December 2, 2007 – The First Sunday of Advent
Matthew 24:36-44
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Last Thursday night the program staff met with our newly-minted Personnel Committee to review documents for staff performance reviews. As we all sat around the table harboring our own personal misgivings about “evaluations,” one of the committee members said, “This is not a bad process, it is a tool to help you all be more perfect.” “How about ‘excellent’ rather than ‘perfect?’ said I, thinking theologically. “No. Perfect,” he insisted. “We strive to be more and more perfect.” “Oh, I get it! ‘Be perfect as your Father in heaven is perfect!’” said I. I don’t remember how he replied. We moved on. But I have been thinking about perfection since then.
We here at Advent have things going pretty well. As you will hear (heard) at our Annual Meeting today, 2007 has been a very productive year in terms of ministry in and around and outside these walls. We continue to attempt to be faithful with the blessings God has entrusted to us. And today we once again meet to “check up/in” on the processes: structure, leadership, stewardship of resources. We will find ourselves trying to look backward and forward all at once, and as was mentioned in a December 2004 article in The Lutheran magazine, “Dark December is a time of separated journeys, drawing inward...It is precisely the wrong time to be working on company finances and church budgets or end-of-year evaluations. The orderly processes of discerning, planning and discussing are at odds with our hearts.” But I disagree. I say Advent, with its “End Time/Christmas/Here-and-Now” juxtaposition of themes is the “perfect” time to take stock of ourselves and our lives.
The first theme on this first Sunday in the first season of our new church year is “The Second Coming of Christ.” And as we begin this new year, we return to the first Gospel, Matthew, speaking with a different voice about Jesus and how we are to be disciples, and we must re-focus to a different perspective on Jesus’ teaching. This voice is a Jewish voice, speaking to 1st century Jews about 1st century issues and 1st century perspectives. This voice is concerned first and foremost with righteousness, and how living under God’s rule and law is at odds with the power structure of the day. It is onto this stage that Jesus walks with his warnings about ultimate choices. It is onto this stage that Jesus teaches about a lifestyle of preparedness. It is onto this stage that Jesus spins a vision of the future.
And as much as we’d like to point to this and claim it as OUR future, this conversation is truly not for us. Oh, we keep trying to make it about us – in the 19th & 20th centuries modern theologians picked these verses to create a whole theology of the End Time and used it as a root metaphor for an event they would title, “The Rapture.” “One will be taken and one will be left…” tends to scare us rather than comfort us, and we forget that we are on THIS side of the Resurrection, and that God is a God of comfort, not of fear. We forget that we are no longer occupied by Romans, and we forget that God’s promise to us is “Remember that I am with you always, to the end of the age.”
Perhaps we need to pause a moment and sing from that great classic hymn, “When Christ shall come, with shouts of acclamation – and take me home, what joy will fill my heart. Then I shall bow, with humble adoration, and there proclaim, My God, How Great Thou Art!” Not a song of fear, but a song of joy and promise and homecoming. It is a song of comfort, because God is in charge.
Today we begin lighting the candles on the Advent wreath which will mark our journey towards the Incarnation, and we start with the first candle, the Prophecy Candle. Prophets spoke the promise into a world of darkness, and the light they kindled began, “Comfort, comfort you, my people…” While we often wonder how we can keep Christmas centered on Christ amid all the commercialization, we perhaps need to stress even more the need to keep one's daily life centered on Christ amid all the other demands placed on us by work, family, and self. When Christ comes, he will need to be the most important thing in our lives. (So even) as congregations may be looking at their budgets, we might ask, "How are we being faithful and wise in caring for others while waiting for Christ's return?"
We need to practice foresight, keeping our eyes on our faithful work, on fulfilling God’s call to us. Someone once asked Wayne Gretsky, the great hockey player, how he managed to become the best goal-scorer in the history of the game. He simply replied, "While everyone else is chasing the puck, I go where the puck is going to be." One of the ways we might accomplish this is to stay focused on Christ (the puck) instead of the events that bring Jesus to mind. To go where he is going to be, so to speak: with the poor, the needy, those in fear and want.
In Matthew's gospel, we hear quite a lot about Jesus as "God with us" (1:23), present with us in tough times (18:20) and for the long haul (28:20). One of the benefits that the ongoing presence of Christ offers the church is the chance to live in the end time ahead of time. We have the presence of Jesus with us even before he comes again in glory… His presence heals, reconciles, calls to account, opens the door to the banquet, pays workers all the same, and on and on, ahead of the time of his return to judgment. Paul's words in Romans are all about living "ahead of time," anticipating with our lives that way of life that will be ours when Christ returns. Maybe the surprise, when Christ returns, will be that he was here all along. Maybe the surprise will be that, ahead of time himself, he has been calling, gathering, enlightening and sanctifying the meek and all the rest of those who bear his name.
A.J. Gordon was the great Baptist pastor of the Clarendon Church in Boston, Massachusetts. One day he met a young boy in front of the sanctuary carrying a rusty cage in which several birds fluttered nervously. Gordon inquired, "Son, where did you get those birds?" The boy replied, "I trapped them out in the field." "What are you going to do with them?" "I'm going to play with them, and then I guess I'll just feed them to an old cat we have at home." When Gordon offered to buy them, the lad exclaimed, "Mister, you don't want them, they're just little old wild birds and can't sing very well." Gordon replied, "I'll give you $2 for the cage and the birds." "Okay, it's a deal, but you're making a bad bargain." The exchange was made and the boy went away whistling, happy with his shiny coins. Gordon walked around to the back of the church property, opened the door of the small wire coop, and let the struggling creatures soar into the blue. The next Sunday he took the empty cage into the pulpit and used it to illustrate his sermon about Christ's coming to seek and to save the lost.
James Arne Nestingen, a professor at Luther Seminary talks about the mark of Christians, those of us who live out post-Easter faith, is forgiveness. “Forgiveness of sin is not merely therapeutic accommodation to the inevitable disappointments of a selfhood running out of control, it is the current form of the resurrection.” In other words, we carry within ourselves the capacity to comfort as God himself comforts, by seeking out and saving those who have been caged. We can free them from their own, or other’s condemnation, and forgive them into a new life of grace. That is release of the captives. That is comfort. That is bringing light into somebody’s darkness.
And don’t we all live in the shadow of the apocalypse – the dark reality of the end of our time and the end of the world's time? That is the warning of Advent. But the good news is that there is also the promise of Advent - the promise that in the darkness, in the shadows, in the unpredictable anxiety of our unfinished lives, God is with us and God will come again. With each candle we light, the shadows recede a bit, and the promise comes closer. With each candle we light, we are proclaiming that the light shines in the darkness and the darkness will not overcome it. The promise is that wherever there is darkness and fear in our lives, wherever there is darkness and fear in the world around us, God is present to help us endure. God is in charge, and hope is alive. And as long as the night might seem, the dawn will come.
Brett Blair, www.eSermons.com for 12.02.07
