II Peter 3:8-15

 I just read a piece in working preacher that does not see this as apocalyptically charged. I don’t buy it, but I do agree that it touches on moral life in the long interim between the two advents of Jesus Christ. Rather, the writer here has an intersection between apocalyptic and moral life. The time gap between the promise and its fulfillment of God’s agenda is to give us time to live properly in anticipation and embrace of God’s way in the world. In that way, it has a sense of Judaism that we are to practice tikkun olam, the healing of all to make the world ready for Messiah.

I see this as an apocalyptic text since it uses elements of it to alert the reader to the oncoming, onrushing new age. 

At the same time, it may be adopting Stoic ideas and transforming them into the emerging Chrsitan context. (Some date this letter as late as 140-160). They held, after all, that the worlds begin and end in a cycle of fire. Indeed, they also linked ethics and physics into a system.

Advent is a reflection on time, and we get a vital one here on God’s sense of time (and timing) in relation to our own. Adopting Ps. 90, it shows that the divine conception of time differs from ours. If one is feeling ambitions, one could go into chronos v. kairos times a la Tillich.

Here we get some Advent virtues to live pure, blameless, peaceful lives. One could put some meat on those bones and make a fine ethical sermon for this time of year.