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Sunday, November 30, 2003
Jeremiah 33:14-16, Psalm 25:1-10, 1Thessalonians 3:9-13,
First Sunday in Advent
Rev. Kwanza Yu
Signs of the Season
Let us pray: Lord, we your people await your advent among us. Comes, O Come, Emmanuel. Come to those who suffer, who are sick, who have given up hope for healing and restoration. Come to those families who suffer by family strife and by sins of domestic violence or addition. Lord, come to us, as we look for signs of seasons, lead us from sorrow to rejoicing that we might be found a sign of hope in this Advent season. Amen.
I wonder if there was ever a time when Advent was a slow buildup of looking forward to Christmas, that has disappeared in the annual blitz. The signs of the season – holiday displays, mall decorations, Christmas catalogs in the mail – being appearing before the jack o’lanterns are put away. It is easy to get confused about what the signs we see around us mean when the commercial calendar rushes the religious one.
Perhaps this season is only an intensified version of what we experience most of our lives – things going too fast, with too much to do, and too little time to do it. There is rarely enough time to step back and figure out what it means.
Today’s lessons help us to focus on the Advent themes of expectation and personal reflection. They are full of prophetic and apocalyptic language heralding the final intervention of God in human history, an intervention that will bring about the conclusion of that history and establish a new creation. Christians expect that Jesus Christ will return to mark this final culmination of time. The lessons read today all point in some way to this time.
Reading the signs of the times is the challenge offered by today’s Gospel. This is apocalyptic language, which presents a picture of the day of the Lord when God will break in to usher in the new age, and the Son of Man will come ‘in a cloud with power and great glory” (v. 27). Traditionally, it will be a day of terror, with people fainting “from fear and foreboding of what is coming upon the world” (v. 26).
Although this is the reading for the first Sunday in Advent, it points us beyond the birth of Jesus to the second coming of Christ and reminds us that we live between the times. We confess the Creed every Sunday that “Christ died, rose, and will come again.” However, we tend not to say enough about the belief that Jesus is coming again.
The early church tried to discern the signs of Jesus’ second coming. It is a question that has caught the speculation of every generation of Christians. And after 2,000 years of speculating, discerning, and predicting, the church has learned one important lesson. Using apocalyptic imagery as literal predications of the earth and try to match up symbolic language with people and events will only lead to terrible abuses. We still remember the Heaven’s Gate suicides in 1997, connected to the sign the cult members saw in the advent of the Hale-Bopp comet, mark the most obvious recent aberration of this quasi-Christian effort to read the signs.
The signs of the times that anticipate the coming of the Son of Man in glory are laden with gloom and foreboding yet it is significant that the parable Jesus tells to help us understand this teaching radiates a spirit of hope and promise.
When the fig tree and all the trees “sprout leaves you can see for yourselves and know that summer is already near” (v.30) Jesus says. The sign of hope, of vitality, vigor, and renewed life. The signs of God’s breaking into our world should be just as obvious and life-giving for those who trust.
In this between time, as we await Jesus’ second coming, Christians are challenged to live in hope, demonstrating by their actions the conviction that “the kingdom of God is near,’ near enough so that we see the first fruits of it. The signs we see are signs of hope, akin to the bursting out of the leaves in spring. Whenever such signs are manifest, you can “stand up and raise your hands,” because “your redemption is drawing near” (v. 28).
Educator Jonathan Kozol’s book Amazing Grace: The Lives of Children and the Conscience of a Nation is a poignant and moving account of the extraordinary lives of children in the most devastating of social circumstances in the South Bronx, in New York City.
He tells of Cliffie, a seven-year-old who seems undaunted by growing up in the poorest and most abandoned of places, with all the miseries and poisons that the world has pumped into him (p.6). Kozol discovers his simple but deep faith is crucial to his resilience. Speaking of a time his mother sent to the store to get a pizza: “three slices, one for my mom, one for my dad and one for me.” Kozol says: Cliffie, saw a homeless man who told him he was hungry. “But he was too cold to move his mouth! “How did you know that he was hungry if he couldn’t talk?” Kozol asked. “He pointed to my pizza.” “What did you do?” I gave him some!” Cliffie responded. “Were your parents mad at you?” Cliffie seemed surprised by the author’s question. “Why would they be mad? God told us, ‘Share!” (P.8).
Signs of hope in the midst of despair. Signs of charity in the midst of covetousness. Signs of life in the midst of death. These are signs of the inbreaking of God’s coming kingdom and reminders of the hope that Christ will come again to bring to fulfillment what God has begun. For we know the words of hope are addressed to people in a most hopeless situation.
In today’s first reading, the prophet Jeremiah announces the return of the exiles from Babylon and offers the words of hope to people in a most hopeless situation—exile. As Paul reminds us in the 1Thessfalonians; the sufferings of the present time are nothing compared with the glory that about to be revealed to us.
The same theme is repeated again and again in today’s gospel reading. When the time is dark and people are in despair, the prophets recall and remember the promises of God and point people to the signs of hope.
Brothers and sisters in Christ, this Advent let us look all around us. Let us look for a light in the darkness. Let us look for a sign of hope amid our anxiety. Let us look for a Living Lord coming as the very foundations shake beneath us. This is the ancient, the eternal promise of Advent. We are called and empowered to stand tall and firm, heads up—looking for signs of hope.
Hope is here. Can you see signs of hope around you? Perhaps a possibility beginning to stir out of the dark loss of a loved one. Perhaps a teenager beginning to shape some values amidst the turmoil of adolescence. Or years of hard work beginning to pay off with seeds of change and growth.
And what about our country struggling to be a country of justice and peace—where is hope? Jonathan Kozol says in his book Amazing Grace: “the South Bronx – the poorest congregational district of our nation that the postmodern ghetto of America is not a social accident but is created and sustained by greed, neglect, racism and expedience. Cliffie, a seven-year-old who seems undaunted by growing up in the poorest and most abandoned of places, with all the miseries and poisons that the world has pumped into him. Yet, as long as Cliffie still shares his one slice of pizza we, as nation has a great hope and we all should work together for justice and peace. This is why the God of love and mercy does not return to earth with his avenging sword in hand.
Today as we wait and look for the signs of hope, we are invited by Jeremiah, Paul and Jesus to anticipate the day to come. In the year 2003, as in every year ahead we will be called to live in hope – God will be God, promising to come in a cloud with power and great glory among us, leading history toward God’s salvation.
So let us stand up tall and raise our heads up—wait with eager longing—expecting God to be God—“God with us” once again this year. May it be so, for you and me. Amen.
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