Sermon Notes first sunday Advent Lk. 21:25-36

Dec. 2, First Sunday in Advent Lk. 21; 25-36
Here we are at the start of the church year, in the midst of the holiday season. In I Thes. we just heard Paul write, “how can we thank you enough.” It sounds like a family hoping for everyone to be able to get together for the holidays. Part of our holiday preparations is to try to make things nice for a family gathering. So often, we make things beautiful for company, but we bring out the everyday materials for family. At the holidays, family get treated as honored guests, and maybe that is the way it should be.We keep checking the time, even though we know when to expect them. maybe we haunt the airport and keep checking the flight status on the boards.After 2000 years of waiting for God’s purposes to come to fruition, it is difficult indeed to yearn for it. Yet yearn for the vision of a better world remains with us still. (for what should we be ungrateful)

Again , we heard in Luke: do not be weighed down by dissipations and worries, yet be alert.Being weighed down dampens our senses and thoughts. We get blinded by all of our preparations and parties to the point of christmas. Advent itself barely registers on our awareness. Again, Advent is the start of the church year. So it looks to the Second Advent of Christ when the new creation comes into view, and the first Advent of Christmas. We start the church year with a look toward the advent of Christ.

We often give short shrift to the apocalyptic material at the beginning and end of the church year. We so want to bring in  the story of Christmas and avoid the fearsome descriptions of apocalyptic material. We may want Christmas songs in church to match the secular celebration of Christmas that seems to start right after Thanksgiving to match at least two local FM stations. I want to be clear here. In my view, the birth of Jesus Christ is an end time event in Scripture. it marks the closing of a chapter of human history and the dawn of a new age, a divine opening. the new age is pictured with what becomes a familiar vocabulary of ages of Scripture to announce the shaking up of the old and expected ways of doing things when God’s vision  enters the scene. We are less familiar with the material and its vocabulary from other parts of Scripture. Basically, it uses tropes of dark, danger, derailment of the ordinary along with morning light and manifold, manifest presence of God in a new full way. When our children were little they could tell when a dreaded commercial was coming by the music and camera change in the program. When I was young, romantic scenes were signalled by a soft muted trumpet and then the flickers of a candle, a lantern, or a volcano erupting.

At times, the church has played around with trying to predict the return of Christ on a calendar, but it became popular in this country only with adoption of material from John Nelson Darby in the mid 1800s. How did  the church survived all those years without reading Biblical material as a guide? I will be blunt. None of us can know with certainty the hour of our own demise. When we pass away, i assert that we enter into God’s divine time that is not managed by a digital clock but the flux of eternity.I am willing to bet that all of us will face eternity before some possible image of annihilation that is not the Scripture’s message in the first place.Rahner: “ time becomes what it is supposed to be...no longer the bleak empty succession of moments...but redeemed, as it gathers into the future, a focal point that co-ordinates the living present with the eternal future.”