Luke 21:25-36
Advent comes but once a year. That doesn’t make preaching in Advent easier. We’d rather think and worship ahead to Christmas. Some among us long to hear more about the end times and the saving judgment to come. We’re sure we know who will win and who will lose when Jesus comes to sort it all out. Most of us are happy to leave all warnings and dire predictions buried in the Bible, somewhere deep and dark, down near the Levitical purity code. Singing “Child in the Manger” in November may be a tad early, but let’s not do “Lo, He Comes with Clouds Descending” either.
Where we stand, or where we sit, determines how we hear apocalyptic scriptures. Jesus’ first followers, many of them displaced persons, most of them powerless, heard words like our gospel today in a way we can’t appreciate. You sit in your pew in Saskatchewan, or with your Bible open on your kitchen table. Where and who we are colour our vision and filter the text’s voice. We can’t put ourselves anywhere, in any time other than where we are and when we live. That’s not good or bad, it just is. And that’s how it works when we open the Bible. A Christian still in Iraq reads today’s gospel, as ISIS draws near, and sees what we can’t.
If my world, the planet I stand on with as much confidence as I can muster, is very small it will always be under threat. My little world will shake in the slightest breeze of change.
Millions of people today have no more of the earth to stand on than the fence line they can walk around in one endless day. They have no choice, no power to change their places. Jesus offered his first disciples hope there might be more for them than tradition and Empire allowed, but for many of them there was little in this world they could safely call their own. Your life and mine couldn’t be more different than the lives of people we meet in the gospels or hear about in the daily news.
How many of us choose to stand on our own little planets, hoping only that we can hold on as everything around us seems to be blowing away? We might hear Jesus say, “It’s always been like this, and it seems it’s getting worse. But I’ve got you. Don’t be afraid.” I hope our sisters and brothers in Syria hear Jesus say just that. Is that really what he’s saying to you and me?
“Apocalypse” means opened curtains, a barrier peeled back to allow us to see behind what’s before our eyes. When Christians began to interpret Jesus’ words as apocalyptic, and then write new apocalypses, they read current events and imagined what they might lead to. They found God everywhere, even if all they could see around them denied God’s presence and sovereignty. We can do that, too.
Difference is, we have the power and the freedom to respond creatively to signs that might herald the end of the world as we know it. But they don’t necessarily mean the end of the world for all. We’re called to action for the deliverance, here and now, of God’s good earth and all God’s people, from the forces of destruction and death. The curtain opened, we can catch the vision of what God wants for the world. From where we stand, Jesus has come and is among us.
