“Distressing Advent”

Date:  November 29, 2009

Script:  Luke 21:25-36

Revd William F. Meier    ~   First United Methodist Church, Saint Cloud, Minnesota

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Every so many years it seems we have a need to get all worked up with a prediction that the end of the world is coming.  Y2k.  Wild preachers encouraging their flock to sell all their possessions and gather on some hillside a dawn.  Now some are getting bent out of shape about a date in 2012 when supposedly Armageddon will consume the world in a final conflagration.  It’s based upon an obscure, cryptic text that scholars can’t agree upon in an ancient Mayan calendar.  But you know how these things can go, we see what we’d like to see or fear to see in the ambiguous. 

And each year in Advent I’m confronted with these dark lectionary readings suggested for these Sundays.  Everyone wants to jump into Christmas carols, peace on earth, joy to the world, and I’m left with the task of trying to make sense of these dark apocalyptic passages. 

“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.  People will faint from fear and foreboding of what is coming upon the world, for the powers of the heavens will be shaken.”

Jesus is talking about things to come in our passage for today, and when I hear it I kind of cringe inside.  These words only feed into the mania…the crazy end-of-the-world predictions that I’d rather not be associated with. 

I’m left with two options when dealing with this stuff.  One is to put Jesus’ words in his own historical context and timeframe and conclude that Jesus was predicting the shattering disaster of 70 A.D. when the Romans destroyed the temple and city of Jerusalem—crucifying over 2,000 men outside the city wall to make a point.  It must have felt like the end of the world.  This approach is backed by Jesus’ words in today’s passage: “Truly I tell you, this generation will not pass away until all things have taken place.” 

The other option is to say that Jesus’ words are pertaining to our time—a move which I find a little ego-centric on our part or pretentious.  After all, after all these years, after a hundred generations have come and gone without Jesus coming back or the end showing up, to think that somehow we are so special that God would pick our time is just a little too much for me. 

And yet.  And yet, what if these words are somehow for us?  What if these dark and obscure words are for us and every generation?  What then?  And what can they mean?

First of all let’s get it straight that when Jesus was talking about “the end” he is not referring to the literal end of the world in a whimper or firey judgment.  Scholars understand the Biblical phrase “the end” as meaning “the end of the age” or the present evil time, and that a transformation from generally evil rule will be replaced with one filled with righteousness and justice.  Certainly we can understand the marking of time into epochs characterized as good or evil, depending upon who was leading or what happened… “The Dark Ages” we may say, or “The Renaissance.”  So when the Biblical world talks about the end it is referring to the end of the present evil age making way for one of righteousness. 

The end that Jesus refers to is his second coming.  It is preceded by destruction (most likely the Jerusalem Temple), and signals that the Kingdom of God is near.  How can something as wonderful as God’s Kingdom come about from destruction?  If you are like me, you’d rather it come gradually and peacefully…as gently as a righteous branch growing (as Jeremiah said) and bringing safety to Jerusalem.  Instead, Jesus’ second coming is preceded by devastation.

I guess I can understand it a little better when I think of the painful and body-altering process of going through labor to bring new life into being in a birth.  And when I think about the ways that I have grown…found something of Christ’s spirit coming to birth in me, it was mostly in some pretty dark days.

Ann Lamott tells of her own coming to Jesus, or a better way to put it is to say that Jesus came to her.  In her book Traveling Mercies she tells us she grew up with liberal atheistic parents who sought to improve the world in actions of social justice, but just couldn’t go in for religion.  As she ascended into her adult years she descended into alcohol and drug abuse, unhealthy relationships, and a general waste of herself and life.  She lived in a dark world of drugs and denial.  On Sunday mornings she’d walk off her hangover or the effects of a cocaine binge by going to a flea market.  Across the street from the market was St. Andrew’s Presbyterian Church.  It was the singing that drew her in.  She writes of those cloudy mornings,

I knew a lot of the hymns from the times I’d gone to church with my grandparents and from the albums we’d had of spirituals.  Finally, I began stopping in at St. Andrew from time to time, standing in the doorway to listen to the songs.  I couldn’t believe how run-down it was, with terrible linoleum that was brown and overshined, and plastic stained-glass windows.  But it has a choir of five black women and one rather Amish-looking white man making all that glorious noise, and a congregation of thirty people or so, radiating kindness and warmth.  During the time when people hugged and greeted each other, various people would come back to where I stood to shake my hand to try to hug me; I was as frozen and stiff as Richard Nixon.  After this Scripture was read, and then the minister named James Noel who was as tall and handsome as Marvin Gaye would preach, and it would be all about social injustice—and Jesus, which would be enough to send me running back to the sanctuary of the flea market…

