Lectionary Texts: Jeremiah 33:14-16, Luke 21: 34-46
In the Calvin and Hobbes comic strips, Calvin is a little boy and Hobbes is his stuffed animal tiger, which is a real live tiger to Calvin. There is a comic strip where this conversation takes place. Calvin speaks to Hobbes and says: “Live for the moment is my motto! You never know how long you got.” He goes on to say, “You could step into the road tomorrow and WHAM, you get hit by a cement truck! Then you’d be sorry you put off your pleasures. Live for the moment – that’s what I say." And then he asks Hobbes: “What’s your motto?” Hobbes replies: “My motto is, “Look down the road!”
Today is the first Sunday of Advent and the beginning of the Christian year. It’s a good time to look down the road. Its time to consider that we live in between the first coming of Jesus and his second coming. Now you know, we feel a lot better about the first one. Christmas is about a baby, after all, and that makes everything easier. We know about babies, and so we know how to domesticate Christmas. We trim a tree, set up a creche’, pin up a wreath, set up a poinsettia or two. We will sing wonderful carols, and somehow all of us together will figure out a way to manage Christmas so that the little Lord Jesus asleep on the hay won’t end up scaring anybody.
But the second coming is something else. Most of us have a real hard time trying to figure this out. A good part of our problem is that the Bible describes the return of our Lord in apocalyptic language, that is so symbolic, sometimes so coded, that is hard to interpret.
During these past weeks I gave you several important principles about how I interpret scripture. Let me quickly restate those. First, I look at scripture from Jesus’ perspective. Some say, we don’t need to interpret scripture at all, we must take scripture word for word. I think we can’t help interpret. Every time we read anything, we interpret it through a variety of filters that’s in our mind. I try to look at scripture, standing on Jesus. What is the kingdom principle here, I want to ask. And sometimes when something that is in scripture seems to contradict what I know from the Spirit of Jesus, I want to ask some hard questions about it. Scripture is authoritative to me, but I worship Jesus. And when he said, Love the Lord your God with all your heart and mind and strength and your neighbor as yourself, and that all the law and the prophets (i.e. scripture) are summed up in these two, I interpret scripture on that basis.
Next I want to look at the context in which it was spoken. To whom was Jesus speaking these words, at what point in his life, what was going on their life together at that time that caused him to say that. Then I want to look at who wrote it and why and at what time. What was Luke trying to convey to his readers. What was going on in his time, 40 –50 years after Jesus’ death and resurrection that caused him to write this. Luke didn’t write everything that Jesus said or did, you see. He couldn’t in such a short book. He had to select, which stories, incidents from his life, which teachings, he was going to highlight. There was a reason for selecting these and a reason for putting them in the order that he does – same goes for Mark and Matthew and all the other writers of the Bible. We are separated by at least 2000 years from these people of God, you see. Its hard for us to understand what life was really like for them. So we have to read and learn – not just from the Bible, but from other sources about life at that time. Who are the evil Roman Emperors that persecuted them, why did they do that, and so on. Now suddenly we have a little better understanding about what we are reading.
Apocalyptic texts are really an unveiling of the world that lives behind this world. It’s a revelation that tells about the transition from this age to the next. This is a rough transition. Its so full of emergency. Nations go to war, and people run for cover. There’s blood in the streets and famine in the fields. The descriptions parallel the life of persecution that the readers were facing. The earth shakes and the sea roars. There are signs in the sky above, panic on the earth beneath, stars falling, people dying of fright – it’s a huge disaster.
And then, in the midst of all the confusion, people will see “the Son of Man coming in a cloud with power and great glory.” He’s got the power to judge and power to save and this time he’s too big to miss. You need to understand this too – every time Jesus said Son of Man, the people understood something that we don’t understand. Son of Man was in their cultural and religious vocabulary. It comes from the vision of Daniel and is reaffirmed in the other writings of the time. It is as if, someone were to say Thomas Jefferson, or any of the founders of this nation who put our constitution together would come to deliver from the recounts and chads. We know what that means. But people in Sri Lanka or anywhere else in the world would have no idea what you are talking about. Jesus identified himself with an existing religious figure. And because the Son of Man was to come in great glory to bring together in a climactic event all of human history and the struggles and the persecutions would end and the righteous shall be made free again. This is the tremendous hope of the apocalyptic literature. The people needed that hope then, and we need it now.
