Sometimes you and I read the Bible as if it were a blast from the past. In reality, it also sends us future messages about what it means for each of us to be a child of God and a disciple of Jesus Christ. Scripture is often out ahead of us, inviting us to live a richer and nobler life today. In essence, today’s epistle lesson is a fax from tomorrow concerning how Christians are to respond to the great promise of God’s return or reappearance before humankind.
A necessary piece of equipment for many modern offices is a fax machine. A business person conveyed an interesting experience he had with a fax machine. Some friends of his in Australia sent him a fax. As he read it, he noticed the date the fax was transmitted. It was sent and dated tomorrow. The fax was sent to him the day after he had received it because of Australia’s time zone. He labeled the letter his “fax from the future.”1
Fittingly, the first Sunday of Advent is symbolized by lighting the candle of Promise. As the days shorten and the nights deepen, we know of darkness. Like the early Thessalonians we are anxious and lacking in our faith. Yet we light a candle as a sign of God’s promise that the Light of the Christ has come and will come again. That promise shapes our present.
Today’s lesson comes from one of the very few letters from Paul that does not try to combat a particular problem in the early church. Paul’s words are those of one who misses his new converts who have no tradition to fall back on in his absence. Like all new converts, they have to fall forward into the future to articulate who they are.
Consequently, Paul writes to reassure them in the midst of their anxiety and answer some questions about the promise of the day of the Lord.
Sometimes we hear the adage, “the present shapes the future.” Indeed it does. We live in a world of cause and effect, rewards and punishments, and impulses and impressions. Paul points to another reality. It is just as true for humankind that the future shapes the present.
Over the entrance to Andover Hall at Harvard Divinity school is an inscription in Latin which translates into English, “The end is determined by the beginning.” Were Paul to have charge of that emblem, the verbiage would, perhaps, be reversed, “The beginning is determined by the end.”
Apparently the hearers of this epistle in Thessalonica were filled with speculation and anxiety about the day when the Lord would return. Would it really happen? Would it be in our lifetime? How do we live in the present? Is God any more available in the future than God is available now? What is the basis for our hope?
The country philosopher contends that the Bible pictures life as it never was, so we can see life as it really is. Paul attempts to ground the newly born Christians of Thessalonica in the vision of a promise that the Jesus who came once in weakness and in meekness will come again, “with all his holy ones,” so they can live in love toward one another and everyone else, confident of God’s future.
Peter Gomes has noted that the glorious paradox of Advent is that “as we look forward to the return of the past, the rekindling of the lights that lead to Bethlehem, we look forward also to that which has not yet been, the lights that lead to the eternal victory we shall share in Jesus Christ.”2 Indeed, Advent, if not the entire Christian experience, is seeing life as it never was so we can see life as it really is.
Without the vision of a future which can shape our present, Advent ceases to become a transforming event. It becomes a spot on the calendar, the four Sundays which precede Christmas. When Prince Talleyrand, the great French statesman, was an old man, he attended a large ball given on some diplomatic occasion. At one point in the evening an announcement was brought to the assembled crowd. The messenger read a statement that Napoleon Bonaparte had died. In the silence that followed, the guests looked to Talleyrand for some words. He simply said, “It is no longer an event. It is merely a piece of information.”3 Something akin to this experience happens when people gather in modern day cathedrals and churches to pay homage to a former faith that now pales in the midst of a long played-out commercial scene of candles, readings, carols, and gifts. No longer an event, merely a piece of information — Advent begins today!
It seems somewhat consistent in human history that without a transforming confidence in God’s future, what Christians call “eschatology,” yesterday’s big events become today’s “mere pieces of information.” We are able to find joy, even in our present darkness, precisely because we believe in the promise of a coming dawn in which the weaknesses and tribulations of this world can be seen for what they really are and are not!
This ability of the future to shape the present connects us intimately and eternally with the anxious Thessalonians. Let’s be honest. Are not their questions our questions as we approach this Christmas season? Reflect on what lies ahead of us. We will sing of peace in the world as we belt out those familiar Christmas carols. Joy to the World — “He rules the world with peace and grace, and makes the nations prove the glories of his righteousness and wonders of his love.” Hark! The Herald Angels Sing — “Peace on earth and mercy mild, God and sinners reconciled!” Silent Night — “Holy infant so tender and mild, sleep in heavenly peace, sleep in heavenly peace.”
Why do we keep singing those songs? Why do we keep singing those songs, if it appears that peace is hardly winning? Certainly all is neither calm nor bright in the annals of human history. In our last 100 years over 125 million people have died in wars. Many children wake up Christmas morning in rooms with parents who have abused them in the previous year. Why do we keep singing those songs of peace every year? Is our big event just a foregone piece of information to a weary world?