I went back to St. Andrew about once a month.  No one tried to con me into sitting down or staying.  I always left before the sermon.  I loved singing, even about Jesus, but I just didn’t want to be preached at about him.  To me, Jesus made about as much sense as Scientology or dowsing.  But the church smelled wonderful, like the air had nourishment in it, or like it was composed of these people’s exhalations, of warmth and faith and peace…

I loved this.  But it was the singing that pulled me in and split me wide open.

I could sing better here than I ever had before.  As part of these people, even though I stayed in the doorway, I did not recognize my voice or know where it was coming from, but sometimes I felt like I could sing forever.

Eventually, a few months after I started coming, I took a seat in one of the folding chairs, off by myself.  Then the singing enveloped me. It was furry and resonant, coming from everyone’s very heart.  There was no sense of performance or judgment, only that the music was breath and food.

Something inside me that was stiff and rotten would feel soft and tender.  Somehow the singing wore down all the boundaries and distinctions that kept me so isolated.  Sitting there, standing with them to sing, sometimes so shaky and sick that I felt like I might tip over, I felt bigger than myself, like I was being taken care of, tricked into coming back to life.

Her life continued to spiral downward, despite these glimpses of another pathway in church.  One night, sick and drained, she had the sense that Jesus came to be present in her bedroom.  He stayed all night, silent, and when she awoke, she felt his presence was gone.  She writes of this,

This experience spooked me badly, but I thought it was just an apparition, born of fear and self-loathing and booze… But then everywhere I went, I had the feeling that a little cat was following me, wanting me to reach down and pick it up, wanting me to open the door and let it in.  But I knew what would happen: you let a cat in one time, give it a little milk, and then it stays forever.  So I tried to keep one step ahead of it, slamming my door when I entered or left.

And one week later, when I went back to church, I was so hungover that I I couldn’t stand up for the songs…  the last song was so deep and raw and pure that I could not escape.  It was as if the people were singing in between the notes, weeping and joyful at the same time, and I felt like their voices or something was rocking me in its bosom, holding me like a scared kid, and I opened up to that feeling—and it washed over me.

I began to cry and left before the benediction, and I raced home and felt the little cat running along at me heels…I opened the door to my house, and I stood there a minute, and then I hung my head and said “[Screw] it; I quit.”  I took a long deep breath and said out loud, “All right.  You can come in.”  So this was my beautiful moment of conversion.^[1]

Here we see on a personal level that the coming of Christ is accompanied by turmoil, upheavals, painful reluctance and little cats following. 

On a larger scale we see things happening in our time that cause us to “faint from fear and foreboding of what is coming upon the world.”  We have religions and worldviews clashing, and at the same time we see a new cooperation among them occurring.  Culture wars… and cultures mixing and intermarrying.  We have economic upheavals and new relationships.  Politics have polarized.  The environment is changing clearly.  What is our response to these fearful shifts? 

Fear and foreboding is one option, and as humans we are good at it.  Along with fear comes regression in our level of being and acting.  We retreat into lower levels …violence, nationalism, militarism, fundamentalism, black and white thinking, and we fall back into previous worldviews like creationism and literalism. 

Jesus encouraged us not towards fear, but to courage.  He said that when we see these things taking place we should “stand, raise your heads, because your redemption is drawing near.”

Jesus encouraged us to have a sense of openness to what is happening; “Do not be weighted down with” (distractions and worries).  A sense of trust and focused discipline is what Jesus is calling us to. 

It seems that our world is on the verge of a whole new shift to a new level of consciousness.  We can enter into this time period with courage that somehow God is in it, bringing us to a new state.  As religions and cultures, political and economic systems we have this opportunity to bring our level of being to a whole new level—beyond competition, exclusive claims, violence and small mindedness based in self-preservation and to cooperation, understanding, openness and discovery. 

I believe that Christ is continually coming into being in creation, in our personal lives, and globally.  The real question is how are we going to welcome him?  With raised heads or slammed doors?  With fear & worry or with expectation and hope?  Amen.f