1st Sunday of Advent: Cycle C 21-22

Jeremiah 33:14-16 | 1 Thessalonians 3:12—4:2 | Luke 21:25-28, 34-36

Grant your faithful, we pray, Almighty God, the resolve to run forth to meet your Christ with righteous deeds at his coming so that, gathered at his right hand, they may be worthy to possess the heavenly kingdom. Through our Lord Jesus Christ, your Son who lives and reigns with you in the unity of the Holy Spirit, God forever and ever. Amen

Always when we begin a new church year, a new season, now looking at the Gospel of St. Luke for the next 12 months, we’re invited to reflect upon the core of this message that Jesus has brought into the world, and if there’s anything that I think you could take from this particular set of readings, the most important thing is the way the gospel ends.  Be vigilant.  Pay attention.  Recognize what’s taking place. 

One of the things that happened to me, when I retired 11 years ago from the active ministry for 43 years in the Diocese of Dallas, is that I finally did not have this incredibly enjoyable but, at times, taxing schedule I had running a parish of over 20,000 members.  You had a system that was going on, a routine.  You knew where you were going to be next week and the week after that and the week after that, and you knew exactly what you were going to do.  But one of the things was clear: it was all-consuming.  I was always working, always engaged with people, and I love being with people.  Doing things for people, I love that too.    And struggling with my own struggles, didn’t love that very much, but I had to do that at the same time.  But basically it was non-reflective.  It was busy, busy, busy, working, working, working, and yet this particular season that starts Advent always starts with the same idea: pay attention, wake up, be vigilant, start reflecting. 

Something is going on that you could get into a way of living where you’re not paying attention to what’s really taking place.  And what is taking place?  What is God doing over and over, year after year in your life and in mine?  He’s remaking the world.  He’s taking us through radical transformation, change.  And I can say this from a zillion ways, but when you have a routine and when things are the way they have always been and somebody just disrupts that, for some of us, it’s hard.  For others, it’s impossible.  Change is not easy, radical change, yet that’s exactly what the gospel is inviting you and me to experience in this world while we walk this planet.  We’re going to be participating in a shift of consciousness and awareness that has to happen to all human beings so that the human race, cumulatively, will figure this out, and we keep growing, growing, growing in consciousness.  There’s something in the world that we resist, and it’s oversimplified maybe to say it’s change.  But whatever it is, it’s moving more into a truth that God has revealed for us to live in, and we tend to want to live in lies, because they’re more comfortable and more familiar.

So with this set of readings, I want to really focus on the gospel to a great extent, because I want to go back to when this passage from Luke took place in the lives of the witnesses that we turn to year after year in every cycle.  We want to listen to the witnesses that were with Jesus, and we want to grow because of what they went through.  So we’re listening to somebody tell us about what it’s like to be in the presence of this God/man Jesus who has come into the world to teach us to be like him.  So let’s put this in a context.  It’s at the end of Luke’s gospel, so pretty much that implies that it’s at the end of the public ministry of Jesus, and it was.  And what has just happened in this particular passage is that Jesus, with his disciples, is deciding to return to Jerusalem, because he has an intuition, a sense of something that he has to do.  And what it is that he’s already implied it to his disciples, “I know this is going to be strange, but I have to give myself into evil.”  Now, they had not concept of what that meant.  Give yourself into evil.  But what he was going to be doing is surrendering to the way in which God intended his life to be lived, and he was going to do it as it was written.  And so Jesus, on the way back to Jerusalem, was not in a great place.  He was not in a good mood, I don’t think.  The one thing that was interesting about that journey back to Jerusalem, when he came upon a fig tree and the fig tree was barren — it wasn’t even time for fig trees to be producing figs, but he condemns that fig tree, and it withers right in front of them.  And so scholars have wondered, “What was that about?”  And what they feel it was about is that Jesus was going back to encounter the temple.  The temple was everything for a good Jew.  It was the place of God’s presence.  It was the source of holiness.  It’s where the Ark of the Covenant was.  In the center of that building was the Ten Commandments, the wisdom that God gave to his followers in the Old Testament, and it was the forerunner of the presence of God entering into somebody.  It’s one thing to have knowledge of what you should be.  It’s something else to have within you the presence of God that enables you to live those rules and regulations and not simply because you’re told that you’re supposed to do them, but you become them.  In Jeremiah’s words, they’re written on your heart.  You become who God intends you to be.

