SERMON FOR THE FIRST SUNDAY IN ADVENT, NOVEMBER 28, 2021            TEXT: LUKE

            Apocalyptic passages like the one we just heard can be very frightening. When I was teaching in Berkeley, I had a student who had grown up in a Pentecostal church. As an adult, he became an Assemblies of God minister. In a class on eschatology, the theological term for what the church teaches about the last times, he shared a personal story. His mom was a full-time homemaker, and everyday when he returned from elementary school, she would be waiting for him in the kitchen, ready to hear about his day while she prepared their family’s dinner. He came home one afternoon to find dishes soaking in the sink, half-peeled vegetables lying on the chopping board, a carton of milk left out on the counter, but no mom. As an eschatologically in-the-know eight-year-old, he concluded that unbeknownst to him, the Lord must have come in glory at last and taken his mother up in the rapture. He, alas, had been found unworthy and left behind. The poor kid ran outside, curled up in a garbage can lid and lay in the driveway sobbing, where his mother found him when she returned. Lacking a crucial ingredient for that evening’s main course, she had run out to the store, expecting to be back before her little boy arrived home. He told us he never forgot the experience, and that as a minister, he was always mindful of the terror the prospect of Christ’s coming again could cause.

          On the other hand, the same apocalyptic passages leave many of us skeptical. Jesus indicated that his contemporaries would witness the events he described, but that generation passed away while heaven and earth did not. It has been a very long time since Jesus spoke those words, and he still hasn’t come in a cloud with power and great glory. The delay has been baffling and embarrassing for the church, and by this point many Christians have relegated these ominous predictions to the island of misfit texts, as one preacher puts it. How does one hear this passage aright, avoiding unreasoning fear on the one hand and unwarranted indifference on the other?

            The evangelist Luke, writing around 85 C.E., was already reframing the situation. He has no interest in establishing a revised timetable for the Lord’s second coming. No one knows the day or time, nor do we need to know.    (Indeed, according to Matthew 24:36, not even the Son is privy to that information: “But about that day and hour no one knows, neither the angels of heaven, nor the Son, but only the Father.”) Luke is concerned about the indeterminate period between Jesus’s resurrection and ascension to the Father and the Lord’s return. This is the time of the church. The author of the Gospel of Luke also wrote The Acts of the Apostles. The two books are Part I and Part II of the same ongoing story, which you may not realize at first, since the Bible sandwiches the Gospel of John between them. Luke urges his readers to live in the moment. I think of the five-act structure of Shakespeare’s comedies. We are past Act I. We are now finding our way through twists and turns of the plot, and it is anyone’s best guess whether we are in Act II, III or IV. In due course Act V will bring the final resolution, and the ending will be a happy one, with order restored, hope realized and love triumphant. There is work to be done before the ending is revealed, and the circumstances of the between-time are often confusing and fraught with peril.

          So it was for Luke’s community of faith, and so it has been for Christians ever since. Every generation has had reason to faint from fear and foreboding at what engulfs their world — disease, war, natural disasters, unrelieved suffering — the four horsemen of the apocalypse never dismount. So many things we thought we could always count on have crumbled; so many calamities once unimaginable have become our new normal. I learned the Greek alphabet to decipher words in the New Testament; now I use it to distinguish Covid variants. Who knew?!

“Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold
Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world
The blood-dimmed tide is loosed and everywhere
The ceremony of innocence is drowned
The best lack all conviction, while the worst
Are full of passionate intensity.”

These lines are from the poem The Second Coming, written by William Butler Yeats in 1919, in the aftermath of the First World War and during the Spanish flu epidemic. A world in chaos much like our own, waiting for a new order to be revealed. Yeats’ vision of the impending future is a monstrous one. The poem ends,

“And what rough beast, its hour come round at last
Slouches towards Bethlehem to be born?”
 

          In striking contrast Luke offers hope. Jesus has made his triumphal entry into Jerusalem, where he teaches daily in the temple. Luke tells us “All the people would get up early in the morning to listen to him . . . .” (21:38). This passage about the coming of the Son of Man and the exhortation to watchfulness are his final words to those gathered around him. What follows in Luke’s Gospel is the account of Jesus’ passion. Luke connects the Second Coming to Jesus’ crucifixion and resurrection. When he returns to complete God’s work, we will be seeing a familiar face. We know this Son of Man who is coming in glory; he makes himself known among us every day. We will be greeting the Savior who has always loved us and loves us still.    No matter how many slouching beasts lead us astray when we let our guard down, his promise will hold true when theirs prove false. His word will not pass away no matter what else does.

          We pray, “Thy kingdom come.” In his Small Catechism Luther asserts that in fact, God’s kingdom comes on its own one way or the other, but we are asking that it come through us. We are part of the problem, but as disciples of Jesus, we can just as surely be a present part of the solution. So let us do the work the church is called to do in the between-times: to tell the story of Jesus and his love, to seek his forgiveness and forgive others in turn, to open our hands and hearts to our neighbors in need. In the end, if we play our parts in Acts II, III, and IV, Act V will take care of itself. Amen.