It's the same year after year. On this most somnolent of American weekends when it takes three days to recover from one day of gluttony, this lazy weekend when some people sleep in for four days in a row - it is this Sunday that the church decides to defy the culture and catapult us into a new year - smacking us first with judgment and then with demand. It is this weekend that the liturgical calendar tells us to "Wake Up!" Life as we know it will eventually end. Get up! The world as we experience it will surely change. Watch! The God we think we know is about to become for us a God we have never met. Yes, my friends, today is the first Sunday of Advent - the season of moving toward a God who will invade our predictable world and shake us up.
Strangely enough, this year I am ready for Advent. I am ready to burrow into its purple shadows. I am ready to wander through its murky mysteries. I am ready to embrace its open-ended darkness. I am ready to hear the stories and learn the lessons which this season has to teach us - stories about how to wait, lessons about how to repent, teachings about how to endure in the middle of the night, when burdens weigh down and anxiety overcomes. Yes, I am ready to figure out how to be a faithful Christian at times when Jesus seems far away and the world seems ready to fall apart.
We can always count on apocalyptic language this first Sunday of Advent. Echoing the phantasmagorical language of Revelation, the bizarre visions of Ezekiel and Daniel, on this New Year's Day of the Christian year, the gospel writers always greet us with images of cosmic catastrophe and jolting judgment - stories that warn us that all that is predictable and all that is comfortable in our lives will be swept away. And, they tell us, there is nothing we can do to stop it.
Matthew's predictions this morning were written to a complacent and lethargic community - Christians who had lost the expectation of the Second Coming - lost the vision of God's rich and peaceable kingdom on earth. After all, the church in Jerusalem had been waiting for eighty years and nothing had happened. And so their faith and their commitment and their connection to God had cooled off. The believers in Jerusalem had become lukewarm - sort of like us - middle-class agnostics living in one of the most affluent counties in America, cushioned by so much comfort, programmed by so much self-importance, that we, too, manage to keep God at a safe distance. When we first hear it, this apocalyptic language, this scary language, this urgent language doesn't really speak to our situation. Or does it?
My friends, if we open our eyes to the world around us, catastrophe surrounds us. The devastation in Iraq and Afghanistan and the Sudan has killed thousands of people. Talk about being swept away! Our barbaric regime has given way to lethargic occupation and sporadic guerrilla warfare.
And what about the former Soviet Union? Poverty and anarchy reign in a vast land of hungry and miserable people. Soldiers are paid with hunting licenses because there is no money for salaries. Alcohol consumption is skyrocketing, while democratic reformers are murdered. And in the midst of it all, in the midst of all this chaos and dysfunction, Russia's vast nuclear stockpile sits inadequately monitored.
And what about Africa and the Middle East and Ireland, where religious persecution and suspicion and warfare boil and bubble in deep cauldrons of ancient hatreds? A few years ago in Egypt 1,000 Coptic Christians were manacled to doors, beaten, and tortured with electric shocks to their genitals. All the while, teenage girls were raped, babies were beaten, and men were nailed to crosses. All in retaliation for the unsolved death of one Muslim.
And what about Washington, D.C., where patterns of street violence, and poor education, and drug addiction, and single-mother families struggling just to greet each morning - where all these patterns are escalating? Where one third of young men in their twenties are in prison, and where the death rate for young black men has risen 700 percent in the last ten years? Yes, my friends, the shadows of apocalypse are all around us if we have eyes to see and ears to hear.
And not only out there in the unpredictable patterns of our chaotic world. These words also echo in here in the carefully circumscribed worlds of our souls. Despite our presentable masks of stability, despite our filled-up calendars and carefully managed stock portfolios, despite our alarm controlled homes and our computer controlled communication, despite our lists and our voice mail, despite our mission statements and our goals and objectives, we all live in worlds we cannot control. And if we are honest, an apocalypse of anxiety often eats away at us in the middle of the night. What if the stock market tumbles again? How will we pay for college - and for that second home? What if that cyst turns out to be malignant? How many years do we have left to live? What, we wonder, will be the next crisis with our aging parents or our children? And how will we find the time and the energy and the wisdom to meet the needs of all those who depend on us - the kids and the spouse and the friends and the parents and the people who lean on us at work? And, when all is said and done, what difference does any of it make anyhow? What is the point of it anyhow? If scripture is right, it will be in the midst of our marrying and working, in the midst of our eating and drinking, there will come a moment, an unexpected moment, when each one of us will be swept away - and there is not one thing we can do about it.
William Willimon tells the story of a funeral he attended when he was serving a small congregation in rural Georgia. One of his members' relatives died, so Willimon and his wife attended the funeral held in an off-brand, country Baptist church. He writes: "I had never seen anything like it. The preacher began to preach. He shouted; he flailed his arms. 'It's too late for Joe. He's dead. But it ain't too late for you. People drop dead every day. Why wait? Now is the day for decision. Give your life to Jesus.' "
Willimon goes on to suggest that this was the worst thing he had ever seen. He fumed and fussed at his wife Patsy, complaining that the preacher had done the worst thing possible for a grieving family - manipulating them with guilt and shame. Patsy agreed. But then she said: "Of course the worst part of it all is that what he said is true."1
My friends, each one of us lives in the shadow of the apocalypse - the dark reality of the end of our time and the end of the world's time. That is the warning of Advent. But there is also good news. There is also the promise of Advent - the promise that in the darkness, in the shadows, in the unpredictable anxiety of our unfinished lives, God is present. God is in control, and God will come again. With each candle we light, the shadows recede a bit, and the promise comes closer. With each candle we light, we are proclaiming that the light shines in the darkness and the darkness will never overcome it. The promise is that wherever there is darkness and dread in our lives, wherever there is darkness and dread in the world around us, God is present to help us endure. God is in charge, and hope is alive. And as long and as interminable as the night seems, morning will come - in God's good time and God's good way.
And so we have a choice. We can wither away with anxiety. Or we can wait expectantly. We can bury our fears in the deep valleys of sleep. Or we can wake up and watch the horizon. We can crawl into caves of dread and despair. Or we can find our way into the hallowed halls of hope. We can give up and settle for little. Or we can work diligently for the salvation of the world - trusting that God will complete our work with wholeness and abundance.
In her novel Animal Dreams, Barbara Kingsolver introduces us to two sisters - Codi and Hallie - whose mother died in childbirth and who were raised by a cold and autocratic father. The two sisters react very differently to the emotional impoverishment of their childhood. Codi becomes a drifter, unable to find roots in work or love or relationship - suspicious of the world - scared of passion - cynical about this crapshoot called life. But Hallie makes a different choice. Somehow she is able to embrace life and discover passion and decide in the unfinished world of which she is a part that she can and must make a difference. She ends up going to Central America as an agricultural specialist - determined to lose her life in order to find it. In a letter to her mystified sister, Hallie writes:
Codi, here's what I've decided: the least you can do is to figure out what you hope for. And the most you can do is live inside that hope. Not admire it from a distance but live under its roof ... Codi, I wish you knew how to squander yourself (for hope).2
My friends, this Advent season, we are called to embrace the darkness, to trust the Presence, to watch for the flickers of light, to wait for the sure coming of God in new ways. And - while we wait and while we watch - we are called to squander ourselves for hope, proclaiming that God is in charge and that one day the kingdom will fully come.
May it be so - for you and for me. Amen.
1. Source unknown
2. Barbara Kingsolver, Animal Dreams (Boston: G. K. Hall and Co., 1991), p. 299.