Happy New Year!

Advent 1 sermon, delivered November 28, 2021 at St. Paul's Episcopal Church, Louisville, KY

Text: Luke 21:25-36

A shoot shall come out from the stump of Jesse, and a branch shall grow out of his roots. The spirit of the Lord shall rest on him, the spirit of wisdom and understanding, the spirit of counsel and might, the spirit of knowledge and the fear of the Lord.

Happy New Year!

No, I haven’t gone off of the deep end, and we haven’t skipped over Christmas to New Year’s Eve. Today is the Church’s new years day, the first Sunday of Advent and the first Sunday of Year C Bible readings, for those keeping track. It means that we finish reading the Gospel of Mark and begin to read the Gospel of Luke for the coming year. It also means that we have left the Ordinary Time of the church calendar and entered into a long arc of preparing for the presence of Christ in our lives, from his birth to his rebirth. We have changed the green hangings of Pentecost to the blue ones of Advent, representing Mary. So many changes, so many opportunities for this season.

The Gospel reading this morning doesn’t sound much like an Advent reading, or one that hints at Christmas. In fact, it uses imagery and language that we’re not used to hearing in the Episcopal Church. The Gospel of Luke was written after the book of Revelation, so that language and imagery in Revelation was already familiar to people in Jesus’ day. They heard them in the last half of the book of Daniel written about 130 years before Jesus’ birth, and they were reinforced by Israel being occupied by Roman soldiers in Jesus’ time. The words describing ominous events in nature, nations being confused, and people fainting from fear may seem vaguely familiar to us now. We are an occupied people as well, with an unseen enemy in our own land and in our own homes that has maimed and killed. We are seeing our own end-times, where our expectations and assumptions about life that we knew two years ago and could predict have been upended because of this occupying virus. Luke did not write about the end of the world and the return of Jesus, but rather the end of the times as they were in his time, 2000 years ago. He was telling us about something new, the coming of the Kingdom of God through Jesus that would change Luke’s world first and then eventually spread over all of the Earth. But that message gets lost in the images and the expectations of the end of the world. It’s hard to see how life in our time will come to a resolution that brings in something new as the Kingdom of God, because all we can see is the end of what was familiar.

But, let’s take a look at what we have heard from Jesus in Mark’s Gospel about the Kingdom of God, in this past church year:

From Mark chapter 1:

“Now after John was arrested, Jesus came to Galilee, proclaiming the good news of God, and saying, “The time is fulfilled, and the kingdom of God has come near; repent, and believe in the good news.”

“When [the disciples] found [Jesus], they said to him, “Everyone is searching for you.” He answered, “Let us go on to the neighboring towns, so that I may proclaim the message there also; for that is what I came out to do.”

From Mark, chapter 12:

Then the scribe said to him, “You are right, Teacher; you have truly said that ... ‘to love one’s neighbor as oneself,’—this is much more important than all whole burnt offerings and sacrifices.” When Jesus saw that he answered wisely, he said to him, “You are not far from the kingdom of God.”

This does not sound at all like what we read in the Gospel this morning. In fact, it sounds a lot like Jesus was saying that the Kingdom of God was here already or nearly here, and it didn’t involve catastrophes, or upheaval, or the heavens shaking. The signs of the Kingdom were found in what was in the heart, in a loving relationship with God and the people around us, or in the beauty of a fig tree growing new leaves in the spring. What is expressed in Luke is what people experienced as the world around them changed, and it caused them fear and anxiety. Our experience with the changes from the pandemic, and with political and social upheaval has caused the same anxiety and fear in us. We don’t know what’s next, or know what it all means, and our hearts are weighed down with the worries of life. It’s hard to believe that the Kingdom of God is here when it doesn’t feel like anything is going right. So, we struggle with how to reconcile this vision of Jesus returning with the Kingdom with what we’ve read over the past year.

For me, reconciling the two is a separation of the trials and tribulations from the Good News. Jesus coming back riding on a cloud over, above, and unconcerned with the signs is the same as Jesus’ triumph over death on the cross. The trouble of the world does not lead to hearing the Good News, and death does not cause resurrection. Instead, hearing the Good News happens despite the troubles, and resurrection happens even though death has occurred. The Kingdom of God will break through the turmoil we experience, but as Jesus puts it, we can’t be distracted by the turmoil or by the world. We look to the Holy Spirit, always with us to withstand all of the bad things that happen and look for the Kingdom with the eyes of faith, rather than with the eyes of the world. The Kingdom can be here at the same time that the world is turned upside down because they are not mutually exclusive; the world cannot overpower or hide the Kingdom of God. It cannot defeat Jesus’ words that are eternal, that will never pass away. The redemption that Jesus offers here is not salvation from sins, but of rescue from the chaos of a world that doesn’t make sense and seems to be falling apart.

And yet, in the middle of all of this chaos and upheaval and contradictions and fear is a moment of peace and calm, one that washes away all of the troubles in the world. It is the moment where the newborn Jesus, our redeemer, lies quietly in a bed of straw. It is the moment where Mary holds him in her arms, the intimate love between parent and child creating peace that expands outward and pushes the cares of the world away. When we turn our back to the signs of the times and look for the Kingdom of God breaking through, we can step into the middle of it and experience the power of that love and peace. Our fears and anxieties will fade, and the love of God will spread, and we will see the world in a different way. Advent is the time of looking for the Kingdom, of preparing ourselves to step into it and into the presence of the Son of Man, of Emmanuel, God with us. Advent is when we experience God’s time, like the beauty of a timeless drop of water falling in slow motion onto a leaf. It isn’t like our time, where we count the days to December 25th and fret over presents, a tree, and decorations. Advent is a season to be alert, for us to stand up and raise our heads, so that we don’t miss the arrival of Jesus.

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