(Ir)religiosity

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Below is the manuscript — more or less, I tend to deviate quite a bit — of the sermon I will be preaching this morning, the first Sunday of Advent, at Quincy Community UMC.  It is based on the gospel text for this week (Luke 21:25-36)

There are probably two great “Fridays” people in the United States can readily identify.  Good Friday, of course, two days before Easter, marking the transition from one season to the next, and, perhaps even more popular, Black Friday, the day after Thanksgiving, the biggest shopping day of the year marking the beginning of the Holy season of Consumerism leading up to Christmas.  Today, we are in the midst of a transition, a cultural in-between time between the Fall season and the hectic Holiday season, the season of consumption where, if you are like me, you are tempted to spend money you don’t have, to buy things you don’t need, to impress people you may not even like.  We are in an in-between time:  between Black Friday, the biggest day of physical shopping, on the one hand, and Cyber Monday, the largest online shopping day, on the other.  Last year even amidst the growing economic crisis, on this same weekend, Americans managed to spend over $41 billion, an average of $373 per person.

We are in an in-between time.

Yet, as Christians, today marks another transition, another in-between time.  Today marks the end of ordinary time in the Christian year and the beginning of Advent, the beginning of our anticipation and celebration of God’s breaking into history through Jesus Christ.  This Sunday in particular, the first Sunday of Advent, we acknowledge a larger period of transition, between Christ’s humble coming in a manager in Bethlehem and God’s complete restoration of all creation in the future.  Today we celebrate God’s coming in Jesus so many years ago and at the same time we anticipate God’s breaking into history again, looking forward to the future redemption and salvation of all things.

So while the culture around us marks the transition into a time of unhealthy and unbridled consumption, we, as God’s people, celebrate and anticipate God’s liberating work in the world.  The question that I would ask all of us today, including myself, is whether we are marking God’s time today, or the time of Consumerism.  Do we look different from the rest of the world around us during this Advent season?  What are we celebrating?  Who are we celebrating?

Our text for today is an interesting and difficult one.  It marks the end of Jesus teachings with this disciples and the beginning of his passion.  In chapter 21 of Luke’s gospel, Jesus has just finished telling his disciples a few parables and then, suddenly, he predicts the destruction of the Temple.  The rest of the chapter is very apocalyptic, speaking of wars, natural disasters and chaos that it seems will occur before the Son of Man (Jesus) returns again.  There is also an interesting parable beginning in verse 29: “Look at the fig tree and all the trees; as soon as they sprout leaves you can see for yourselves and know that summer is already near. So also, when you see these things taking place, you know that the kingdom of God is near.”  This is the same sort of thing that Jesus says in verse 28 immediately before the parable. Jesus says, “Now when these things begin to take place, stand up and raise your heads, because your redemption is drawing near.

Your redemption is drawing near.  Keep that in mind.

Now, there is something really interesting about the way this passage is written in Luke that differs from the other gospels, especially Mark.  A little background information — we know two things about Mark that are important for our reading of Luke today.  First, Mark is the earliest of the gospels and the first to be written, about 40 or so years after the time of Jesus.  Second, the writer Luke was probably familiar with Mark and used it as a sort of guide for his own account of the life of Jesus.  So that means it is important to notice were Luke differs from Mark or changes Mark because those are points where Luke is trying to say something different from the other gospels, something that he thinks is important and vital to his version of the story of Jesus.

With that in mind, when you compare this passage in Luke with the one in Mark (ch. 13) there are some noticeable differences and an important shift in thinking — a shift that I think is really important for us today, standing in between the already and the not-yet; standing between the celebration of God’s coming in Christ and the anticipation of God’s rupturing of history yet again in the future, of God’s breaking into time and making all things new.

In Mark, there is a very real sense in which this future in-breaking of God, this future coming of Christ, is imminent and that the event approaching very quickly.  In fact, most of the disciples were convinced that it would happen within their lifetime.  But, of course, it didn’t.  And after the first generation of disciples began to die, the first Christians realized that they must start forming a community amidst the oppressive rule of the Roman Empire.    So when Luke writes his gospel, this passage about the second coming of Christ is changed a bit, to speak to these circumstances.

Now, I imagine if Luke were here today he wouldn’t be a very good politician, at least by our standards because he doesn’t have a clear timetable.  He is very vague and ambiguous about when this future restoration and final redemption of the earth will occur.  In fact, in Luke’s version of the story Jesus tells this odd parable, the parable of the fig tree I mentioned a moment ago, suggesting that just as the budding leaves of the fig tree announce the advent of summer, so the signs of the coming kingdom of God will transparent to the Christian community.  So in Luke, the emphasis shifts from when God’s kingdom will come to the proper character of the community — the church — in the meantime.  What does this mean?  It is not our place to guess when God’s peace will be realized on earth, it is our job to bear witness to that peace as the church, to participate in the God’s kingdom even in the midst of the chaos of the world around us, and to create space for that kingdom and that peace to be made present for the least among us — for those that need it most.

It is important to remember that the author of Luke was also the author of Acts.  And what is Acts?  It is the story of the birth of the church.  So here Luke is suggesting that it is not the business of Christians to speculate as to when God’s kingdom will be fully realized on earth but to bear witness to that kingdom in the here and now.  And then later in Acts, the sequel to Luke, we see the story of the community doing just that: we see the story of a community living in stark contrast to the world around them, a community that embodies a different story than the one given to them by their culture, a community that embodies the peaceable story of God for the least, the last, and the lost; a story especially for those under the thumb of power and those on the underside of history.  This is the task of the church — standing in-between the coming of God in Christ and the future coming of God’s peace here on earth, a future rupture of history in which all things will be restored, a future coming of God in which all things will be made new, in between these two great poles of history we are called to live as God’s people, in tune to a different way of living and being-in-the-world.

