Sermon # 4

hearts be acceptable to You, O Lord & Savior.
An Offering for Advent:
One of my favorite passages of Scripture we often hear as our cyclical church calendar spins into Advent-time & then finally into Christmas. It is neither one of our Scripture lessons today and yet these words offer us a starting place from which to contemplate today’s Scriptures as well as the imminent questions: What is all this fuss about Advent—and why is Advent framed with scriptures that speak about what we seminarians call eschatology or, in plain-speak, the question of the end time of history and when Christ will return. For me, these questions are significant, they are powerful, and they likewise spring from yet another one, a question that naturally flows from these much loved scripture verses:
A shoot will come up from the stump of Jesse; from his roots a Branch will bear fruit. The Spirit of the LORD will rest on him—the Spirit of wisdom and of understanding, . . . and he will delight in the fear of the LORD. He will NOT judge by what he sees with his eyes, or decide by what he hears with his ears; but with righteousness he will judge the needy, with justice he will give decisions for the poor of the earth. He will strike the earth with the rod of his mouth; with the breath of his lips he will slay the wicked. Righteousness will be his belt and faithfulness the sash around his waist. The wolf will live with the lamb, the leopard will lie down with the goat, the calf and the lion and the yearling together; and a little child will lead them.

These words come to us from the 11th chapter of Isaiah; consider the way that they depict the person of Jesus Christ for us Christians. Christ, as part of the Trinity, is intimately connected with the Holy Spirit--- and Christ acts from this spirit—a spirit of wisdom and of understanding…. a spirit of counsel and of power…. The wickedness that we know on the earth: Our personal sins in which we disobey God’s guidance in our lives and objectify those around us as well as the powers that be who look only to self-interest, the systemic forces that keep people in poverty, that oppress native peoples binding individuals in addiction, self-loathing, and violence --- all of this wickedness will be blown (with breath) away and instead that mystical, heavenly portrait appears: the wolf and the lamb together, the leopard and the goat, the lion and the calf with even the yearling--- (predator safely beside prey) – and a little child will lead them.
Why the little child we wonder and then need look only to our Sunday School program perhaps to find an answer? Yet, I have wondered “Why the Child” myself many times. In Scripture, we find Christ telling his disciples to allow the little children to come to him. We are told in Matthew 18: 3 that unless we become like children, we will “never enter the kingdom of heaven.” There are many ideas about what is special about children; one thing I have noticed is their intrinsic sense of right & wrong. I have seen this most specifically while watching children learn about the abuses of history—they are shocked that the Holocaust could have happened only 60+ years ago, they are saddened by the gap between the rich and the poor, many of them understand what MLK meant when he spoke his famous words about his children being judged by the content of their character rather than the color of their skin, and they are righteously indigent—our adult politics aside--about child labor, human trafficking, and pollution.
And so that aforementioned question that springs from all of this, that emerges with the poignancy of an African American spiritual, the intensity that likewise revealed itself in the words of a teenage girl who said, in the midst of losing everything, “In spite of everything, I still believe that people are good at heart,” and this question which likewise flows when one learns about the emotional courage of Hutu and Tutsi young school children in Rwanda who refused to step aside so that 1/2 of them could be killed; this is our question: (PAUSE) When, O God, when… When will your peace come to this earth?!
This advent we symbolically wait for your Son to come, a little child, who ushered forth a new kingdom on Earth. But your child has come, and we are also waiting for something else? We wonder when all the pain in this world will finally cease and the lion and the lamb can in fact lie down together—and no one ends up in the Emergency Room. For, otherwise, as Woody Allen jokes: “The lion and the calf will lay down together, but the calf won’t get much sleep.”
With this question of pain waiting and hovering just between our eyes, we come to today’s Gospel lesson. Our lesson from Luke is an apocalyptic text. It is clear that Luke’s community is grappling with the question of time or, more specifically, God’s timing of when the promised return of Jesus and consummation of history will occur. As Preaching Professor at Luther Seminary, David Lose shares: “Whereas Mark seems to tie [the end times and return of Christ] to the destruction of the Temple in Jerusalem, Luke distances the promised end of history. Luke is, in fact, down right vague about when Jesus will return, refusing to offer any specific time-table.” Woe to all of us Schedulers or Type A folk who like our 5 year plans and love to draw up our trim and tidy schedules; we are not talking about 2012— this scripture is not comfortable and although it provides us with some certainty, it seems to be more of the gray kind than the black and white one; but perhaps—at least for those of us here in North America who struggle with the ways in which our use of certainty has hurt others—this is a good news. Perhaps too there is something in this Scripture that we must be certain about—a certainty that we need faithfully exclaim!
If you are reading along with me in your Bibles, take a look at verse 29. Christ hastens his followers, rather than the lilies, to consider the fig tree. “Just as budding fig leaves unmistakably herald the [coming] of summer, so also will the signs of the coming kingdom be [seen] to the Christian community.” The emphasis of the Scripture therefore shifts from when these things will happen to the issue of how the Christian community should act. Look at the fig tre & SEE.
This call to see reminds me of the book that our Book Club has been reading this past month: AJ Jacob’s Year of Living Biblically. Herein, Jacobs comes to Christian faith after trying and failing to live out literally all the laws from the Old and New Testaments. About 3/5 of the way through the book, we read of Jacobs’ experience of taking on the food laws, in particular the rule that one may only eat fruit that is older than four years old. Jacobs finally discovers that, from planting to produce, cherries take five years. They are safe! On this experience of cherry-eating, Jacobs writes:
Each cherry took about 3 seconds to eat. Three seconds to eat but at least five years in the making. It seemed unfair to the hard-working cherry tree. The least I could do was devote my attention to the cherry in those three seconds, really appreciate the tartness of the skin and the faint crunching sound when I bite down. I guess it’s called mindfulness. Or being in the moment, or making the mundane sacred. Whatever it is, I’m doing it more. . . . The fruit taboo made me more aware of the whole cherry process, the seed, the soil, the five years of watering and waiting. That’s the paradox: I thought religion would make me live with my head in the clouds, but as often as not, it grounds me in this world” (Jacobs, Year of Living Biblically, 172).
What strikes me about Jesus’ parable in Luke is that it functions in a similar way. After revealing many signs of the end of history—signs which people have continuously used to prove their own timetables and oftentimes to condemn the sinfulness of others rather, perhaps, than their own sin--- Luke urges his readers to be mindful: Interpreting the signs of the end is like watching the blossoming of trees. In this sense, regardless of how you interpret the signs themselves, they should be fairly obvious. The important action that is often missed is the watching of the signs—or the watching of the sign-maker. Do not be so bogged down in your own cares that you miss what our Triune God is doing! When you pray and ask God for help, be attentive to how God will respond to your need; as the well-known story goes, don’t refuse the boat, the helicopter, and the ambulance!
This topic of the Apocalypse occasions many emotions and feelings for us; it is just the kind of text that could fill the seminarian with an appropriate amount of fear and trembling. Many, out of faith, speak of the end of history as that great event when the Prince of Peace will come back to earth and those who have loved him will be with him in eternity. Yet depictions of this event fluctuate: some are particularly violent and even seem triumphalist —like kids on the playground, one shouts: It! Not It! Others’ depictions are more gentle—wondering: When, O God, will your You and your Kingdom come to earth?
Today, in our prayers and faith life, let us all look to the 28th verse in today’s chapter. It reads
:
“Now when these things begin to take place, stand up and raise your heads, because your redemption is drawing near.”
This text reminds me of why, when we say the Assurance of Pardon, I want to shout with enthusiasm! Our God of Love cares for us so much that God desires the absolute best for us. How do we live into that best?! How do we care for others and, empowering them, allow God to touch their lives too? How do we speak of our faith not as something we can dissect or use as a weapon or a selfish tool of self-justification but afford it as the kind of thing it is: Something alive, something moving the world, something speaking a truth so precious that we need not be ashamed to say: We are Christian people. We love our Church. As Paul reminds us in 1 Thessalonians and as many of us have been saying to each other this Holiday Season, we are thankful for you. Church, I am thankful for you. I am thankful for what God is doing in you: The way that our community serves the Midway Shelter. How we rise around those in pain and grief. Let our love for our God, for each other, and even ourselves— because we cannot love our neighbor unless we have also loved ourselves— Let this love GROW!

