First Sunday in Advent
Text: Jeremiah 33:14-16, Psalm 25:1-10;
I Thessalonians 3:9-13, Luke 21:25-36
“Be on guard!” Jesus says. Watch out! Be careful that “your hearts are not weighed down” with the “worries of this life, and that day catch you unexpectedly” (Luke 21:34).
What is that day? There is a great deal of speculation and debate about that question. Lutherans don’t dive into it too often, but many of our Protestant neighbors spend a lot of time and energy arguing between “pre-trib” and “post-trib” and “pre-millennial” and “post-millennial” and “what dispensation are we in?” and other questions like that.
There is no need to get tied up in knots about when Jesus is coming back; that’s not the issue. The real point is a simple one – life ends for all of us. The most important question we face is not: “When will Jesus come back?” Rather the real question we must answer is: “How does the fact that none of us lives forever alter our behavior?”
The Scriptures continually remind us that one day God will, “execute justice and righteousness” (Jeremiah 33:15). And Jesus reminds us that we must: “Be on guard, so that your hearts are not weighed down with dissipation and drunkenness and the worries of this life … . Be alert at all times, praying that you may have strength … to escape … and to stand” (Luke 21:34-36). In short, we are called upon to take our God and ourselves seriously. We are called upon to recognize that life can be snuffed out in an instant and to live accordingly. Not with a morbid fear of death, but rather with a vibrant excitement about the opportunity to love and serve God and neighbor every day. We are to be alert, stay awake and watch for signs of God’s activity in the world so we can join in.
This is a difficult thing to do in the midst of the modern, secular, consumerist Christmas season.
After 2,000 years, we’ve sort of stopped looking for Christ to come, and we’ve settled for a pale, weak, neon lit imitation. We schedule office Christmas parties and celebrate family dinners. We buy presents for our husbands and wives and children and significant others. We decorate our homes with lights, trees and ornaments. We send out greeting cards and enotes to people over the country, and we hope that our sanity and our bank account will hold out until New Year’s Day.
The season of Advent is a reminder that in the midst of all the holiday hoopla we are invited to look for Christ, to seek signs of his coming, to be alert for his presence “in, with and under” all the gift giving, decorating and partying. In our Gospel lesson, Jesus tells the parable of the fig tree. We live in a land where most of the trees go dormant in the winter and come back to life in the spring. In Palestine, the opposite is true. Most of the tress and scrubs there are evergreens. The fig tree is an exception; it alone goes dormant in winter. That is why it was so significant to Jesus. The fact that it died and came back to life was a symbol of faith. Even though it appeared to be dead; in the spring it sprouted new leaves, proving that it had been not dead but dormant; gathering strength for a new explosion of life and fruitfulness.
Sometimes it is hard to find signs of life in an old faith. Sometimes it feels like God is either dead or sleeping. It is at such times that we are invited to remember the lesson of the fig tree – that it is in the middle of a world filled with physical and spiritual death that we must hold on most fiercely to God’s promise of hope and life and salvation. We must stare hard at the “dead wood,” seeking there some sign of life.
My late mother-in-law was what I would call a generic Protestant – a Metho-bap-terian, a sort of Evangelical, for whom the Christmas season started the day after Thanksgiving and ended when she went to bed on Christmas Day. Fair enough – it’s that way it is for most people in this country.
She loved to decorate the house, buy presents, fix food and watch all the old Christmas movies with her son Dwight. Jean was widowed in her 50s, and Dwight is developmentally disabled and she took care of him all her life.
Sometime in December, every year, Jean would stumble across the opportunity to do something nice and generous for someone in need. She would call and tell us about taking clothes to a burned-out family she heard about at church, or taking a meal to the homeless shelter, or secretly paying the rent or the electric bill for a needy family she heard about at her job at the bank. She would call, happily telling us all about it. Then she would say, “That made my Christmas, it sure did.”
“That made my Christmas.” Not the house lit up like a Roman candle, not the decorations in every room, not all the special foods, not the presents, not the bank party, not even the Christmas Cantata and candlelight communion at the Methodist Church, No, a random, yet sincere, act of kindness made her Christmas. Helping someone else, putting her own very real needs aside for a moment, being able to be a part of touching the life of someone else – that made her Christmas special, and it allowed her to be, in the words of Martin Luther, “a little Christ” for someone else, a sign of God’s ongoing activity in the world.
Maybe the real question today is not “When will Christ return?” or “What must I do to be ready?” Maybe the real question is “What will make your Christmas?” What are you going to do during this Advent to be a sign of God’s loving presence in the world?
Amen and amen.
