A sermon by Senior Minister John B. McCall, November 29, 2009
Jeremiah 33:14-16
Luke 21:25-36
We’ve all been on long trips in the car. Traveling with kids is a particular kind of experience: “Mommy, he put his finger on my side of the line!” “Don’t you kids make me stop the car!” “Are we there yet?”
Whether you’re traveling for days, hours, or even a few minutes, kids seem to have different sense of time. Patience and delayed gratification are meaningless. Generally, kids want to speed life up. When they’re two they want to be four, and when they’re in middle school they want to get on to high school. From their point of view life lasts forever and everything takes too long. There’s nothing but the future.
Then at some point we reverse our sense of time. We wake up one day and realize there are more years behind us than ahead of us. There are lots of memories of things gone by. And whatever the future holds, it’s not the larger, grander world of youth but a smaller, tougher world of old age. Everything is moving too fast and happening too quickly. We want to slow it down.
Part of the shift is simply experience. We learn that nothing lasts forever – neither burdens nor bliss. We know that most things take time to unfold and play out: driving to grandma’s house, flying to Florida, waiting for the baby to come, or watching a loved one slip away ever-so-slowly.
Just as we used to get impatient when time moved too slowly (“Are we there yet?) so we struggle when time moves too fast (“My gosh… it’s that time already?”) Labor Day was just yesterday, then Columbus Day flashed by, the turkey is still warm and now we’re talking Christmas.
One author has called this the new season of “Hallowthanksmas,” that blur of activity that starts about mid-October and doesn’t stop until early January.
More importantly to us as Christians, today we begin Advent, our four-week season of preparation for the coming of God in the life of Jesus, whom we call Christ, the anointed one, the new-born sovereign. Centuries ago Christians lived with a sense of anticipation, spiritually on tiptoe, waiting for the coming of Christ. And they awaited his second coming, his return in judgment. And they waited and waited.
Today too much of Advent has been lost to the hurry and scurry of Christmas preparations. But many of us seek ways to reclaim this sacred time of preparation, recognizing our deepening need to take time, even to make time to focus on the true reason for the season.
We know the sales brochures and TV specials are here to stay, but we also know they leave us empty and unsatisfied. Our Grinchiness isn’t disgust with Christmas but disgust with the many distractions that diminish our experience of Christmas.
I came across an old Calvin and Hobbes cartoon recently, arguably, I think, one of the best strips of all time: Dad came walking into the room to see Calvin in a big chair squarely in front of the television set; said dad: “Oh look: yet another Christmas TV special. How touching to have the meaning of Christmas brought to us by cola, fast food, and beer conglomerates. Who’d ever have guessed product consumption, popular entertainment, and spirituality would mix so harmoniously. It’s a beautiful world, all right.” To which Calvin mutters: “Dad doesn’t handle the season’s stress very gracefully.”
Many of us don’t handle this kind of stress very gracefully. At some level we try to persuade ourselves that we don’t need the time – that we can just suck it up and charge through the lists.
Sure, you may mark the season with family activities, or even a home Advent calendar or wreath. You may be able to repeat from memory the meaning of the candles we light on the different Sundays. But since we come to this season every year it’s pretty much like reruns on TV or turkey leftovers for two weeks after Thanksgiving. Been there…done that!
How sad that so many dread the holidays, feeling the rising sense of too much to do and too much pressure. We reason that we might be able to relax and enjoy if we only had more time. But more pages in the date-book or more hours between dawn and dusk wouldn’t solve anything. If we had 26-hour days we’d only pack them as tightly as we do already.
What we need is a different sense of time; a feeling of rhythm and a deeper rootedness. Then, when we hear that whiney “are we there yet?” we can answer “No, thank God… not yet: we have more time, enough time to travel before we get there. But won’t it be all the sweeter when we finally arrive?”
Every year we have the chance to enhance our experience of Advent – to embrace a time of preparation, to reclaim a sense of anticipation, and to wait for the coming of Christ. We don’t have to experience Advent as four weeks of frenzy and a too-long list. Rather, now is the time to claim Advent as a way of living, of being in the world. It’s about our openness to the possibility that God can do something different and it may be this time around – so we arrive not tired and grumpy, but somehow refreshed and ready. That’s what I always pray for.
In the few words I read from the prophet Jeremiah, we heard the promise and threat that was issued some 20 years before Jerusalem the holy city, was laid waste by the Babylonian army in 587 BCE. The prophet was calling the people to keep the faith and to lay the foundation that comes from obedience to the holy will of God. He warned that following the commands of earthly kings was leading the people of Judah away from God and towards destruction. And he was right. The prophet pointed not only to the problems but to the way God would reconcile them to the holy will.
That prophetic negativism may be fine for a biblical character but we’d best be alert to its creeping into our own world-view. I read an online article from the Harvard Business Review this week from management guru Marshall Goldsmith. He’s a well-known executive coach and was asked by a reader what was the best advice he’d ever gotten. So, with remarkable humility he told of how rigid, negative and judgmental he was as a young man, a PhD candidate. His advisor, a UCLA professor, told Goldsmith he was considered “a pain in the butt” by most of the people who knew him; that he wasn’t helping his clients, his mentor or himself.
Then the advisor offered his wise counsel: option A – continue to be angry, negative and judgmental and suffer the consequences or, option B – focus on making a constructive difference and have some fun doing it. Accentuate the positive for yourself and the people around you.” Real leaders are not the people who can point out the problem. Real leaders are able to make things better.”
So it is, Luke points us toward what we can do – must do – in our waiting. Luke wrote his Gospel in 75-80 CE, soon after the Romans had destroyed the great temple in Jerusalem. Jesus’ hearers were tired and discouraged. They lived with armies in their streets. They were cruelly treated and oppressively taxed.
For them, and for any people who are pushed to the edges, the suggestion that everything would be turned upside down came as good news… the BEST news.
They watched for signs – Jesus said there would be signs. Many people, Jews and Christians alike, thought this awful event was the beginning of the end. “Are we there yet?”
So we come to the first day of Advent, 2009. Let’s begin with the reminder that time isn’t our enemy. We may speak of working against it or fighting it. We may buy into the vain claims that we can stop the aging process or appear young forever. We try to manage it and slow it down, but time continues like an ever-rolling stream.
We’ve lived long enough to realize that everything is finite and nothing lasts forever. The good times and the bad times come and go. Whatever is now will someday be gone. And what isn’t yet will someday come. Bounty and bust dance a jig and we’re often left breathless and anxious about both.
But don’t make the mistake of thinking Advent waiting is a passive stance. It’s not simply observing time pass by. Advent waiting calls us to be prepared and be open to whatever God is about to do. And more than that, in Advent God invites us into the drama that’s still being written.
So God’s people ask yet again: “Are we there yet?” But we know the answer before we speak. Because we can see the world isn’t redeemed. Sin and suffering and brokenness are everywhere we look. Injustice is rampant. God’s people are not safe in many places. The savior apparently hasn’t returned in judgment.
But Jesus’ call to us was to remain ready, to live on tip-toe; to anticipate that any day might be the day when we do, in fact experience God’s final act of judgment, grace, and resolution – the rest of the story.
Luke’s message may make us tremble. We don’t want more bad news to stand between us and the Good News. But the promise is simple: our redemption draws near. Wait, watch, work, wonder, serve, save, savor.
Live with anticipation, rooted deep in hope, faith, love and joy.