And so he’s going back to Jerusalem to confront this whole issue of the radical change that’s going to happen through his death and resurrection, and it’s going to be traumatic.  Imagine: these 12 men are following Jesus, and they have been told all along that the kingdom is coming, and the kingdom is going to be wonderful.  And if they surrender to God’s gift, they will be able to create this kingdom of peace and joy and forgiveness.  It’s just a beautiful message, right?  Is the world ready for that message?  No.  When you have a message of peace and love and understanding and compassion and you walk into a room filled with people that are filled with vengeance and rivalry and competition and a desire to destroy everything that is not what they expect it to be, you think they’re going to embrace you and say it’s wonderful?  No, they’re going to fight you, and that’s exactly what happened when Jesus returned to Jerusalem.  And he knew that he had to do something really, really, really important, and he took on the entire temple.  And so when he comes in, he’s already in trouble.  He’s already on the radar of the people that have been watching Jesus, and so Jesus knows giving in to evil is going to be giving in to the egocentric, the dysfunction of the temple that had turned into not a place of life but a place that was sucking life out of people.  Does that sound familiar, institutions that suck life out of people?  That happens over and over again in political situations, in business, in religion.  It’s when the very system that is there to care for people turns out to suck life out of them instead of caring for them, because it cares for itself.  All right?  That’s what he’s going to confront.  That’s the barrenness of the temple.  So Jesus comes in as a hero, and he knows that’s going to stir up a lot of stuff in the temple, in the temple leaders.  So on — let’s say he came in on Sunday, the Sabbath maybe, whatever day exactly was, Saturday or Sunday, but basically it was Sunday, I’m sure.  And he came in, and then he took his disciples — but then he went to the temple the next day, in Luke’s gospel, and starts teaching against the temple, because it was such an embarrassment to his and to his — he knew how wrong it was and how sad it was that it had lost its hope and its direction.  Why it did that — it’s only saying that human beings on their own are not ever going to be able to become who they need to be.  They have to have divinity living in them.  That’s the whole history of the Old Testament.  Human beings struggling to do their best to become who God wants them to be are going to end up being egocentric and somehow abusive.  So the system doesn’t have within it what it takes to be fruitful.  The fruitless tree, the fig tree, symbolized that. 

And now when Jesus has gone to the temple and he’s basically yelled at them, tried to make them aware of what they were doing, then he’s with his disciples now where this gospel takes place, and he is sitting — he took them outside of Jerusalem.  They’re looking back at the temple that was just completed, and Jesus makes this incredibly powerful statement.  He said, “Gentlemen, see that place that everyone looks to as the source of life, which it really isn’t, but people still think it is?  It’s going to be destroyed.  I am going to destroy it, and I can rebuild it in three days.”  What he’s saying is — he’s not getting rid of the temple.  He’s not destroying the temple; he’s remaking it.  He’s turning it into something radically different, from a temple that was focused on regulations, rules, laws, judgment, condemnation, he turned it into a church filled with people, filled with empathy, compassion, forgiveness.  It was so radical. 

So Jesus is really aware of the disciples being totally confused at this point, and then he goes on to describe what they’re going to have to be ready to endure, and he talks about the end of the world.  It sounds like the whole world is going to fall apart, and everything is going to collapse.  And there’s going to be darkness and pain and screaming, and bless those that can survive it.  What he’s not talking about — people think this is talking about the end of the world, but it’s not the end of the world.  What it is, it’s the end of that tyrannical system of the temple, and these men are going to be caught in the resistance of the temple to destroy everything that Jesus came to establish.  And so indirectly, he’s saying, “The world that you thought you were going to get into, gentlemen, the thing that you thought I was preparing for you, this great, glorious Jerusalem back in its place of controlling and guiding the world and being the center of the world and all that, it’s all going to go dark.  None of that image is going to work for you guys.  You have to surrender to the fact that everything that you have in your head, that you think I am going to bring you through my guiding you into this new kingdom is going to bring you all this power and glory, it’s going to be just the opposite.  You’re going to be, all of you —” he didn’t say these words but, “All of you are going to be asked directly to die for me, to lose everything that you’ve worked for, just as I am going to show you what it’s like to give in to what it is that God is asking all of us to do, and that is to surrender to the way it’s written.  And when the writing on the wall is that the thing that you’ve come to establish in this world is going to be met with such enormous resistance that you’re going to have to have this capacity inside of you to endure the loss of the power that you would like to have to make the world into what you want it to be.”  We just don’t walk into the world and make it what we want it to be.  We don’t have children and make them into what we think they should be and that we have the power to make the world into what it is.  No, we have the power to bring God into every situation, and when the situation is far from what it should be, we should expect some backlash, some resistance.  And when Jesus tells his disciples, “Be aware of all this.  Stay vigilant.  Don’t get caught up in drunkenness,” all I can think of is, when life is so tough and when you’ve really put yourself out there and you want so much the world to be what you think it could be and you’re working on something, it all collapses.  Or just you have an image of your life that you think God has created this wonderful life for you, and then the life that you believe you had is devastated by a horrible accident or by a disease or by some calamity.  The world you built is gone.  That’s what he’s talking to his disciples about on this mountain, looking back at the glory of the temple, the glory of the perfect world they thought the disciples were going to create. 