Another interesting thing about this passage that you don’t really pick up when you read it in English is the usage of some important words.  For instance, the word that is translated to “world” in English doesn’t really convey the real meaning that the writer is trying to get at.  The original word that Luke uses is not one that refers not to the physical or geographical world — planet earth — but to the political and economic worlds, which makes sense because Luke’s hearers were living under the oppressive rule of the Roman Empire.  So Luke seems to be saying the following:  even when the world around you — the political and economic climate — is not working in your favor, even when the systems that impose themselves upon you demanding unhealthy and destructive things of you — even in the midst of all these things the kingdom of God is near and your redemption is drawing near.  You redemption is drawing near and because your future hope has been secured in Jesus and you live in tune with a different time and a different story.  That is Luke’s message to the first Christians and I would submit to you that it is a message we desperately need to hear at the beginning of this Advent season.

Walter Brueggemann, a well renowned theologian and Old Testament professor, spoke at a conference several years ago and delivered 19 theses that he believes are important for Christians today.  Now, I’m not going to go through them one by one, but I believe a few of them are important to keep in mind as a mark the beginning of this advent season today.  His main point is that every person and every society has a “script” or a story that they live by.  Most of the time, these scripts aren’t even named, but they guide our lives, dictate our behavior, and are reinforced through the various stories we tell and the traditions we participate in.  Scripts can be constructive or destructive, they can be helpful and add meaning to our lives, or they can be unhealthy and damaging.

Now, Brueggemann believes, and I think he is right, that one of the dominant scripts in our society is that of therapeutic consumerism.  And, as I said earlier, we see this at work during the Holiday season more than ever.  It undergirds the society around us and, if we let it, it dictates our lives through impatience, greed, and largesse.  This very weekend — Thanksgiving, Black Friday, and Cyber Monday — is emblematic of this story.  And, what’s worse, this script is doubly destructive, not only for those of us who can afford to go out and buy stuff we don’t need, but those who can’t.  This script is deeply destructive to those that we never see, those who make the things we buy for a sub-standard wage and those who are deprived of the basic resources for living a quality life.  This script of consumption allows us to spend an average of $373 per person on material excess while there are those in this world who have never seen what $373 even looks like.  If our humanity and our redemption is inextricably bound up with those who are on the underside of society then this script is not only destructive, it is suicidal; not to mention antithetical to God’s peaceable kingdom and the way of life modeled by Jesus.

The good news is we have an alternative script and a different story.  And we are called to refuse this old story and align ourselves with God’s alternative story, the alternative script that Jesus called the kingdom of God.  This is the meaning of advent — that even in the midst of a destructive story, we as the people of God are called to bear witness to God’s story, a story that began with Jesus birth in Bethlehem and a story that will one day be fully realized as God’s peace is established here on earth.  As God’s people, part of the community called the church, the community following in the way of Jesus, we stand in between two poles of history, we live in tune with a different time, aligned with a different story.  We don’t know when this story will be finished but as Jesus shows us in the gospel of Luke our job is not to guess at when that will happen, our responsibility is to participate in God’s kingdom in the meantime, to bear witness to God’s story over and against the destructive and harmful stories around us.  And even when those stories around us seem to have us in their grip, even when those stories, those scripts, seem over-powering, we remain hopeful because we know that the kingdom of God is near and that our very redemption is drawing near

Our redemption is indeed drawing near and even though we stand in the in-between time we know that one day, perhaps someday soon, God’s peace will reign on earth as it is in heaven and, as the prophet Isaiah said, we will behold that God is making all things new.

God is making all things new such that we will live in a world where war and violent coercion are not accepted as normative forms of public policy, but are repudiated and disparaged; a world where poverty no longer plagues the globe and the bellies of every man, woman, and child are filled; a world where disease and genocide are no longer headlines on the evenings news, but past memories of former things; a world where domination and greed no longer guide the behavior of countries and individuals, but are rejected as destructive and anti-human; a world where oppressive ideologies such imperialism, nationalism, classism, sexism, racism and all the other –isms no longer dominate our behavior; a world where the church allows itself to be the church rather allowing itself to remain a detached bureaucratic institution irrelevant to our contemporary situations; a world where God’s peaceable kingdom is being intentionally built by Christians everywhere; a world where Christians are so committed and dedicated to the words “…thy kingdom come thy will be done, on earth as it is in heaven” that they can’t help but put those words into action.

This is our hope. This is our hope.

It is a hope secured by God’s coming in Christ.  A hope that we remember and anticipate at the beginning of this advent season knowing that our responsibility is not to know when this hope will be realized but to participate in the pockets of this hope, this alternative story, whenever and where they exist, right under the noses of the destructive stories and scripts around us.

So — as we enter into this season of advent, this time of anticipation and celebration of God’s coming in Christ, may you take hope in knowing that even in the midst a world which pulls you in a thousand different directions, even in the midst of a world which tells you to do, run, buy,  and consume — even amidst all this, your redemption is drawing near; the kingdom is drawing near.  May you take hope in knowing that your ultimate hope is secured in Jesus Christ and that you calling is live that hope, to bear witness to that hope, and to be that hope to the world around you.  In the name of the one who Created you, the one who is Redeeming you, and the one who Sustains you now and forevermore.  Amen.