Advent 1

May my words and my thoughts be acceptable to you, O Lord, my refuge and my redeemer. (Psalm 19:14)

SEASON: Advent 1
PROPER: C
PLACE: St. John's Parish, Kingsville
DATE: December 3,2000


TEXT: Luke 21:25-31 - Then they will see ‘the Son of Man coming in a cloud’ with power and great glory. Now when these things begin to take place, stand up and raise your heads, because your redemption is drawing near.

Zechariah 14:4-9 - Then the Lord my God will come, and all the holy ones with him . . . . And the Lord will become king over all the earth; on that day the Lord will be one and his name one.

ISSUE: - These passages from Zechariah and Luke are images of hope for people living through and anticipating difficult times. God will not abandon his people and will come to them. The work of the church and its people today is to stand ready and prepared, fostering and looking forward to the renewed coming of Christ in our lives, and ready for the final coming.
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Welcome to the beginning of a new church year with the beginning of the First Sunday of Advent. It is that time when we again look forward to the coming of Christ. Actually, there are two aspects of the Advent Season. We look forward to the coming of Christ once again in the celebration of Christmas. We also are reminded of the belief that Christ will come again to judge the world, known as the Second Coming. The concept of Christ coming again is seen as part of an apocalyptic event. When the end time comes, Christ will come. The Christian community must be prepared, watchful, and waiting for the event.
While the Apocalyptic event is often portrayed as a disaster and calamity, for the faithful people of God it is often portrayed with great hope. The Hebrew Lesson from the prophet Zechariah is one such picture. It is written in such a time when Israel, God’s people, had faced great suffering and oppression at the hands of their enemies. But, Zechariah proclaims a time of great redemption and hope for the people of God. There will be a great earthquake that will split The Mount of Olives in two, creating a great plain, which will be an escape route for the people of God. And it will be as if God or the Messiah of God will stand straddling the divided mountain as His people escape oppression and injustice. What’s more, God will change the face of the earth. The earth will be turned to perpetual daylight with no darkness at all. The cold and frost will turn to perpetual summertime. In a land known for its arid climate and lack of water, running living waters will flow out of Jerusalem, and God’s people will neither hunger nor thirst anymore.
Luke’s Gospel also tells of an awesome time. Luke is borrowing from Mark’s Little Apocalypse that we read last week. While Mark wrote when the Jerusalem Temple was being destroyed, Luke is writing after the event. It is a time of great distress for Jews and Christians alike in the face of domineering powers over them. But, Luke gives to Jesus the words that are reassuring to the faithful. When the very heaven above and the earth beneath seem to be shaken, let these events be a sign to you that God is near. “Your redemption is drawing near.” It is like a barren fig tree. It appears dead in the winter, but when you see the shoots, the signs are there that the summer is coming. When there are difficult times, let them be signs and reminders for you that the Kingdom of God is near. “Now when you see these things begin to take place, stand up and raise your heads because your redemption is drawing near.
For Luke difficult times will be and are reminder that God is near, and the faithful need not fear. Look up, stand firm, and raise up your heads, your redemption is near. Again the coming of Christ forecasts a new spring, a new beginning, a new hope for the faithful. It is good news. God will come to his people.
Presently we are living through a difficult period in the history of the world, and a time of great concerns. We are living at a time when there is significant concern over the global issue of an earth growing too warm as a result of pollution. The implications are quite significant. Melting polar caps will change sea levels flooding low lying populated areas causing the need for significant migrations of people. Global warming can have a significant effect upon weather conditions, causing problems with food supplies for feeding the peoples of the world.
Recent theories on the death of dinosaurs millions of years ago, indicate that their extinction was likely to have been caused by a comet or asteroid striking the earth. In recent years this knowledge has inspired several apocalyptic movies. We live with that threat of the world as we know it coming to an end.
The more ever present event that threatens the world order today is the situation in the Middle East. We’ve already seen the sky turn black from the bombings and disaster for the people of Iraq. As that whole problem continues to fester in the Middle East and random uncontrolled terrorism and violence persists, we might begin to wonder what a world without oil would look like. Without alternative resources the outlook would be pretty grim.
In each of our personal lives, we also know difficult times. We lose jobs, marriages, people we love. We experience serious illness and death. There are things that happen to us over which we sometimes have no control. These are personal apocalyptic events that can make us feel our world has come to its end. We see no light or hope at the end of the tunnel.
One of the memorable events and a great metaphor for our time is the story of the Titanic. It was ship thought to be unsinkable and a modern marvel. Yet built at the hands of human beings, the steel was too brittle in cold water, and the rivets poorly made. Racing across the Atlantic on a calm and relatively clear night in hopes of achieving a new man made record; it side swiped an iceberg and sank. Its grandeur broke in half like a matchstick. That too, was an apocalyptic event. As terrorizing as the event was, it also created a new age for seamanship, requiring appropriate numbers of life boats, new radio monitoring codes, and gave birth to the iceberg watch patrols in the Atlantic. It also revealed the great gap between the rich and the poor, when it came to who could reach the available lifeboats first. We saw in the event a kind of judgment that we are not God but need God. It is like the old Biblical story of The Tower of Babel, where men try to storm heaven and take God’s place. Fact of the matter is that we need God and all that God represents. In recognizing that need we enter into a new age of hope and renewal.
We are also living in time of great affluence. It is an age, especially here in America, unlike any other time in history. We have more than enough, if not more than our share of the resources of the world. There is a great temptation to believe that we’ve got it made, that we are the masters and controllers over our own lives and the world. Without a greater concern for the needs and concerns of the world, which perceives us as not just rich, but greedy. We could be caught by surprise when the Son of Man returns in judgment.
This season is a very busy one. It calls for very busy lives and participation in all kinds of parties and festivities. In all of our lives there are distractions that gnaw away at our spiritual lives and our need to be in relationship with God. The call of the church in the Advent season is to keep in perspective what this season means. We stand under the judgment of God and we need God. The judgment of God is certainly awesome. At the same time is can also be fair, just, and renewing. With all that we do, with all we fear, this is the season for keeping in mind the need to allow the presence of God to be with us.
We live at a wonderful time in history. There is so much to commend this period of great scientific and technological advancement. It is also a time of insidious terrorism (the USS Cole being a vivid recent example, not to mention other bombings). In our culture there is a prevailing godlessness, moral decline, distractions, abusiveness, and a frantic busyness that is spiritually debilitating. In this sense we too live in an apocalyptic age. Our hope however is that God seeks once again to come to us to change and redeem us. The reality is that we stand in need of God to guide us and shape us, to remold us into new people of compassion, caring, and love. We need to reclaim the important of our faith in a world that is faithless. We need the vision of the God standing over us with his feet upon the mountains showing us the way to our deliverance. We need to recognize the signs, when terrorism and bloodshed prevail, when there is poverty and human suffering, God is needed. God is near. His Kingdom will come. We need to be the facilitators of his coming, open to be changed and renewed.
Jesus Christ comes again in this season in the manger at Bethlehem. Simply, humbly, his message of love comes again. His call to radical change and renewal dares the world. Humble and simple as he is, it is as if he stands with one foot on one mountaintop and the other foot on the other calling us to him and with him into the way of peace and love.