Christ did not come into the world to condemn the world but to save the world. Writing about judgment, Presbyterian minister Frederick Buechner tells us: “We are all of us judged every day. We are judged by the face that looks back at us from the bathroom mirror. We are judged by the faces of the people we love and by the faces and lives of our children and our dreams. . . . Each day finds us at the junction of many roads, and we are judged as much by the roads we have not taken as by the roads we have. The NT proclaims that at some unforeseeable time in the future, God will ring down the final curtain on history, and there will come a Day on which all our days and all the judgments upon us and all our judgments upon each other will themselves be judged. The judge will be Christ. In other words, the one who judges us most finally will be the one who loves us most fully. Romantic love [often] is blind to everything except what is lovable and lovely, but Christ’s love sees us with terrible clarity and sees us whole. Christ’s love so wishes our joy that it is ruthless against everything in us that diminishes our joy. The worst sentence Love can pass is that we behold the suffering which Love has endured for our sake, and that is also our acquittal. The justice and mercy of the judge are ultimately one.” Frederick Buechner, Wishful Thinking, 58.
In conclusion,
“We live, according to Luke, between the two great poles of God's intervention in the world”: the coming of Christ as the baby we celebrate on Christmas morning & Christ’s triumph over death on Easter as well as the coming of Christ in glory at the end of time and his triumph over all the powers of earth and heaven. “We are in the in-between space. We hold by faith and trust belief in what happened in the past—the story’s beginning-- and we now reside in the difficult time before our story’s ending.” Do you know that part of the purpose behind apocalyptic literature was comfort—to communicate hope. Even though we live in a world with great suffering, there is reason to hope. And so, you might wonder: What is the comfort we have from today’s Scripture?!
Congregation folks here at the First Presbyterian Church of Alameda, brothers and sisters in Christ, this is our comfort: We are free to struggle, to wait, to work, to witness, to love- – indeed to live and die – with hope because we know the end of the story…We know the end is in the hands of our Triune God who chose to humble himself, to suffer himself, so that we might live. This Advent, as we wait for the coming of Christ on Christmas, let us remember that all the suffering we experience together is temporary, let us work together to comfort each other, and let us hold firm in faith and be watchful for the day when the lion and the lamb will truly be able to lay down together. Amen.