It’s not about creating a perfect world.  Be vigilant.  It’s about being authentic and being yourself in every situation, and when you’re in that situation, you’re going to have an impact on freeing the world from whatever is in that space that you’re working in that is clinging to the old way.  And if it doesn’t come after you with a vengeance, then you’re probably not doing the real work.  But when I talk about the real work, I want to be sure that I’m not exaggerating something that would be confusing to you, because I’m using major images, which have a lot of power in them, like if you don’t do this, or when you go through this process, it’s as if your whole world has completely collapsed, and the sun is no more, and the earth is not under your body, and you’re falling.  That’s a lot of drama, and there’s something valuable about using images that strong to say this is really not something that is just easy.  When you think about it, life, for a lot of people, it’s pretty ordinary and pretty normal, and we don’t have major, major traumas.  We haven’t been through some natural disaster or a war or some horrible personal disease and all of that.  So what is it that I would want to give you as advice for how you participate in this mysterious death and resurrection process that is so core to our understanding of what God is longing to do, not so much for us but with us and not to us but with us? 

I’m going to just share something that’s happened to me.  It’s going to sound really silly compared to all these major issues I just described that you might be caught up in, but basically one of the things I noticed, when I was living alone for the first time after my retirement 11 years ago, is how upset and angry I would get when things aren’t the way they’re supposed to be.  Now, I’m not saying that, when I was pastor, that I was raging at times, screaming at people.  I didn’t do that very much, but if I was unhappy with something they were doing, I wasn’t screaming at them, but maybe in a worse situation, they could pretty much feel my rejection — my rejection.  And that’s a kind of violent thing when you think about it.  If you have somebody you look up to, somebody that you want to please, and then they look at you, and they don’t say it so much, but you can just feel something coming out of them — in fact, most of us don’t realize how transparent we are when we are trying to hide emotions and act like nothing’s really a problem.  And most people can pick it up.  So anyway, I just — what I’m saying is I needed a discipline where I could learn how basically to work on the issue of surrendering to things as they are and not as the way I want them to be.  And I started doing it in some of the silliest ways, but I’d get up in the morning by myself, and I would make a cup of coffee, and I would run around and do a few things.  I’d go to sit down and reach for my coffee.  I couldn’t find it.  Then I would look around the house.  I couldn’t find it, and I would get so, so angry.  “What the hell.  Where’s the damn coffee,” and just lose it.  Or I’d go and set something on a table, and it falls over, and it’s red wine, and it goes onto the floor, and I have to clean it up, and I get angry.  And all of a sudden, I realize, “What is it that’s happening when I get angry?  What am I expressing?”  And it was resistance, just pure resistance to the fact that I’m a human being and I make a lot of mistakes.  And I didn’t accept that.  It become — somehow when somebody else is around you and you get mad, like I used to do, they’ll comfort you and say, “Oh, no.  It’s okay.”  But I didn’t have any audience.  I was just doing it on my own.  I was thinking, “This is really crazy.  What a waste of time, to be so angry over something I’ve done that is really nothing other than an expression of my humanity.”  And when you think about the mistakes we make so much, we forget to do something for someone — I remember I had dinner not too long ago with a friend, and I said, “Don’t you worry.  I’ll pick you up at the hotel, and I’ll meet you at the restaurant,” because they’re from out of town.  And I’m sitting at the restaurant wondering, “Where are they?”  And I thought, “Oh, my God, I forgot to pick them up.”  And I sat there, after years of this training, and I’m trying to talk to you about where I just don’t get upset at myself anymore.  I sat there, and I said, “Well, oh well.”  I called them and said, “This is going to sound really stupid, but I forgot to pick you up.  Can you call an Uber and come over?”  But I found amazing capacity to stop the, whatever, instant, negative reaction, when I’m just being human, by simply giving in over and over to little things.

And so maybe what I’m saying is, in all the big, traumatic events in our life, we might find that the real exercising of our will to surrender to what is, is going to happen in the simplest, littlest things, and that’s not too difficult to embrace.Just why get upset when something goes wrong?Why upset in traffic?Why when somebody is in line in front of you and they can’t find their checkbook or they can’t find their credit card or they forgot to get something?They run back to get something, and you’re sitting there waiting, and it’s just chapping you.Give in.Let it go.It’s amazing how you can develop that, and it just takes off so much pressure, because it doesn’t have to be the right way.It doesn’t have to work out the way you expected it to work out.That’s a kind of inner peace that you can develop when you simply trust in the model of Jesus, who gave himself over to evil.That’s exactly what we’re doing, and believe it or not, it’s not that hard, and it’s really effective.