A Note of Caution as We Begin

Jeremiah 33:14-16

Luke 21:25-36

Let me begin with the obvious – these two readings today, from Jeremiah and Luke, do not exactly put us in the “Christmas spirit.”  In our culture, Thanksgiving and Christmas bookend a festive holiday season.  In countless ways, we come away from Thanksgiving ready for a countdown to Christmas.   

And can you really blame us?  We live in the grit and grind of humdrum, ordinary tasks and responsibilities.  And the holiday season presents us with something different – a time for laughter, joy, celebration, special gatherings, good food, and gift-giving.  Young people who endure the drudgery of school look forward to a two-week break at Christmas.  Those of us who work will get a few days off.  And most of us plan to connect with friends and family. 

 

How many of you used the Thanksgiving weekend to begin decorating for Christmas?  For youngsters this countdown marks a final leg of a long year of waiting for the magic time of putting up the decorations and making Christmas lists.  At school and work, December marks a time for Christmas parties all month long. 

So here we are, done with Thanksgiving and plunging headfirst into the Christmas season, and the traditional readings on the first Sunday of Advent feel a little mismatched to where we are emotionally.  Jeremiah has nothing to say about lights and gingerbread men, but instead directs us to a coming day of the Lord marked by justice and righteousness.  And our reading from Luke’s gospel features not the sweet story of the baby born to Joseph and Mary, but instead the adult Jesus, speaking of the shaking of the heavens, warning us all to be alert and keep watch.

The church has been observing a season of Advent for centuries.  And these readings are here on purpose.  We all come to worship today expecting some help launching out into the joy of the season.  What we get instead sounds strange, bizarre, and confusing.  Both Jeremiah and Jesus call us to the faithful practice of waiting. 

Jeremiah is the prophet who speaks God’s word to Jerusalem during a time of fear.  The northern tribes of Israel had been conquered and deported by the Assyrian empire long ago.  The Southern tribes in the area around Jerusalem lived under the threat of a similar national disaster. They were in a crisis moment, and they had every reason to despair when looking to the future.

But when life is under threat from several directions, Jeremiah reminds us that God keeps promises.  The God who promised peace and security to Jerusalem would not fail or fizzle.  God will provide leadership for God’s people through the ancestry of King David.  And this will be a new realm of justice; a new kingdom so marked by God’s righteousness that he city of Jerusalem will receive a new name, “The Lord is Our Righteousness.”

Now it is almost impossible for us to hear this promise from God for a shared, public, communal life marked by “righteousness.”  We use the term “self-righteous” to describe people who use their own track record of morality to place themselves above others.  But Jeremiah calls us to a kind of waiting, watching, and working that has as its focus the saving work of God that benefits and blesses the whole realm.  There is no room during Advent for selfish individualism.  We wait by longing for God’s righteousness alongside others who wait and watch for a new way of life that can only emerge as the gift of God’s arrival.

Like Jeremiah, Jesus warns us to wait and watch for a coming day of the Lord.  He calls us to be on guard and watch for signs of the old world breaking apart and a new world beginning to emerge.  Though he turns us toward a future of life-shattering, world-shaking events, we are not to despair.  Rather, we are to organize our lives so that God’s arrival does not close on us like a trap.  We are to avoid being lulled into distraction by either anxiety or pleasure.  We are to take up practices of prayer that anticipate the world Jesus promises coming to birth. 

If all this “waiting” strikes you as abstract piety or a way of life that’s distant from your real life and concerns, let me remind you that both Jeremiah and Jesus are speaking to real, concrete situations.  Both of their audiences – like us - lived at a time of massive political upheaval and cultural anxiety.  They speak to people who feel like the world is coming apart.  They speak to people whose plans for the future have been interrupted.  They speak to people just trying to hold on in a world where the heavens shake and the seas roar.

So it’s true that these readings do not yet usher us into the joyous celebration of Christmas.  They offer us no wise men, no shepherds, no angels, and no babies.  But what happens if we can get beyond our disappointment over these readings?  What might we hear when we admit that this wasn’t really what we came to hear?  Is there something here opened up for us that we would have missed had we been allowed to run full speed ahead into the joy of the season with everyone else?

These readings do not allow us to cheer and sing and rejoice with a relaxed posture, as if God’s arrival in the world will put us at ease.  Instead, they invite us to gird ourselves, to wake from our comfortable drowsiness, so that we can receive the earth-shattering newness of God’s arrival in its full splendor and life-transforming power.

