Advent 1- The Coming of Christ
Today we are starting a new year in the church’s calendar. The Church year always begins with Advent. Advent is about expectation. It is about anticipating something that we have no control over. We read in Jeremiah, “The days are surely coming, says the Lord, when I will fulfil the promise I made” (Jeremiah 33:14). We can’t force this. Our impatience won’t make this come any faster. We are waiting for a door to open that we have no key for.
Over our history, humanity has tried to make heaven come to earth on our own. … For example, the Late Victorian Era was known for its optimism and activism. Optimism is the pervasive belief that things are getting progressively better. Activism is the disposition towards acting to make change in the world. For the Late Victorians they believed that Colonialism was about spreading civilization. They believed they were making the world a better place through the spreading of Western ideas and values. …
The advances in technology and medicine helped people to survive threats that their recent ancestors didn’t. Industrialization was bringing more wealth and was providing mass produced products to the public that were made with less human effort. With new farming technologies, one farmer could do the work of a whole crew. … “Rags to riches” stories began to grab a hold of the Western mind as social class began to allow upward mobility. … All obstacles would be overcome, with effort and ingenuity. Hard work would be rewarded.
The late Victorians tended to believe that human beings were fundamentally good, or at least capable of becoming good. The world seemed to them to be progressing into a better future. It was a time of optimism and effort. It was a time to implement good ideas that helped them to conquer nature and make life easier.
This optimism began to show cracks, though. Darwin’s ideas about evolution were being considered for human development, so they tried to find ways so that only the “strong” would reproduce and the “weak” were prevented from reproduction through practices like Eugenics. This inspired the Nazi ideas about creating a stronger human race by breeding the “pure” and excluding the “weak” from the human gene pool.
Marx’s ideas about raising up poor factory workers to share in a greater share of the profits of what they helped to produce inspired revolutions that resulted in the deaths of millions of people in Soviet Russia, China, Cambodia, and in many other places.
On the heels of the Victorian Era, we saw two World Wars inflicted on the world. Around 40 million died in World War 1, and World War 2 caused up to 85 million deaths. We saw technology produce machine guns, and airplanes that were used to drop bombs on civilian populations. Science and technology developed more and more destructive bombs as well as mustard gas, and eventually nuclear weapons that were used on Hiroshima and Nagasaki that killed between 129,000-226,000 people.
We are now becoming painfully aware of the terrible cost indigenous peoples (and many others) paid for the efforts of Colonialism. And we are also learning about the destructive side effects industrialization has had on the health of our families and our communities, as well as pouring pollutants into the air. We are becoming very aware that our technologies have a hidden cost. We saw the destructive consequences of the ideologies of Marxism and Nazism, both of which desired to produce a kind of utopia.
All of this can make many of us a bit more suspicious of our ability to make life better with our technology. Many of us can be equally suspicious of ideologies that are designed to fix our society and lead us into a new Golden Age. … This isn’t to suggest we shouldn’t try to improve our society. Though, I think we should do so more cautiously now, if we are to learn from the past. … The Optimism and Activism of the Late Victorian age has proven to come with a terrible cost. Trying to make our own heaven on earth can come with disastrous side effects. It can be like trying to build the tower of Babel.
As much as we might try (and we should try) our attempts to better the world are always tainted by Sin. Sometimes this is so subtle that it can only be seen by future generations. … This realization should humble us. But it doesn’t always. We can still arrogantly think that we are finally the generation that has things figured out, and that we finally know what to do to make the world right, while avoiding unforeseen and undesirable consequences of our good intentions. …
So, if we can’t produce the righteousness the world needs, then we have to look elsewhere. The justice and righteousness that the Branch of David will bring is beyond what we are capable of doing. It is a completely different order of justice (Jer 33:15). This is part of our yearning and expectation during Advent. We live in an expectation that some day Christ will come again to set things right. …
And we want to expect this with humility. … When Christ first came there were those who rejected him because they had in their mind how this was going to work. They knew how the messiah thing was supposed to go and when Jesus didn’t dance to their drum beat, they rejected him. We don’t want to make the same mistake.
When we read in our Gospel about these cosmic signs- the sun, moon, stars, the earth, and the sea, all giving signs of the Second Coming of Christ. We should be careful about thinking too literally about these signs. There are scholars who believe that the Gospel reading is actually referring to the destruction of the Temple in Jerusalem 40 or so years after Jesus died and was resurrected. The language is very symbolic, and so we shouldn’t necessarily be thinking about actual sun, moon, and stars. … All of this may have been speaking about the marching of the Roman legions into Jerusalem and destroying the city and the Temple. It would have been a massive blow to Judaism because that was where the festivals took place, it was the only place where sacrifices to deal with the sins of the people was allowed. It was, for many people, the very house of God. So, its destruction would have sent Judaism into an identity crisis. It was the end of their world, in a way. … Many of the early Christians saw this destruction as judgement on the Temple for the rejection of God’s Son and for not producing good fruit- for not being the light to the world Israel was meant to be. Many of the people of the time considered the temple leadership corrupt for its collusion with Rome. There were groups like the Essenes who seemed to have gone into the wilderness and rejected the Temple system for its corruption. …
But Christians have also seen readings like this as pointing into the future to the time when Christ will come again, which is why we have the reading today as we begin Advent. We expect him to come again as undisputed King, but we should do so with humility. Our job is not to predict the time, or the exact how, of the second coming. Jesus himself said he would come like a thief in the night (1 Thes 5:2; Matt 24:43; 2 Pet 3:10). So, trying to predict the second coming is pointless. What we can do, though, is prepare ourselves for Christ’s return. Whether it is tomorrow, or next year, or in ten years, we should make ourselves ready. …
In a way, our own death is like a coming of Christ to us. We don’t always know when that will be, so we should make ourselves ready for that moment. Preparing for our death and preparing for Christ’s return are the same kind of preparation for Christians, I think. Paul prays for his readers, “may he so strengthen your hearts in holiness that you may be blameless before our God and Father at the coming of our Lord Jesus with all his saints” (1 Thes 3:13). So, preparing for his coming means having our hearts strengthened in holiness. It is not something we can do on our own, but presumably it is not something that will happen without our involvement- our willingness and participation in how God wants to transform us.
The end of our Gospel reading speaks about this as well-
“… watch yourselves lest your hearts be weighed down with dissipation and drunkenness and cares of this life, and that day come upon you suddenly like a trap. For it will come upon all who dwell on the face of the whole earth. But stay awake at all times, praying that you may have strength to escape all these things that are going to take place, and to stand before the Son of Man” (Lk 21:34-36).
Be diligent. Watch yourselves. Do not allow the cares of this life to trap you. Live like he is coming back at any moment. Don’t be seduced by debauchery, or drunkenness. Watch. Stay awake. Don’t literally stay awake, but rather be aware. Keep your eyes open to your life and the lives of those around you. The life of sin is often one we slide into when we aren’t paying attention. Pay attention to your life in light of the fact that Christ is coming again, and in light of the fact that you are going to die and meet him, and you can’t know exactly when either of those will happen. Keep your eyes open to God, and the Kingdom Christ is constantly bringing. Being ready means constantly opening ourselves to that kingdom. AMEN
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