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First Sunday of Advent

Luke 21
25 “There will be signs in the sun, moon and stars. On the earth, nations will be in anguish and perplexity at the roaring and tossing of the sea. 26 People will faint from terror, apprehensive of what is coming on the world, for the heavenly bodies will be shaken. 27 At that time they will see the Son of Man coming in a cloud with power and great glory. 28 When these things begin to take place, stand up and lift up your heads, because your redemption is drawing near.”
29 He told them this parable: “Look at the fig tree and all the trees. 30 When they sprout leaves, you can see for yourselves and know that summer is near. 31 Even so, when you see these things happening, you know that the kingdom of God is near.
32 “Truly I tell you, this generation will certainly not pass away until all these things have happened. 33 Heaven and earth will pass away, but my words will never pass away.
34 “Be careful, or your hearts will be weighed down with carousing, drunkenness and the anxieties of life, and that day will close on you suddenly like a trap. 35 For it will come on all those who live on the face of the whole earth. 36 Be always on the watch, and pray that you may be able to escape all that is about to happen, and that you may be able to stand before the Son of Man.”


Well, earthlings, we had a good run.

5,125 years and the Mesoamerican Long Count Calendar comes to an end. Two weeks from Friday, if you want to be precise, and then we’re on our own. Forget the ‘fiscal cliff,’ global warning, or the cancellation of the rest of the NHL season: we’re talking about flipping the wall calendar and finding the next page blank.

Mayans not your style? Some have piggy-backed on all the excitement to point to Sagittarius A, believed to be the location of a supermassive black hole at the centre of the Milky Way that may or may not have the gravitational pull required to make life of earth shorter and more memorable.

And then there is a rather persistent radio commercial I keep hearing for something called “Critical Warning Number 6.” The voiceover begins “Something very big will happen in America within the next 180 days” and concludes (of course) with a website that will take your Visa card. Forget that they have been running the spot for a year and a half now.

In some ways it’s just too easy to make fun of the end of the world: it just keeps refusing to happen. Y2K? That was a yawn. Remember Harold Camping at his end-of-the-world billboard campaign? Or Hal Lindsey and his famous book “The Late Great Planet Earth?” Or his follow-up “The 1980’s: Countdown to Armageddon?” It should have read ‘The 1980’s: Countdown to Fashion Armageddon.’

Still, we had a good run. And if you were at all listening to the reading we just heard from Joan “End-of-theWorld” Fulford, you will now know that Luke and the others were not above a little apocalyptic musing themselves.

“There will be signs in the sun, moon and stars. On the earth, nations will be in anguish and perplexity at the roaring and tossing of the sea. 26 People will faint from terror, apprehensive of what is coming on the world, for the heavenly bodies will be shaken. 27 At that time they will see the Son of Man coming in a cloud with power and great glory.”

And then Luke adds the coda that ruins the whole thing:

Truly I tell you, this generation will certainly not pass away until all these things have happened.

So immediately we have a problem. The world-ending, terror-producing, heaven-shaking event that Luke predicts didn’t come to pass, so the temptation is to dismiss. Unfortunately for us, these letters are in red, and so we have to at least consider them, even though we are sophisticated enough to know that ever since the first human became aware of an era, that same human became aware that eras come to an end.

Now, since the world is ending two weeks from Friday, I might was well surrender some of my bible interpretation tricks, since I may not need them anymore. In this case, the best interpretive methodology we can employ would be to look at the context, the location of the text in the overall gospel narrative. And sure enough, it falls immediately before Jesus’ betrayal and arrest.

In other words, the world-ending, terror-producing, heaven-shaking event that Jesus was preparing his disciples to face would actually happen, in a garden, in the darkness, by a companion and friend. Considered that way, it almost sounds worse than the ‘anguish and perplexity and tossing of the sea.’

Now, perhaps you are thinking that’s just too simple, and there must be more, so instead I’ll distract you with a childhood story (another preacher’s trick).

Imagine little Michael huddled in the back seat of his mother’s ’67 Mustang, barreling down the Mount Albert Sideroad to an uncertain future in something that was given the deceptively gentle sounding name ‘Kindergarten.”

Bear in mind that everything leading up to this moment was pretty sweet. Mid-week, the bread truck would come, and we would whine until we got some of those little sugar covered donuts. We had a massive sand pile. And twice a day we got to enjoy break-time with the men in my father’s machine shop, with coffee, and smoking, and giant metalworking machines that could consume small children.

So one day it’s all coffee and danger with sugar-covered donuts and the next day I’m being transported to an uncertain future with a seemingly pleasant German-sounding name. How nice, a garden full of children: don’t believe a word of it.

There were tears. Not mine, of course, but the tears of the other children. And as my mother tells me, with more than a little pride, as soon as I arrived I set about comforting the other children as they faced this end-of-the-world experience. I wonder, at times, if my mother’s telling of this story is apocryphal, which has nothing to do with the end of the world, but rather indicates that she is making it all up.

I’ll let you decide if you accept Marilyn’s natural-born pastor theory, or if it’s just another Mount Albert folktale like the one about washers and dryers from the Mainprize store sliding down Centre Street in the middle of the night.

I’m sure I’ve mentioned it before, but the book “Necessary Losses” by Judith Viorst is most helpful here. You might know her by her most famous book, “Alexander and the Terrible, Horrible, No Good, Very Bad Day.” A great book, but for today it’s “Necessary Losses” with the sub-title: “The Loves, Illusions, Dependencies, and Impossible Expectations That All of Us Have to Give Up in Order to Grow.” That’s pretty much the whole book in the title, but she also speaks directly to that trip down the Mount Albert Sideroad in Marilyn’s ’67 Mustang: it was the end of the world.

You left your mother’s womb, that was a loss. You gave up nappies: loss. You went to Kindergarten: loss. You made a friend and lost a friend: loss. You graduated and they forced you to go to High School: loss. First love, first car, first choice of schools: loss. Do you get the picture? Everything new, everything next, everything now will eventually transform into something else or nothing at all. All that we have and all that we hope to have will be with us for a time and then be with us no longer. Remember 2012? Olympics, Jubilee, shiny new NHL season? All came and went (or failed to come) and we experienced loss.

Viorst argues that everyday is a little loss, but if we accept it, and maybe even embrace it, we can live more fully and happily. And then Jesus said: “Look at the fig tree and all the trees. When they sprout leaves, you can see for yourselves and know that summer is near. Even so, when you see these things happening, you know that the kingdom of God is near.”

What he means is completion. The true “sign of the times,” the passing of the seasons, will eventually lead to the completion of all things, and this Jesus can only describe as the Kingdom of God. Remembering from last week, it remains a mystery, this Kingdom of the not-yet and yet within-you. But the last word on the last day on the last page of the last calendar will not be a blank page or a supermassive black hole but the Kingdom of God. It will be the end of all losses, the loss of losses, and the completion of all that is.

So Advent begins, and we know where it will end: With the birth of the one-for-whom-we-wait. The child of the New Age, the real new age, that will promise and deliver an end to loss, and an end to death, and an end to the present age, and give us instead the Kingdom of God. Amen.

posted by michael jacob kooiman @ 5:51 AM