Our Hope is in God

1AdventA, November 27, 2016, St Martin’s Episcopal Church, Moses Lake, WA by Annette Fricke

Just as in the most recent gospel texts, this one too is a gospel about the end times.  The church year ends with the end times as well as the beginning of the church year begins with the end times.  Today is the first Sunday of the church year of a season that has only four Sundays preceding Christmas.  We are now in the season of Advent.  The word advent is from the Latin meaning coming.  It is the advent of Advent.  During this period, we will see readings that emphasize both the need for repentance as well as hope.  Thus, the liturgical colors for the season can be either purple, as in Lent or blue.  Blue has become a preferred color in many churches denoting hope.  When we repent, we prepare ourselves for the coming of Christ, both the birth of Christ and the second coming of Christ.  We look forward to celebrating Christmas and also the second coming of Jesus in power and glory.  These elements are descriptive and inclusive of what we call apocalyptic literature.  Although all of the gospels include this apocalyptic material, the book of Revelation is an entire book of it.  It is by no means an easy task to decipher just how we should interpret such writings.  Many interpretations have been given in every generation.  For example, Martin Luther named the then pope the anti-Christ.  Some people who lived through World War II might name Hitler as the anti-Christ.  In that line of thinking we will end up with several anti-Christs.  But perhaps that is being just a bit too literal to really make any sense out of it.  Maybe there is a way to look at it that makes the meaning written several years ago, be pretty much how we would interpret it today in 2016.  While many people have predicted the end, the group called the Seventh Day Adventists comes to mind, they were all wrong and the end is yet to come.  There is almost an implicit message, if we read between the lines, that predicting is of no value.  Verse 36 clearly states, “But about that day and hour no one knows, neither the angels of heaven, nor the Son, but only the Father.” It’s as if God is saying to us to avoid the temptation to think that we can predict the end.  But we are humans and we can’t help it.  We like to speculate.  The earlier writings seemed to imply that some disciples of Jesus would not see their own deaths, that Jesus would return before they died.  That didn’t happen.  This appears to be a correction.  Is that what Jesus said or meant to say or maybe the end is not what most of us think it means.  Maybe there is not this big happening way out in the future.  So, people also thought that it could be that there is no second coming, Jesus came back in the form of the Holy Spirit—that would be a second coming.  Another proposed theory is that the second coming of Jesus is when we die.  And if you think further about that, in baptism, we die to our sins and receive the Holy Spirit which brings us back to the Holy Spirit.  Thinking even more, it’s like life itself here on earth: we keep searching for definite answers, God surprises us, but it is never quite certain what goal we have achieved or if there is more.  What does God have in mind for us? Sometimes our sense of security lies in having answers.  However, the answers remain ever elusive.  We must conclude that it doesn’t matter if we accept this or not, we will never know for sure the when of Jesus’ coming.  That is why even faith is challenged.  God is in charge and our faith is strongest when we accept that we are not in charge.  Some would say that this is not at all comforting, but actually anxiety provoking.  I’ll say it again: “There is almost an implicit message if we read between the lines that predicting is of no value.”  If that is the case, why should we be on guard or alert?  That would in no way be logical.

Is it not true that our lives are marked by beginnings and endings all the time and that we are frequently in a state of confusion because of that very phenomenon?  For example, is a graduation and ending or a beginning?  Isn’t it the case that we also call this same event a commencement?  A birthday or anniversary is a commemoration of the past and also a look into the future.  Our whole lives are a state of being somewhere in the middle all the time: that is where I was, this is where I am and the future is yet to come.  Some days are lived in reminiscing, some lived in the moment, and still others dreaming of the future.  And God’s story is the same with a beginning at creation which is the past, the continual giving of the Son and the Holy Spirit which is the present, and the consummation of God’s saving grace at Jesus’ second coming.  In a certain sense, our lives parallel God’s.  God has the upper hand in all things, can and will make it happen.  This is still the beginning of the end of all things.  Despite how many times the generations of life and death and birth occur, we continue to live our lives into the future.  Children wait for mom to pick them up from grandma’s house.  Grandma works in a hospital.  Mom teaches the 5^th grade at the local elementary.  Dad sells cars.  Every four years we vote for a president and some people will challenge the election results because it is not to their liking.  People get into fights and young people are sent to fight for their country.  Time marches on. Even normal happenings can keep us from watching for Jesus’ return.  From an unknown author attributed to the Celtic tradition, “And every day, the world will drag you by the hand, yelling, ‘This is important!  And this is important!  And this is important! You need to worry about this!  And this!  And this!’  And each day, it’s up to you to yank your hand back, put it on your heart and say, ‘No.  This is what’s important.”  It is important to be alert.  It is important to not allow other interests to pull us away from God.  It is important to remember that God remains the eternal provider for all that is necessary for life for all of creation.  God still has in mind the restoration of God’s kingdom and will bring it to completion.  Caring that much about each and every one of us and all of the created order is God’s purpose.  God will not abandon us or leave the work of redemption unfinished.  God will complete the work of salvation. It is our role as God’s children to live out God’s salvation, to keep on honoring God in our lives.

Some Christians do not know what to believe.  Will there be a second coming of Jesus?  It hasn’t happened yet. One response to this text could be apathy—well, I don’t know if Jesus is coming or not, so why should I care?  Why should I get excited about it?  Does history have any significance?  I can’t see what’s going on, therefore there is no point.  There are atheists who fall into this category as well.  This attitude is summed up in Shakespeare’s Macbeth who says, “Life is a tale told by an idiot, full of sound and fury, signifying nothing.” 

There are other Christians who are filled with anxiety when reading this passage of scripture because they focus only on the part about being left behind. They fall victim to these words taken out of context to make books and movies that only serve to strike terror into the hearts of those who take this literally. They see God as one who punishes.  They don’t see a God of mercy and grace.

Life is not a tale told by an idiot and God is not a merciless tyrant who snatches away those who are somehow more evil than the rest of us.  Rather, God is sovereign and holds all of created life in loving care, a care and love that does everything possible to draw in and nourish all people.  God will not abandon us because we are God’s people created to be and live in God’s presence.  God is no idiot, but has the wisdom that surpasses all human wisdom.  This is God’s history and God will never write us out of it.  Our hope is in God, the maker of heaven and earth, all things visible and invisible, and in Jesus Christ who lives that we too, might walk in newness of life.