When I was a teenager there was a high school in our area that lost all its football games three years in a row. They never won a single game. Every time we went on the field and bowled them over, I was amazed at the surroundings. They had a large band that played over and over, “Fight to win the victory, fight for her name.” And all those parents and students would stand up and sing. They always had a dozen or more cheerleaders brightly dressed in green and white. They’d spell out V-I-C-T-O-R-Y all through the game. I used to wonder what it was like to puff your breath out on the tuba or keep screaming “victory” in the freezing cold and rain when your team always lost. Oh, sometimes they would be ahead in the game, but at the end the idea of victory never became a reality. They always cheered for the idea but the reality never came.
Why sing and plan for an idea that never becomes a total accomplishment? Why not save everybody the time, the effort, and the money and just never take the uniforms and the instruments out of the closet? Why sing for an idea that never becomes an accomplishment?
Jesus the Christ, like the prophets before him, let forth the dream of a world of peace, where the will of God would be done, a kingdom of God where the lion would lie down with the lamb; where the king on the throne would be the Prince of Peace and not a totalitarian despot. He said his Spirit, his Holy Spirit, would be here to support it. But it doesn’t seem to have happened.
To be quite honest, even in the day of Jesus there was a dark side to Christmas. There was no peace on earth. At the human level it appeared that nothing had changed. The rivers of the Middle East still ran red with blood. Within two years of the birth of Jesus, Herod was slaughtering all the male babies in Bethlehem two years old and under. People had to keep paying taxes to Rome and bowing down before the emperor. The lions in the Roman coliseum feasted on the flesh of those who had believed that Jesus was the Prince of Peace. Apparently this messiah was not just about love and light and peace. Jesus the Christ was not just about singing songs and having a warm feeling in your heart. Jesus Christ was not just about going to heaven when you die and living in a perfect world on earth until that time. Jesus Christ was about sin, judgment, and forgiveness. The very fact that Jesus was born as the Son of God was witness to the reality of human sin.
Sometimes the complexities of a tough world blind us to our sources for hope. We walk and act as if nothing has changed when everything has changed. One of the craziest acts in the Bible is attributed to Jeremiah. Jeremiah knew that God had promised peace for his people and that God had said he would give them a new covenant, not on stone tablets but on human hearts. Yet, Judah was weak and about to be swallowed up by the Chaldeans. The people of Judah had lost faith in everything. Jeremiah held to God’s long-term promise. As a result of his faith and hope, Jeremiah took his life savings and purchased property, land, in Judah which he knew would be destroyed. Scripture says he paid full price for it, too. He was more interested in buying into the promise of a kingdom of peace than being ruled by what the world could see at the present.
This is precisely what Paul was encouraging the anxious Thessalonians to do. He was urging a most radical transformation under the shadow of Jesus’ promise to return. This transformation could actually make one’s love increase, not only toward one’s comrades-in-arms, but toward everyone else as well.
Bastions of pessimism in our world will always look at the scriptural images of Jesus, Paul, and Jeremiah and exclaim, “Quit singing those songs of peace. There is no peace on earth and there never will be. All you religious folk are unrealistic dreamers. You can talk about peace and love, but the world ain’t that way.”
We stand at the threshold as surely as did those Thessalonians who first read Paul’s letter. Will it really happen? Night and day we will need to have others praying for us that we may be supplied what is lacking in our faith. We so desperately want our God and our Lord Jesus to clear the way for us through our commercialism, insensitivity, and violence, so the confident message of hope in God’s future can come to us.
We will sing the songs. We will light the candles. We will embrace the choirs and the ministers as they come again to cheer us through another season and supply what is lacking in our faith. We will preach of justice when there is no justice. We will talk of love when all around us there is hate. We will lift up compassion when ugliness is our ever-present reality. We will stage pageants of shepherds, stars, and wisemen, recalling, perhaps, scenes from life like it never was in order to see our life as it really is. We will do this in joy and overflowing love, not to celebrate a birthday and profane the nativity scene of a messiah, but to express our confidence in God’s future. It is that future that shapes our present and turns this season back into a big event.
1. The story is told by Brian Kelly Bauknight in On A Wing and A Prayer (Nashville: Dimension for Living, 1998), p. 23.
2. Peter J. Gomes, Sermons: Biblical Wisdom for Daily Living (New York: William Morrow, 1998), p. 20.
3. As quoted by Herbert O. Driscoll, Year of the Lord (Toronto, Anglican Book Center, 1986), p. 104.