When we read scripture we need to look at all these things. We need to ask ourselves what are the principles that the speaker is trying to convey to his listeners and the writer to his readers. Then we need to take those principles, pull them out of that context and replant them in our context.
But why does the second coming make us squirm? What is it about this that makes us so uneasy? One problem is, as I said, we don’t know how to read the text. Every time we read apocalyptic literature without reference to its context of tremendous hardship and struggle and without a taking into account its symbolic language, we run into trouble.
Another problem is that we have been waiting too long. Its hard to stand on tiptoe for two thousand years. So after a while people settle down to an everydayness of their faith and quit scanning the horizon. The way this plays out for most of us is that we embrace a common-sense Christianity that stays fairly close to the ground. We don’t deny the big, booming events such as the second coming, but we don’t think about them very much either. We’ve still got church, and scripture and prayer, we’ve got Jesus’ commandments “Love the Lord you God with all your heart, mind and strength and your neighbor as yourself,” we’ve got Christian radio stations to make us feel at home in the world, and every week we faithfully spend some of our money and time on kingdom causes. That’s ground-level Christianity, and its just enough religion to keep us going.
Then there’s a third reason. We have become secularized. Our view of the world has flattened out, and the second advent of Jesus Christ doesn’t fit into a flattened out world very well. Its too fantastic. Its too supernatural. Its too embarrassing. Its an embarrassing advent so we leave it to those who have turned apocalyptic speculation into a billion-dollar industry – prophecy buffs with the computer charts and wrong predictions that are then folded back into new predictions. And when we meet our friends and relatives, fellow believers, who have bumper stickers that say, “Beam me up, Jesus” –we try to ignore it.
But by secularized I don’t mean that we need to have a world view of a three-tiered universe – with heaven above and hell below. By secularized, I mean that our embarrassment about our ancient faith has made us cynical. So we live with a low ceiling over our lives, so that there is no room for the incoming Lord? We may be just the sort of people Jesus warns about in Luke 21. “Watch!” says Jesus. Heads up! Be alert! Pray that you will have the strength to stand before the ‘Son of Man! Jesus says this to people who have given up on the second coming and have settled into a ground-level religion. At this level their hearts get weighed down, says Jesus. And isn’t that the truth about us! We are and we live among a people who weigh themselves down with anxieties and stresses and then relieve themselves with private amusements. Jesus mentions drunkenness in particular. Today he might name a variety of addictions. People worry, so they get drunk. They get drunk, so they worry. And that makes them want a drink. And we are caught up in that addictive cycle. At the end they are trapped.
Watch! Jesus says. Be alert! Jesus says this because his return is not an apocalyptic fireworks display. His return is the coming of the kingdom of God. It’s the coming of justice in the earth. When the signs appear, says Jesus to a temple-full of listeners, don’t give up! Don’t freeze up! “When these things begin to take place, stand up and raise your heads, because your redemption is drawing near.”
How can I not talk about this weekend! This weekend I was with 500 plus people, religious leaders intensely engaged in standing up, raising their heads and working out their redemption and the redemption of the world. They are people so moved by the power of the redemption they have experienced in their own lives, so moved by the power of the anointing of the Holy Spirit, so moved by the calling of God for the redemption of the world. I stood in a line of clergy and lay leaders at the closing worship to anoint with oil the hands of these leaders who came in a long line. I was struck by how different each of them was – women and men, black, white, Latino and Asian, older people and young people and they came from all over the country and South Africa. I could see the passion in their eyes. And I knew that these anointed hands would be the ones that will work so hard to dismantle racism and economic oppression. They are the hands that would be raised to challenge the power structures, to bring down the oppressive walls of Jericho. They are also the hands that would work hard to rebuild homes and communities, touch and heal the pain of our broken world.
Jesus is talking to people who know about redemption. These are Exodus people. These are Passover people. These people have a history of being squeezed by Egypt, Babylon and Rome. To these people, redemption is the longing of their heart. They want Rome off their back. They want Caesar out of their hair. That’s their dream. Its their passion. The coming of God’s redemption means justice is coming. When biblical people want God’s redemption they cry out. This is not just a whining cry. It’s a passionate cry, it’s a defiant cry, it’s a protest. And you know what -- God hears.
