Jeremiah 33:14-16; Luke 21:25-36

I don't know how the Christmas season begins for you. But for me, it always starts with a mad scramble to write - or find - a play for the children to perform at church. That's always followed in late November by decorating the church for Christmas. People often make jokes about the way church members sit in the same pew week after week after week. Well, when it comes to decorating the church, I have the same job year after year.

I'm the ladder guy. I climb up to the area above the elevator and hand down the decorations to those brave souls who stand below me and assume I have a good enough grip not to drop anything on their heads. Then I go downstairs and bring up the big wreaths to hang in the front. And finally I climb back up above the elevator to store the empty boxes and to hang the garland on that upper railing.

Meanwhile, as I'm hanging that upper garland, far more interesting things are going on down below - in the windows, in the vestibule and, of course, in the front of the church with the tree and the decorations around the choir loft. Many years -like last Monday - we'll even play Christmas music in the background while we decorate to really get us in the mood. When we're all done, the sanctuary looks beautiful and it really feels as if the Christmas season has begun.

That's why the first Sunday of Advent always comes with a jarring note to set things off on what seems to be the wrong foot. We don't hear the beloved stories of Mary's miraculous pregnancy - or that of her relative Elizabeth, who would become the mother of John the Baptist long after she was eligible for the ancient equivalent of an AARP membership card - or about the incredible twists and turns of Mary and Joseph's relationship.

Instead, every year the Lectionary drags us off into prophecies of what seems to be an unsettling future, where destruction reigns and God's judgment falls hard onto humanity. That's hardly the approach most of us look for to help us get into the Christmas spirit. So why does the church insist on this downer of an introduction to the Christmas season every year?

The answer to that question really lies in two parts. The first has to do with our tendency to sentimentalize Christmas. When we think about the miraculous events of Jesus' infancy, it makes us think of our own cherished childhood memories in ways that are far more idealized than realistic.

By doing that, we tend to transform Christmas into more of an entertaining diversion from the real world, than a celebration of the historical moment in which God entered this world to embrace us and to share all of our very real pains and problems.

That said, our gospel lesson - which we think of as being a prophecy of the end of time - is not really about that at all. Jesus says, "Truly I tell you, this generation will not pass away until all things have taken place." So the truth of the matter is that he is offering comfort to those who will be alive some 40 years later when Romans would forcibly put down a Jewish revolt by devastating the country and leveling the Temple.

Jesus was saying to them that even when the time comes that their world has fallen apart and it seems as if God has abandoned them, that's not the case at all. Even in the midst of violence and terror and destruction, God would come and bring healing for their pain.

The same idea is true of our Old Testament lesson today. Some 600 years before Jesus' day, Jerusalem had once again fallen to its enemies. The first Temple was destroyed and the leading figures of Jewish society were being compelled into exile. They were facing a starvation and terrible physical dangers on a forced march through 800 miles of desert to the heart of the enemy empire.

When the Babylonians attacked, they had depended on God to protect them, but instead they had lost everything they had ever known. It was a dire and desperate situation into which Jeremiah made a startling prophecy of hope. He said that the desolated land would bloom again and would once more ring with the laughter of the Jewish people.

God had not abandoned the exiles. In fact, God would ultimately bring them back to the Promised Land. God even promised that, in time, he would send them an heir to David who would bring justice and righteousness to all people. The point of his message was that hope hadn't been crushed under the crumbled walls of the Temple. Instead hope remained alive because God, who is the source of all hope, remained with his people.

In the same way, these Advent stories of apocalyptic hope serve to ground each of us once more in the reality of God's love for us and presence with us in the horribly real world of war and corruption and genocide - the world of Darfur and Baghdad, the world where polonium is used to poison and police mistakenly shoot innocent bridegrooms.

God isn't locked away in some ancient fairy tale from an imaginary disinfected world of 2,000 years ago. Instead, God was born to a very real impoverished family in a germ-ridden, manure-stained stable as a sign that there was no length God wouldn't to go for us.

And the future-orientation of our annual Advent lessons serve to remind us that God will never stop coming for us, no matter how difficult our present struggles may be.

