The 1st Sunday of Advent
Scripture Readings:
Hebrew Scriptures – Jeremiah 33: 14-61
14The days are surely coming, says the LORD, when I will fulfill the promise I made to the house of Israel and the house of Judah. 15In those days and at that time I will cause a righteous Branch to spring up for David; and he shall execute justice and righteousness in the land. 16In those days Judah will be saved and Jerusalem will live in safety. And this is the name by which it will be called: "The LORD is our righteousness."
Gospel Lesson – Luke 21: 25-312
25There will be signs in the sun, the moon, and the stars, and on the earth distress among nations confused by the roaring of the sea and the waves. 26People will faint from fear and foreboding of what is coming upon the world, for the powers of the heavens will be shaken. 27Then they will see ‘the Son of Man coming in a cloud’ with power and great glory. 28Now when these things begin to take place, stand up and raise your heads, because your redemption is drawing near.
29Then [Jesus] told them a parable: “Look at the fig tree and all the trees; 30as soon as they sprout leaves you can see for yourselves and know that summer is already near. 31So also, when you see these things taking place, you know that the kingdom of God is near.”
“Look at All the Trees.”
Once upon a time (the way all good fairy tales begin!), there was a wife and her husband who had died and gone to heaven. After being there for some time, they both marveled at how wonderful it was. The husband then turned to his wife and said, “Just think, I could’ve been here ten years ago if you hadn’t made me eat all that oat bran.”
While we might chuckle a bit at this story, oddly enough it does speak to the way we often picture reality and how it relates to our culture. Eating oat bran can be a good thing in itself (I am here as a witness!), and while it may delay the inevitable, still there is the inevitable.
As we’ve been discussing in the “Remedial Christianity” class, what we often perceive as truth – along with the categories that have been created from the past into which we’ve all been born – becomes, for us, reality by consensus. And yet, given time, we can become victims of consensus reality and blind to the fact that all of those categories are, in many ways, philosophical constructs – ideas. Our perceptions of reality, then, can be so filled with assumptions, that what we value and become attached to are a kind of cultural conditioning. Such conditioning comes from a number of different sources of course: parents, teachers, friends, enemies, education, the media, our socio-economic group…. All of this we weave into our system of beliefs.
So when a new awareness comes along – whether we’re conscious of it or not – of an impending change in our consensus reality, we often feel threatened. The prospect that “truths” that we’ve known all of our lives might be replaced by some other “beliefs” or “truths,” can really be unsettling.
In spite of all of the projected fears and anxieties surrounding the Y2K problem (do you remember that one?), the world did not come to an end on January 1, 2000. And yet some estimates made prior to the turn of the last century ranged from predicting not just minor computer inconveniences, but widespread power outages and prolonged disruption of utilities and services, followed by economic depression and eventual famine! And it wasn’t that long ago that the intermingling of racial groups was thought to be a threat to the stability of our culture, or worse, a godless communist plot.3 Today it’s the misguided belief that all gay people are sexual predators out to seduce our children and grandchildren. Depending upon the sources of these beliefs I hear, almost as an echo, the line from today’s gospel reading:
There will be signs in the sun, the moon, and the stars, and on the earth distress among nations confused by the roaring of the sea and the waves. People will faint from fear and foreboding of what is coming upon the world, for the powers of the heavens will be shaken.4
Sociological and historical research studies have shown us that during times of revolutionary change there will be, typically, increases in the frequency of mental illness, social disruptions (along with the use of police and other armed forces to suppress such disruptions), violent crime, terrorism, religious cults, as well as attitudes of pleasure-seeking selfishness and other aspects of hedonism. All of these signs are visible today, aren’t they? Things may get even worse before they get any better. Such signs are basically a response to our underlying anxiety at how quickly we see the world changing – and we can’t help but interpret it as “a threat to our way of life.” The tendency is there to actively resist or oppose change – of any kind. And yet during just such a time as this, Jesus told a parable about a fig tree that is a sign for those of us who would take the time to really look:
“…when you see these things taking place, you know that the kingdom of God is near.”5
The religious community has always understood itself as having the duty to scrutinize the signs of the times and interpret them in the light of its tradition. So, in language that makes sense, religion responds to the questions asked by every generation about this life and the life to come – and about the relationship of the one to the other. It’s important, then, that we understand the world in which we live – its expectations and longings, customs and traditions, and its particularly cultural assumptions.
