Advent 1
Romans 13:11-14
The Gospel of Matthew 24:36-44
Preached at House of Hope Lutheran Church (New Hope, MN)
November 27, 2022
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Grace and peace to you from God the Creator, Christ the Liberator, and the Holy Spirit. Amen.
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Today is the first Sunday of Advent – the first Sunday of the Church year. And the Church year begins, not with resurrection, not with crucifixion or the fire of the Holy Spirit, not with the birth of a child, but with Advent, and apocalypse.
Apocalypse is a word that carries so much weight. So much history.
It might bring up a lot in our bodies, minds, and hearts. For some of us, we might picture life as we know it violently ending, through meteor or nuclear fallout.
We might picture zombies, or floods, or fire, or ice, or all of those things, all at once.
Some have already known world-ending apocalypse – many Indigenous and Native writers, including David G. Lewis of the Grand Ronde Tribe, and Cherie Dimaline of the Metis Nation of Ontario, speak and write to the fact that Native and Indigenous communities are living in a post-apocalyptic world.
For some of us, we have experienced the death of a loved one, the loss of a job, a broken relationship, that made it feel like the world-as-we-knew-it would never be the same, where it felt like what we knew was crashing down around us – because it was, and might still be. We live in apocalyptic times.
And yet. The root of the term apocalypse is to uncover. To reveal. To unearth. Why does unearthing, uncovering, so often feel like the end of the world-as-we-know-it?
We begin the Church year in the rubble, in the grief, in the stillness. Everything is already crumbling, has already crumbled, and we are standing at the edge. The Gospel text for this first Sunday of Advent is apocalyptic.
There’s a temptation to soften apocalypse. To make it less frightening. To downplay the reality that the world-as-you-know-it ending is scary – it is destabilizing.
There’s a temptation to just keep going, keep moving, because if we’re busy and we’re productive, we’re told that we’ll be okay. Even if we rush past each other, rush past Creation, rush past our bodies.
There’s a temptation to ignore the unearthing going on around us, to carry on like we are not in a changing world, an emerging world, an uncovering world, where harmful beliefs and systems are dug up by their roots – because if we are present to that reality, we might also be present to the reality of God in our midst.
Beloveds in Christ, this is not new. We have been here before, and will be again, as we live in the apocalyptic tension between the world-as-it-is and the world-as-it-could-be.
The Gospel writer for today’s text is naming truth – the world is changing. It is rebirthing. It is unearthing. Here, and now.
Today we enter into a season of emerging and unearthing.
The root of Advent is to come into being. To emerge. Apocalypse is paired with this time of anticipation, waiting for the Christ-child, waiting for Christ to come into the world, embodied, already, again, and still, waiting for the world to turn.
Holding on to the tiniest thread of hope that new life can, and will, emerge in the midst of the unearthing. In the midst of grief. Putting faith in tulip bulbs buried beneath the dark earth, buried beneath the snow, in freezing soil. Putting faith in an incarnate God, coming to us in a body that needs to be nursed, that grows tired, that weeps. Putting faith in the promises of God, even as we don’t know the day or hour those promises will be fulfilled.
This part of the Gospel of Matthew might also call to mind other cultural images of apocalypse – of the end times. In certain expressions of Christianity, this is one of the texts used to invoke the Rapture – an idea that there will be a day that God sweeps up the faithful, and leaves non-believers behind in a Day of Judgement.
I don’t read this text that way. The writer is comparing the coming of the Son of Man to the flood of Noah’s time. In Noah’s time, people were living their lives – eating and drinking, marrying and giving in marriage – until a flood swept through and destroyed them. Their world ended. With that comparison, it doesn’t seem like a positive thing to be the one taken from the field, or taken from the tasks of daily life.
It seems closer to a moment of surprise separation, of trauma, where the one left is left to grieve, left to labor, left to carry on, when their world feels like it’s ending. I can’t read this text – one will be taken, one will be left – without images of those taken too soon, unexpectedly, by violence, playing through my head. Taken too soon, unexpectedly, by illness, by pandemic, weighing on my heart.
To me, part of what this text is reminding us – albeit harshly – is that we are not God. We can’t know the future, can’t know what’s coming next, where God will next show up, where we will next lament and cry out for a God that seems absent. There is uncertainty built into our lives together – as much as we want to know the future, to believe we know what’s coming next – we can’t. And a question that’s worth asking is – in this inevitable uncertainty of what’s coming next, do we turn towards grace and possibility, or towards fear, and a desire to control each other?
We aren’t being asked by God to know what’s coming next – in fact, it’s the exact opposite – we can’t know when the Son of Man will show up next in our lives, stealing away the things that keep us from God, but that we cling to like our most prized possessions, leaving us off-kilter, but ready to be surprised by God.
We aren’t being asked to be fearful of each other, and of the future, displacing our uncertainty into a desire to control, and have our way be the only right way of responding to God in Creation.
We are asked to keep awake.
Keep awake to the injustices of this world. To the systemic harms, violent rhetoric, and normalization of violence. Don’t allow yourself to get desensitized to this violence, which comes in the form of words and laws and bullets.
Keep awake to the structures we are surrounded by, systems that oppress, that violate, that rupture. Notice what is being uncovered in your life and your world – sins of racism, transphobia, ableism, eco-facism. Notice how you are being lulled into sleep and complacency.
Keep awake to that which is being swept under the rug for the sake of profit, and exploitation, and erasure. To the ways small and simple acts of caring for each other are framed as oppression, instead of love.
Keep awake to your feelings. Your experiences. Your joys, and your griefs.
Keep awake, so that when Jesus shows up in your life, you notice him, and follow him. Leaving the patterns that keep us from seeing God in each other and in ourselves.
In this season of emerging and unearthing, Jesus asks us to keep awake, only a few chapters before his disciples fall asleep on the night he is handed over to the authorities. They fall asleep when Jesus asks them to stay awake with him, pray with him, be with him.
In this season of Advent and Apocalypse, I invite you to stay with the challenge that emerging and unearthing presents, in a world where Christmas decorations have been in stores since before Halloween, tempting us to gloss over the depths of our grief, and the depths of our dreams. The systems we live in are designed to help us ignore this time of reflection, of remembrance, of slowing down, of digging in, in hoping for and enacting a more compassionate, more just, world.
Keep awake. To the injustices we are surrounded by, to the love we are surrounded by. To the places where God is emerging and unearthing. Dig into the dark earth. Sow bulbs for spring. Reconnect with each other. Slow down, and wake from sleep. Keep awake.
Reed Fowler 