The reason these readings catch us unprepared is that we had hoped to move smoothly from one holiday to another, from one period of joy straight into the next one.  These readings ask us to push pause before moving further into the Christmas season.  They break our rhythm.  They ask us to pose some hard questions about whether our need for smooth and soothing transitions from one period of life to another is really healthy.  They arrest our quick dart past difficulty by asking whether our desire – our secret demand even – for a life that moves always between comfort and pleasure is realistic.

Before we celebrate God’s arrival to save, we at least have to name some of the ways that our world is marked by pain, confusion, and uncertainty.

If some of our children were not alive to experience and remember the terrorist attacks of 9/11, they know the fear of terrorism from the recent bloody attacks in Paris.

If our children do not remember the Oklahoma City Bombing by home-grown terrorist Timothy McVeigh, they know the fear of the Boston marathon bombing, of the killings in Denver this week, and of the sick cycle of school shootings that happen again and again.  And they recognize the absurdity of living in a political landscape where we adults cannot even get assault rifles out of the hands of kids, and cannot find the resources to help those who are mentally ill.

Bad things can happen now, anytime, anywhere.  If you fly on planes or travel on trains or set foot in a public place, a crowded building or coliseum, you are a potential target of someone’s misplaced anger and violence.

Our black brothers and sisters in Ferguson, Baltimore, Chicago, and Minneapolis are in terrible pain.  And we grieve with them.  They are tired of being profiled and shot.  They’ve had enough.  And they’re organizing non-violent protests to affirm their dignity, their right to raise sons and daughters in safe places.  And yet even the peaceful demonstration in Minneapolis this week was infiltrated by white supremists, who shot and killed three people. 

The black community in Chicago rallied the city to protest another shooting of a young black man.  They marched down the Magnificent Mile, as if to say, we cannot shop for Christmas presents without justice and reconciliation between whites and blacks.  Black athletes at the University of Missouri had to threaten to boycott events in order to affirm their dignity and worth in the face of widespread and threatening racism.  And in case you think this is all about other places, there is significant tension between whites and black on the campus of the community college here in town.

The problems before us are not just black, they’re brown too.  We’re caught in debates and disagreements about immigration from Mexico and South America as well as about refugees from Syria and other war-torn regions in the Middle East.

Just listen to our conversations about the economy, interest rates, market volatility, and future employment, and you will hear anxiety and worry just beneath the surface.  Will jobs come back, or will they be automated or moved overseas?  Does college ready our young people for life in this new economy?  And if so, how much student debt should they take on?  Is anyone’s job safe?  Or are we all living near the edge of having to scramble and hustle to find another job, or another field of work entirely?  And as we listen to our political candidates, we wonder whether any of them have the backbone, the foresight, or the character, to lead us through troubling times.  Are any of them able to withstand the lure of money from powerful corporate lobbyists to govern for the good of all? 

In our wider cultural life, we feel the world coming apart in the lack of trust between older and younger generations, expressed in a wariness about technology, entertainment, and the use of cellphones.  Centuries of certainty about marriage are giving way to the beginning of a new way of imagining loving partnerships.  Bruce Jenner’s pivot into Caitlyn Jenner raises questions about gender.  Everything seems to have come unstuck.

Life is unsure and precarious.  The world is dangerous and unpredictable.  Events will continue to explode our security and expectations.  We head into the Christmas season with no promises of smooth progress from joy to joy. 

But we do have God’s promise to be with us through all of what comes.  We have God’s promise to arrive in the middle of our lives and to be enough.  God offers us a way of trusting in the power of love, in the victory of God’s kingdom, without needing to predict what will happen next. 

As God’s people, we are called to a trusting hope in a coming day of the Lord.  And this is no common sense optimism derived from reading our current situation.   Rather, it is based on being a people situated between God’s first arrival in Jesus and another, fuller arrival yet to come.  The future cannot disappoint.  Because the future belongs to the Lord Almighty.  Your future is a place of God’s transforming love.  And we are called to replace the negativity of our despair and complaining with patient, hopeful waiting upon God. 

We’re not counting down to Christmas as an ending to the season.  Instead, we’re counting forward to the beginning of something new, to the birth of the long awaited messiah, to the special child who will inaugurate God’s loving realm amidst a people who watch and wait.