1 Advent C Luke 21:25 - 36 “Look up and Live” 30 November 2003
Rev. Roger Haugen
There was a man who had the good
fortune of finding a $50 bill on the ground as he was walking through the park
one day. There it was lying on the
ground with no one around, so he picked it up, put it in his pocket and carried
on. From that day on he walked around
with his eyes to the ground — you never know what you might find!
For the next 20 years until he
died he spent every waking moment walking with his eyes to the ground. He found another $16.52, an assortment of
hair clips, a pen, a dog-eared, slightly wet paperback, litter of thousands of
people but not much else.
He missed 7300 sunrises, 7300
sunsets, 1205 days of fall leaves, the smiles of innumerable children playing
in the park, thousands of colourful birds flying above him and squirrels
running about in the trees above him.
He died bent over from all the looking at the ground, with the high
point of his later years, the memory that propelled him, being a crumpled $50
bill lying on the ground that fateful day 20 years before.
We know what it is to be bent
over. We are shouted at by an angry
store clerk and we cringe and bend over in self-defense. We hear the news of an election that doesn’t
go as we would like and we feel the weight of taxation, poor health care or
whatever problem we hoped to be remedied by the election, bearing down on our
shoulders and we bend a little more.
We hear the news of the Middle
East and we recoil at the violence. We
hear of the drug and alcohol problems driving crime in our community and we are
bent over, thinking about gated communities, alarmed security systems and fear
because we know you can’t guard against everything.
We know what it is to be bent
over by fear. Jesus speaks of signs in
the sun, the moon, and the stars. We
think of ozone depletion, solar flares, and meteorites aimed at the earth and
feeling “faint from fear and foreboding of what is coming” is not so foreign to
us. Hope seems gone, there is nowhere
to turn — all depends on us and we set out on a feverish pace to somehow
forestall the inevitable. Bending into
the task. We want to shout, “Where is
God when I need him?” “Where is God in
all this?”
Jesus speaks to us in the midst
of our fears and says, “Stand up and raise your heads.” Stand up look around and see what is really
taking place. When life is dark, hope
is distant, there is God in the midst.
When fear paralyzes, God offers release.
The Advent hope is “stand up and
raise your heads, because your redemption is drawing near.” When so much bends you down forcing you to
see only the ground in front of you, stand up and raise your heads. See what is really taking place.
Mike was 45 when he got the big
C. His oncologist gave him a 50/50 chance of total recovery after surgery and
chemotherapy. But his psychologist gave him an 80/20 chance. His oncologist
said that the outcome was not easily predictable. He was regularly being
surprised. Given two people who had apparently the same physical conditions,
one would recover and the other would not. The psychologists seem to have a
better record of accuracy in prediction. For them the person who could accept
the reality honestly, and have hope, had a better chance of recovery. The
psychologist knew that Mike had a very good chance because after he had
listened to his doctor about his operation and further therapy, he had set up a
game of golf for himself for the first reasonable date. He was looking to the
future realistically, and with hope. (from Sundays into Silence - A Pathway to Life)
We enter the season of Advent
keenly aware that all is not as we would like or as God intends. We live between reality and hope. We live within that tension and cling to
hope even when all evidence should tell us otherwise. Mike’s psychologist knew that the person who could accept the
reality honestly, and have hope, had a better chance of recovery.
It is no accident that we place a
large cross at the front of our church.
We walk in from the week we have had, bowed down by cares, pain, the
wear and tear of the week. Our eyes are
drawn up to the cross, we look up, raise our heads and we see what is really
taking place in the world. Jesus Christ
came into the world to walk with us in the pain of our lives, the
inconsistencies of our lives, the hell of our lives and promises to take us
through to the other side.
The struggles that seemed so
insurmountable are no longer so. The
lonely nature of our pain is shared and we can stand straighter. We sing the words of the liturgy and we
stand taller. “Glory to God, glory to
God in the highest.” “O come let us
sing to the Lord, let us shout for joy to the rock of our salvation.” We sing the hymns and they give us words
that we desperately need to take the weight from our shoulders. We live in hope keenly aware of
reality. Jesus tells us to “be on guard
so that your hearts are not weighed down”.
Keep focused on hope, because there is our salvation.
We live in a culture desperate
for hope. Our philosophers of today,
our advertisers, have taken some of our best lines in the quest for hope. Nike says, “No Fear” and we hear the words,
“be not afraid”. Words spoken over 300
times in the Bible. Be not afraid, in
the midst of fear – God is with us. Be
not afraid, in the midst of earthquakes – God is with us. Fear will not disappear with the right
shoes. Fear disappears when we trust in
one who can and will deliver us.
Today we begin the
season of Advent. Today we begin to
tell, once again, the story. The story
that seeks to refocus our vision, the story that once again reminds us to “look
up!” We read what seems to be a strange
passage for the start of this season, we hear about “signs, distress, confusion,
fainting people. This is poetic
language that would have been words of hope reminding his audience of God who
had intervened decisively in their history and had hope that God would once
again.
Today we begin the
cycle again. To watch for God in action,
God in action in the midst of disaster and despair. “Today’s Gospel call on us to do two things that can be very hard
to hold together: to be realistic about how the world is going and at the same
time not lose hope in the future.” (from Sundays
into Silence – A Pathway to Life. Copyright © 1998)
Today we begin again to tell the story that does not end with a baby in a manger. We begin to tell the story of a God who sent a Son to live among us, to be human like us. A Son who would know what it is to suffer, to work through suffering, disappointments and death. A Son that would show us another side after suffering. A Son who reminds us that if we live with him we will die with him, and if we die with him we will also rise with him. There is another side beyond the reality that would bend us over. We enter the Advent ready to “stand up and raise your heads”. We hear, in the face of all that might convince us otherwise, that “the days are surely coming, says the Lord, when I will fulfill the promise I made to the house of Israel and the house of Judah.” We enter into Advent ready to hold reality and hope in tension knowing that God will bring hope into being when reality has done it worst.
Today we begin the story once again. Let the story begin!