Because of that, the second reason our Lectionary passages deal with these seemingly dark issues is that they serve to remind us to be expectant - to look for the signs of Christ's coming in our world, because the truth is that when we truly look for those signs, we will find them.

Sarah Keyser writes, "It's all too easy to give up hope when we see the way our world uses such drastically different standards of justice for the richest and the poorest among us. When greed and prejudice continue to take their toll on those least able to defend themselves. It's all too easy to wonder what we're hoping and trying for when we can't see that anything we do makes much difference in the face of such great injustice and such great need. It's all too easy to wonder if God is still in charge when prayers seem to go unanswered, and innocent ones suffer...

"So what indeed are we getting ready for? What's the point of all this about watching and waiting? What exactly do we think we're waiting for? Do we really believe all this is going to change in some dramatic, momentous way? Will any prophesies come true this year, or will we just wear ourselves out shopping and cooking another big meal and then open the gifts and find ourselves still tired, still cynical, still faced with the same situations as before - only now we have packaging that needs to be thrown away and too many dishes that need to be washed and a tree that's dropping needles on the carpet.

"Somehow, in spite of it all, both Jeremiah and Luke are telling us to hope for something. When these things take place, says Luke, stand up and lift up your heads, for your redemption is drawing near. In this place, says Jeremiah, voices will sing again, voices giving thanks to the Lord, because of the steadfast love of the Lord.

"We tend to hear apocalyptic words like these as if they speak of some distant future, but neither Jeremiah nor Luke was speaking to a people who could afford to place all their hope in some imagined future well beyond their own lifetime. Their experience was of despair in their present reality - as is ours. And they were watching and waiting not only for a promised coming in the future, but also for the breaking in of hope in their own time and place. As are we..."

So, as we prepare for the coming of this Christmas, where will we look to see the signs of our redemption? We're currently locked into two wars abroad with no consensus on how to bring either of them to a close. We see the African continent - which has long been the region that lives out the pain of the rest of the world's darkest secrets - currently being ravaged by AIDS to a degree that is nearly imaginable.

In fact, just four years ago, an expert compared the number of deaths caused by AIDS worldwide to "a fully laden jumbo jet crashing every hour on the hour, every day of the year."

Just yesterday, a different expert said that our climate has changed to the point that we can continue to expect devastating hurricanes every year for at least the next 20 years. He said this even as the residents of our Gulf Coast states continue to struggle to overcome the damage from Hurricanes Katrina and Rita that struck nearly a year and a half ago.

Meanwhile, tensions in the Middle East continue to rise with few signs of abating. And, in fact, the tensions between the three monotheistic faiths - Christianity, Judaism and Islam - seem to grow stronger nearly every day. That's true even though the Pope's recent visit to Turkey shows that there are some who are actively working to ease those tensions in the name of the God we all serve.

When you think of all these signs - and others as well - it is easy to get discouraged or worse. But that's when Jesus tells us, "stand up and raise your heads, because your redemption is drawing near." Hope is called for because Christ is present among us. The world remains far from Eden, but Advent serves to remind us that the Master of Eden still walks among us. Like our ancestors before us, we may be a people living in darkness, but the light of the world shines in the darkness and the darkness cannot overcome it.

In the late 18th century in Poland, the Kaiser decided to send his armies to destroy all the Jewish villages in his kingdom. Shortly after one village had been burned to the ground, an old Jewish gentlemen pounded a few boards together to serve as a seller's stall and opened it up for business.

A young man who was passing by, stared in disbelief and then asked the old man, "What are you selling among these ruins?"

The old man smiled and said, "I am selling hope. You can sell water on a dry desert, so the place to sell hope is on the ash heap of destruction."

That's what Advent is all about. It's about bringing hope to a world that desperately needs it. That's how we can look up to see the signs of our redemption drawing near.

As Chris Udy put it, "Redemption is something we work for. It comes when we refuse the temptation to escape into denial or panic or heartlessness. It comes when we look honestly at the world around us and hold on to the hope and compassion within us. It comes when we choose to live and work for God's reign of justice and peace.

"Rather than fearing what might come, we are called to be faithful till Christ returns. Instead of cursing and fearing shadows, we're called to trust, and watch, and wait and light candles against the dark." Amen.