As one of my seminary professors was fond of asking us: “How do you know what you know?” Usually it was because someone told us; rarely was it because of something that we had experienced first hand. We are both shaped and restricted by our mythology: the myth, say, that the Bible is the actual “Word of God” and contains the only truths we need, or a whole string of contending myths that claim life is either tragic or a blessing, threatening or filled with hope, unsatisfying or fertile, a paradox or simply what it is …and so on. In a sense each of those myths, though (along with the stories that we make up about them), limit the possibilities of our choices of living in a new and very different way. And so, as Tad Dunne has observed in his book Spiritual Mentoring:
The Victorian Story inhibited sexual desires. The Faithful Churchgoer Story inhibits the spirit of prophecy in churches. The American Individual Story inhibits individual hopes for shared living. Then there are the stories we tell ourselves: “I am the Neglected Child.” “I must be liked, no matter what.” “I must succeed like Uncle Ben.”6
And so we in the church who’ve become comfortable using such words as “conversion” or “transformation,” may have disguised the vital reality that lives beneath those words. That’s what I love about Jesus’ parables: they have a way of stripping away abstractions and speaking to the heart.
I remember reading just such a narrative in a professional religious journal years ago. A man was describing his back-packing trip deep into the wilderness as he gathered his thoughts for a lecture that he was supposed to give on “Mother Earth as Metaphor.” He went, he wrote,
…as the prophet Esdras had urged, to the earth itself. I asked the earth what she would say if she had been invited to speak in my place.7
At night, sitting beside his campfire, the man noticed a small pine tree and sensed that the tree was asking him for a story. Oddly enough he was moved to speak out loud to this tree by telling a Lakota Sioux tale that he remembered from his childhood, a tale of “risk, change and death.” As he began his story, though, he noticed five or six other small pines gathered near the fire. He tells the story to all of them, not realizing at the time what was deeply drawing him, as the storyteller, into its mystery. He writes:
The trees were mesmerized by the tale. Some of its truth they already knew. They understood transformation. The woods are full of it. Young trees continually grow next to the old ones that have fallen and begun to rot, returning again to the soil. But something still deeper was drawing them into the story as we sat together around the fire. In an echo of Gethsemane, these trees were listening, with both fascination and terror, as they watched…wood …burn. … They never imagined the stuff-of-their-own-being turned into Light and Beauty. [Together] our fear of death was absorbed into their wonder at the mystery of transformation.8
This powerful and mystical experience led the narrator of our story to ask himself about the image of the earth as mother: What is this image? And the words “grief” and “song” came to him. So he wrote that this earth “grieves what is lost and sings into life what is struggling to be born.”9
I am here to tell you that our ability to distinguish between reliable and unreliable stories depends on how educated we are in alternative stories. It also indicates how open we are to change. As our myths and stories prove unreliable, our faith and the institutions that support it are shaken. But then our consensus reality changes, and there is still that one great inevitable story, the Cosmic Story – not unlike, maybe, the story of a fig tree.
As that Persian mystic and poet of the 13th century, Rumi, has written:
This is how a human being
can change
There is a worm addicted
to eating grape leaves
Suddenly he wakes up
call it grace,
…
And he’s no longer a worm
He’s the entire vineyard
and the orchard too
The fruit, the trunks,
a growing wisdom and joy
that doesn’t need to devour.10
And so here we are on our Advent journey. But we are not alone, nor are we without inspiration. The ultimate teacher of the faith is the Spirit working in the hearts of its followers. The Spirit’s tools are the community, its common worship, its acts of service – all of it more powerful than we will ever know.
1 The thirty-third chapter of Jeremiah is an oracle set in the year 587 BCE, just prior to the fall of Jerusalem to the Babylonian army, but probably composed later during the years of that city’s restoration. It’s a message of hope to a fearful people who long for a place filled with joy once again. In a sense Jeremiah introduces what Christians later took to be the idea of two ages and of God’s intervention as the basis of history’s entrance into a new era. Here he speaks of the tradition of the Messiah – someone of the lineage of David who will, finally, cause God’s will to be done.
2 Our Christian celebration of Advent, in effect, begins a new year four weeks earlier than the cultural calendar to show that the church experiences time differently – with a different sense of beginning as well as having a different end in view. We do this every year acknowledging (oddly enough) that the end has never fully been realized – the kingdom is here and still coming, now and not yet. We begin by announcing the promise that Jesus, who came into the world once, in fact continues to return, again and again, to claim his own – at least those who have had “eyes to see” and “ears to hear” of his coming.
3 See some of the observations of the upheavals caused by the Civil Rights movement in Black Struggle – Red Scare: Segregation and Anti-Communism in the South, 1948-1968 by Jeff Woods, as well as in other such books as The Politics of Righteousness: Idaho Christian Patriotism by James A. Aho.
4 Luke 21: 25-26.
5 Ibid, v. 31.
6 Tad Dunne, Spiritual Mentoring (HarperSanFrancisco, 1996), p. 11.
7 Belden C. Lane, “Mother Earth as Metaphor: A Healing Pattern of Grieving and Giving Birth,” Horizons, Spring 1994).
8 Ibid.
9 Loc. cit.
10 Jedaluddin Rumi (e.g., http://www.attractionretreat.org/AttractionRetreat/MoreQuotes.html).