even when you just don’t know when or how peace will actually happen.
It is at Advent we are to look around at our swords and spears, many of them still lying where we left them last year. Where are your swords and how will you turn them into ploughshares and pruning-hooks? Advent calls us to that kind of self-awareness and self-assessment. The kind that brings us into a new place of preparedness……a determination to move into a more peaceful way of living, a more joyful way of perceiving our lives and a more courageous way of journeying through them.
Opportunities for peace come and go, between individuals and between nations ….and sometimes, we let them slip from our fingers like quicksilver, or sometimes, we just aren’t ready for them and we are not alert or awake enough to recognize them when they come, and sometimes we simply are not ready or willing to recognize them.
To live with peaceful faith, is to live with a heart that holds a deep and profound, indescribable joy.
We have no way of knowing which opportunity will come our way that could lead us to realize our goals, no way to know when a new life, a new love, a new event will bring us into a state of such contentment that the world seems to shift under our feet.
When we are ready to accept with open readiness all that comes our way, we can experience the state of being lifted up with a sense of joyous anticipation at any time, no matter what this earthly life forces us to face. It is when we find ourselves unprepared for the challenges that will inevitably come, we experience a feeling of being at a loss and frightened.
Jesus wants us to be courageous as we move into this new future. He wants us to be more like Noah….an ordinary guy who had the courage to follow God’s lead, even though everyone thought he was crazy. Jesus wants us to have that kind of courage in order to make changes in our lives that prepare us for whatever God has in store for us….having the courage to live out our faith no matter what the rest of the world might think about it. To turn the other cheek, to love no matter how hard, to find and see Christ come again and again, right in front of us….to feel swept up by His coming and to experience the peace, and the joy of knowing we are recognized as searchers of God’s truth and therefore our own….and to have the courage to keep the faith, no matter what our circumstances may be in life.
To do nothing leaves us vulnerable as God’s people and we would be wise to consider the costs. Perhaps the greatest lesson we can take forward from today is to look back at our own history and the history of God’s making so that our faith and trust can be renewed and strengthened as we prepare for the future.
With faith in this incarnate history and with intent to prepare for God’s renewed presence in our lives, we can feel less anxiety about what the future holds. To know this, is to move into a place of quiet, peaceful, joyous and courageous acceptance of that we know nothing about, can do nothing about beyond our human intention for good. It is left to us to move into a place of hope that finds its foundation in God…. to move into a place of trust in a future, even if we cannot, try as we might, see into the outcome.
One day when we least expect it, Jesus will appear. Maybe the Son of Man will come riding through the clouds “clothed with a long robe and a golden sash…his head and hair white as snow; his eyes like a flame of fire; his face like the sun shining with full force…..” ….or maybe he will simply appear before us…..in the face of a hungry child or of a refugee or prisoner…..or poor parents, working at several menial jobs in order to keep food on the table….or maybe you and me, as we face our own hardships and challenges our joys and our triumphs. In the face of all the lost and the lonely…..the confused and exhausted, the joyous and the profound, we can watch for Christ.
And when those moments come, we’ll look up from our computers, or whatever we are using to communicate with at the time, we’ll step back from cooking the dinner, or mowing the lawn or studying our history of civilization ……...our song will be cut off mid-phrase, and the violins will be quiet all the more to hear the sound of the heavenly host….and we’ll pause whatever we’re doing as Jesus steps into our lives again as He has done so many times before, and He’ll smile at us and say…. “Welcome to the future, “Do not be afraid; I am the first and the last and the living one. I was dead, and see, I am alive for ever and ever.”
And speaking softly into our silence…. He’ll continue….. “I know you didn’t expect me,….but I’m so glad you were ready.”
End
Written to the Glory of God
E. J. R. Culver+
December 1, 2019