What do we know about such passion? You know, when life is good, our prayers for the kingdom get a little faint. We whisper our prayers for the kingdom so that God can’t quite hear them. “Thy Kingdom come,” we pray, and actually hope it won’t. “Thy kingdom come, we pray “but not right away.” When our own kingdom has had a good year, we aren’t necessarily looking for God’s kingdom, now, are we? When life is good, redemption doesn’t sound so good. God’s redemption is good news for people whose life is bad news – and on the same count, its bad news for people whose life is good news. If you are slave in Pharoah’s Egypt, or a slave in antebellum Mississippi, you want your redemption. If you are an Israelite exiled in Babylon, or a Kosovar exiled in Albania, you want your redemption.
You know, redemption is never just an individual thing. According to scripture the person who wants redemption wants the kingdom of God whether she knows it or not. And the coming of the kingdom depends on the coming of the King. The one who will return with power and with great glory. However we are to understand this apocalyptic event, what form it takes, the second coming of Jesus Christ means that God’s righteousness will at last fill the earth.
People who are struggling with their lives now – people who are oppressed and persecuted now, want it to happen now. It you are a Christian in sub-saharan Africa today, you don’t yawn when somebody mentions the return of Jesus Christ. When the AIDS epidemic has devastated whole populations you want your redeemer. If you are a Christian in the Northern parts of Sri Lanka, you don’t yawn when you think about the return of Christ, when for almost two decades you have been cut off from basic amenities of life, like food and transportation and fuel and a terrorist war has devastated your community. And I want to suggest to you, that if you are a Christian in the southside of Chicago, and you can look at the suffering that people undergo here or understand the systemic evil of disinvesting from a entire geographic region because people who are African American and people who are poor live there, the return of Christ is not a yawn. It’s a powerful hope, because it’s the day of the coming Kingdom that we’ve been waiting for. Passionate Christians want the return of the Lord -- so do compassionate ones.
Be on guard, said Jesus, that you don’t get weighed down with anxieties and worries that you will have to use private amusements to relieve them. Be on guard against that fatal absorption with yourself! Take care! Stay alert! Stand up and raise your heads because the kingdom is coming.” These words are an antidote to our sloth, and antidote to our worldly cynicisms. Jesus’ words are meant to raise our heads and raise our hopes. Could the kingdom of God really come on earth? If we believe that, we will pray, and we will hope for those without much hope left.
In a book entitled Standing on the Promises, Lewis Smedes says that hoping for others is hard, but not the hardest. Praying for others is hard, but not the hardest. The hardest thing for people who believe in Jesus and in his second coming is in Living it in such a way that people will say: “Ah, so that’s how people are going to live in the righteousness takes over the world. The hardest part is simple faithfulness in our work and in our attitudes – and the kind of faithfulness that shows we are being drawn forward by the magnet force of the kingdom of God.
Jesus said, look at the signs. When the trees start dropping their leaves you know winter is going to come. When the fig tree starts to sprout you know summer is already near. And I read the signs, too. I am not going to look at a Camp David meeting and pull out a pocket calculator to say, Jesus is going to come when Jerusalem is re-established as Israel’s capital. But I look at a gathering of 500 plus religious leaders from across the country who gather in one place to learn, reflect, strategize, be agitated and return with energy to their communities to challenge the structures that bind. I look a national movement that is calling for a massive gathering of all religious communities to prayer in front of the Lincoln Monument in Washington DC next year, to mobilize our people to let the legislators in both state and federal governments know that people of faith have come to believe that the time for eradicating concentrated poverty is an issue whose time has come.
My motto is also to look down the road. Yesterday I did that and I saw it in the eyes of 500 religious leaders. Then I came here yesterday, to this community – where about 15 of us gathered last night to talk about where God is leading us and I saw it in our eyes, and I see it today – in your eyes, in the eyes of all God’s people who know and understand that our faith is more than ground-level day to day Christianity. I see it in your eyes. The Son of Man coming in a cloud with power and great glory. So, stand up, raise your heads for your redemption is drawing near.