St Paul’s United Church Sunday, November 29, 2009

Advent 1

Hope Now! Rev. David Mundy

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

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Brothers and sisters, the end of the world is coming! Repent of your sins and prepare to meet your maker! This may be the last sermon I ever preach at St. Paul’s!

Can you imagine if I suddenly decided on the urgency of sharing a message of “doom and gloom” and insisted that you feed on a steady diet of this? Churches everywhere are dealing with the challenge of keeping and attracting members. This would be a good strategy for clearing the place in a hurry.

For some reason the formula which we wouldn’t dream of using here, seems to work well for another kind of congregation, the one which gathers at movie theatres.

You may or may not be aware of a disaster movie called 2012 has been a huge success since its release two week ago doing more than one hundred million dollars of business at the box office. It was Numero Uno until the vampires invaded the theatres.

The title 2012 refers to the year just a couple of years from now when the world will essentially self-destruct, according to a Mayan legend. And, lo and behold, it comes to pass, at least in the movie. Run for your lives! Crash! Bang! Boom! The critics hate it, but people apparently love it and it is already a big success.

What is it about predictions of disaster and the end of the world as we know it? Books and movies on the subject are hugely popular, whether secular or religious. The Christian book series Left Behind has sold in the millions, even though the books promise carnage and mayhem on an unimaginable scale. Jesus loves you, but if you’re not careful you’re going to get a whuppin’ when he comes home and, oh yes, the world will be destroyed. Supposedly there is good news mixed in there, but not before an awful amount of destruction.

This morning we begin the season of Advent in the Christian year and what do we get in our Gospel lesson – some scary stuff, at least to begin with. Every year it’s the same thing as we start to get revved up for the ho, ho, ho of Christmas. But instead of ho, ho, ho, it is the no, no, no of bleak signs and portents and you may not have wanted to hear this.

There will be signs in the sun, the moon, and the stars, and on the earth distress among nations confused by the roaring of the sea and the waves. People will faint from fear and foreboding of what is coming upon the world, for the powers of the heavens will be shaken.

Jesus is in Jerusalem with his disciples when he offers this gloomy picture and he has already predicted the destruction of the temple, which must have been almost unimaginable to them. We need to remember, too, that this gospel was written at least a generation after Jesus’ death and resurrection, so the faithful community is listening in as well, wondering what will be next for them.

And we are listening, or at least I hope we’re listening, even though we may be in the midst of own dark days.

We are drawing to the close of this first decade of the third millennium, and let’s face it, there has been a fair amount of gloom and doom. For most of these years we have lived with the ominous threat of terrorism which didn’t really begin with 911 but were seared into our consciousness by those events. The collapse of the twin towers in New York City is our version of the destruction of the temple.

We have come to realize that we could be just about anywhere where people gather in numbers, at any time, and people we do not know and who don’t know us can cause untold horror. A few days ago we marked the massacre of hotel guests in Mumbai a year ago, but there have been attacks in London, Madrid, and, of course, New York. It is disturbing to wonder where terrorists will strike next.

This decade has also brought a tsunami of bewildering information our way about the health of our planet. While not everyone is agreed about climate change, the weight of evidence in the scientific community is that we are changing the chemistry of the Earth. After our rather cool and wet summer some are inclined to offer, wryly, “so much for global warming.” Yet we have just been informed that 2009 was the fifth hottest year for the planet in the 150 years that records have been kept.

Within this year we have dealt with two events of great foreboding and fear. A global economic recession has affected virtually every economy, and we have watched our neighbour nation to the south brought to its knees, not by terrorism or military engagement but by unbridled greed.

This is the bigger picture. Let’s not get started on what happens in our personal lives. The majority of us have gone through our trials and troubles and may be in the midst of dark days even as we are here together this morning.

This is where you say “stop, now!” The impact of knowing so much about so many can be numbing and even paralysing. It would be so sad if we ended up stuck in

And that’s why it’s important to be aware of the rest of the passage today. Jesus encourages them to lift up their heads for their redemption is near. Have you noticed that you can often tell when someone has been battered and bruised by life by their body language? They are what we sometimes term “downcast.” They may be reluctant to make eye contact. It is when we are able to face the world with courage and wholeness that we can look up.

Then Jesus goes on to tell a very modest parable – just a few words really -- of the unfurling leaves of the fig tree, one of the hopeful signs that summer isn’t that far off. It is so simple and yet so profound because we can be so concerned about the ominous clouds on the horizon that we are unaware of the everyday miracle of the budding and sprouting leaves.

Jesus goes on to say that we can’t become numb or escapist because of our anxieties. He tells us to live with this sense of expectancy and alertness to the immediacy of God’s realm. ... be on your guard. In Eugene Peterson’s paraphrase of this passage he offers “Don't let the sharp edge of your expectation get dulled by parties and drinking and shopping. Otherwise, that Day is going to take you by complete surprise . . . "

The Good News is that we are given the freedom to choose how we will interpret the “signs of the times” and then find the ways to live in this world as Christ’s followers. We will constantly open ourselves to the hope which is actually a spiritual gift in Christ, which includes our efforts but is more than just self-generated optimism. I keep coming back to the words Clarence Jordan, a courageous Christian who worked persistently and bravely against segregation in the American south in the sixties: “Hope is believing in spite of the evidence, then watching the evidence change.”

There is another film which has come out in the last week called The Road which is disaster movie of a different kind. It is based on the Pulitzer Prize winning novel by Cormac McCarthy. I haven’t seen the film yet, but I read the book, and it is very dark. A father and son are on a grim journey in the aftermath of some great horror which has struck the planet, perhaps a nuclear war or an environmental disaster. Birds and animals are gone, the green of trees and plants turned black and gray. Come to think of it, it sounds a lot like Southern Ontario in November!

There are hardly any humans left, but the ones who are still around are desperate, willing to do almost anything to stay alive. The father has the difficult task of providing for and protecting his child as they make their way through the bleak landscape. If it sounds terrible, it is, and even though the novel is written extremely well I could hardly get through it.

One of our daughters who is in her twenties read it immediately after I did, and we compared our impressions when she finished. For her it was stark and sombre as well, but she heard a note of hope that I had not been able to hear. She pointed out that the little boy in the story is regularly more hopeful than the understandably anxious and suspicious father. He doesn’t view every newcomer as a threat. Even this world can be explored and there is even playfulness. In the child there is possibility for a shattered world.

It occurred to me after our conversation that I am a parent and she is my child, even though she is an adult. I couldn’t get past the parental anxiety of protecting the child. She picked up on the glimmer of hope as dim as it might be. Even though it may seem like the road to nowhere, the child represents the way to hope.

The season of Advent leads us along the road to hope, and while we will celebrate the birth of a child, the birth would mean nothing without the life and the death and the resurrection of Jesus as the Christ, the Promised One. It is the risen, present Christ who calls us to live with this hope, today, in this moment.

We can’t have hope for the past because the day has come and gone. We can anticipate the future hopefully, yet while we can work for a better day, we have only limited control over the events to come. What we can do is hope now, for ourselves, for our loved ones, for the total strangers who need to lifted up from the overwhelming sadness or grief.

And what a gift that we can be Christ’s partners in this! This Advent season be passionate about your faith. Pray for one another. Express love and kindness to those around you. Be as generous as you can possibly be, not just what is comfortable but what might stretch you to the limit. In the way that this Sunday is the beginning of the Christian year, we affirm that the end is not near, it is the beginning of hope, now.