RVCC Pastor's Sermon

Sermon - November 29, 2009

“The Razzle Dazzle of Advent”

By Rev. Nancy Foran
Luke 21:25-36

Welcome to Advent! We have had our fill of turkey sandwiches. The leftover pie – a bit dried out now – is in the refrigerator but good for breakfast just the same. The hurrying and bustling is in full swing, and the mall managers are playing their favorite tune, “Silver Bells.”

The large inflatable Santa’s have come out of storage along with the energy eating light up reindeer. The biggest shopping day of the year has passed, and the secular world is on a trajectory of red and green, glitter and googahs, debit or credit? - aimed directly at December 25th.

And in the midst of all the razzle dazzle, we have gathered in the shelter of our little church this morning, sensing that we really ought to be feeling some sort of spiritual hunger gnawing at us in this special season. We really ought to be carving out the quiet and the contemplative times because, after all, we are off to find that little baby – ssh! – sleeping in his manger in that stable next to the inn in long ago Bethlehem.

Well, I am sorry to disappoint you, but this morning is not about the quiet and the contemplative. This morning is all about the razzle dazzle. And that is because (and this is the part of our story we try to avoid), our redemption is not just found in the first quiet Christmas of so very long ago. There is a second Advent as well, that second coming, you know, the one most of us are embarrassed to talk about and so we try our best to dismiss it, but we still find ourselves in tension between the then of long ago Bethlehem and the then of what is to come.

As Presbyterian pastor, Robert Dunham, notes: “As the Christian faith reckons time, we live between the times, you and I… between the first advent at Bethlehem and the second coming… between then and then. I suspect most of us don’t think of our lives that way very often, despite the fact that we pray every Sunday, “Thy kingdom come, thy will be done on earth….” The truth is, if we think about advent at all, says Neil Plantinga, we are more comfortable thinking about the first advent than about the second.

Christmas [the first advent] is about a baby, after all, and that makes everything easier. We know about babies, and so we know how to domesticate Christmas. We set up a crèche, pin up a wreath, set out a poinsettia or two. Maybe we sing, “Away in a Manger,” with the alternate tune.

Altogether we figure out how 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. As Karl Barth said, we can’t fathom the Second Advent of Jesus Christ, and we stammer when we try to speak of it.”

And yet every year our lectionary directs us to this second advent on this first Sunday of the new church year. And so for us in the church the season begins not dissimilarly from the way it begins for the secular world. Our season begins not with the cows and the sheep and the makeshift cradle in the barn – not with the quiet and the contemplation – but it begins with the razzle dazzle.

Luke describes it all – that second coming. Not surprisingly, the gospel writer uses apocalyptic language, and so he writes that it begins with strange things happening. The world is thrown off course and the stars begin to fall. Luke paints a foreboding picture with all these cataclysmic events of nature. For the Gospel writer, all these signs of the heavens going erratic are indications that the human condition is way off course. Chaos reigns, so why would we not expect war, famine, plagues, and general barbarism.

My goodness, what has gotten into this gospel writer? And perhaps more importantly, what are we to do with all this apocalyptic razzle dazzle? Those are the questions for us this morning.

In answer to the first question about what has gotten into the Gospel writer to even include these dire predictions and warnings in his narrative, it is important to realize that this idea of the second coming, this expectation of Christ's return, dominated early Christian thought. Nobody is really quite sure whether it was Jesus himself or the early church that taught in such terms. However, we do know that many of the concepts and images used in our Gospels were drawn from standard Jewish apocalyptic writing found in the Hebrew scriptures (our Old Testament) and other similar non-Biblical writings of that period.

In addition, as Presbyterian pastor, Susan Andrews, reminds us, “these words (in Luke) were actually written 50 to 60 years after (Jesus), after the destruction of the temple, after the wars, after the suffering, the turmoil, and the political catastrophes of first-century Palestine. These words, then, are written for a people already molded by the suffering and fear and turmoil which the words predict. Luke describes events that took place after Jesus' death; but he describes them through the eyes of Jesus.” So, really, Luke was merely reflecting back what was already part and parcel of his own culture.

Ok – but what about the second question we raised? What do Luke’s words possibly have to do with us? Why do we have to listen to Jesus telling us about a disintegrating social order and impending chaos? Surely we know without being told that the world is not in tiptop shape.

However, as James Kay wrote in “Christian Century,” “We can't just skip over (these verses). The text is a reminder that our world, even our "Christian" world with 20 centuries behind it, is far from redeemed.”

Now that is a downer in this season of joy! But is that the whole message of Advent? It is certainly part of it – the part we would like to forget – the part that rudely nudges us into recalling that it can be pretty bad out there – maybe not always for us, but certainly for those who have known only famine and war in their lives.

However, as James Kay continues to write in his article, “The message of Advent is not that everything is falling to pieces. We probably don't need Luke to tell us that. And certainly the message is not that God is in heaven and all is therefore well with the world. No. The message of Advent is that when heaven itself is spinning into oblivion, when every fixed star on the moral compass is wavering, when all hell is breaking loose on earth, in Jesus’ words, "your redemption is drawing near.”

“My Lord, what a morning, when the stars begin to fall.” Look at it this way. Before the good news comes the bad news. And the bad news is that the world is not as God intended it to be. And maybe only when we can admit this fact can we open ourselves to the fulfillment of God’s promise, open ourselves to the adult message of the baby that we so much want to keep wrapped in those swaddling clothes for as long as possible.

In a most profound way, these words of Luke are not meant to scare. Rather they are meant to soothe. Read as they are meant to be read, they are incredible words of hope. Maybe that is why we reflect upon them this first Sunday in Advent, the Sunday of hope.

Embedded in this passage is such potential, such a certainty of fulfillment. When we read these words, not literally, but for the style of apocalyptic literature that they are, in between the lines of death and destruction, there is such promise and such life. You know, we are mistaken when we think that the word “apocalypse” means the end of the world. It simply means the “uncovering”, the “unveiling.”

Perhaps it means the end of human history as we know it, but would that really be all that bad if it meant we would live as the uncovering or unveiling of God’s kingdom takes place? When we least expect it, God breaks into this world in unpredictable ways that we could never foresee. It is all so close. Can you feel it? It is like when you can almost smell spring in the air, when the fig tree is just about to bloom. The kingdom is that close…

You and I are stuck between then and then, between the first advent and the second, between the kingdom which is already here and the kingdom which is just around the corner, just out of reach. We live oh so realistically about the world as it is - and yet at the same time we do not lose hope in the future.

And so we come to these weeks before Christmas in tension – pulled between the then of long ago and the then of what is surely to be. We come waiting and longing and hoping for that time when God’s promises will be fulfilled, when a new page in our human history will be written in a different way, when there will be light instead of darkness, when the razzle dazzle will be positively glorious, when the stars begin to fall.

Sermon - November 29, 2009

“The Razzle Dazzle of Advent”

By Rev. Nancy Foran Luke 21:25-36

By Rev. Nancy Foran
Luke 21:25-36