Advent 1c.06                                               December 3, 2006

Christian faith has its friends and its enemies.
Our real enemies are not the skeptics and the critics.
They keep us honest and on our toes.
Our real enemies are Christians
        who smuggle their personal pathologies
        into the faith and distort it into something false

        – something destructive that makes people
                 cruel instead of kind,
                          judgmental instead of forgiving.

No one has done more harm to Christianity
        than John Nelson Darby,
        a 19th Century clergyman who invented
                  the modern heresy of dispensationalism.
You may or may not know the term.
It is the all too popular brand of religion that threatens people
        with the Coming of Christ in vengeance.

If you want to know the difference between
        the orthodox faith and the Left Behind heresy,
        I highly recommend a book, The Rapture Exposed
                  by Barbara Rossing.
For today, it’s enough that you know,
        that dispensationalism
                  is not the orthodox Christian tradition.
We don’t dread the 2nd Coming as a disaster.

We pray “thy Kingdom come,”
        in faith that God’s kingdom is one of freedom and peace.
We pray, “Thy will be done,”
        in faith that the same God, whose love gave birth to the Cosmos,
        wills mercy and healing all creation.

For hundreds of years,
        the Church has read the lessons
        about the end times during the season of Advent.

We read these lessons now, in this season,
        because the ultimate destiny of creation
        isn’t that God will wipe it out,
        but that God will redeem it
                  in something that looks like Christmas.

The essence of Christianity is not fear but hope.
So we do not dread the coming of Christ. We hope for it.
Zechariah described our God-ordained destiny
        as a day in which there is no night,
        as a river of life flowing from Jerusalem
        to the ends of the earth,
                 always flowing in every season.
Isaiah described it as a great feast,
        a time when every tear would be wiped away,
        and the lion would lay down with the lamb.

We read these lessons in Advent,
        because we are looking forward
                 to something like Christmas

        – when angels will sing and people
                 will be still and happy in reverence.

Hope is an extraordinary thing.
It is extraordinary because it dares to believe in something,
         even to trust in something, we cannot yet see.
This is the difference between Christianity
         and all the religions that teach passive acceptance
                  of things as they are.
Christians are not satisfied with things as they are,
         and we do not want to be satisfied with things as they are.
We hope for better.
That’s why we strive for better.

The German theologian, Jurgen Moltmann, says,

       “ . . . (E)xperience and hope stand in contradiction to each other . . .
       with the result that . . . man is not brought into . . . agreement
       with the given situation, but is drawn into the conflict
       between experience and hope.”

That’s what Jesus describes in today’s lesson.
Our experience is sometimes pretty grim,
        but, in spite of experience, our hearts are set on hope.
Whenever the world seems to be falling apart,
        people faint with fear and foreboding.
But that is precisely the time, Jesus says, to

        “stand up, raise your heads,
        because your redemption is near

        . . . the kingdom of God is near.”

Today, when war is raging around the world,
        the glaciers and the polar ice caps are melting,
        and global pandemics threaten people’s lives,
                 it feels as if things are falling apart on a grand scale.
When our personal lives are into chaos,
        our families split into conflict,
        people we love are lost in addiction,
                 it feels as if we are falling apart ourselves.

The natural human reaction is to faint with fear and foreboding.
We could panic or collapse into despair.
But Jesus says, this is precisely the time to

        “stand up, raise your heads,
because your redemption is near
. . . the kingdom of God is near.”

That doesn’t mean to roll over and go back to sleep
        because God will take care of it.
Quite the opposite.
To stand up and raise our heads
        is to engage the world,
        to challenge the status quo,
        to do something godly,
                 to do something Christ-like
                 in the face of all the powers of death and darkness.

Moltmann says,

        “. . . (H)ope causes not rest, but unrest,
        not patience but impatience. . .
        Those who hope in Christ” he says, “can no longer
                 put up with reality as it is,
        but begin to suffer with it, to contradict it.”

That means we roll up our sleeves and do something
        about the melting glaciers and the spread of AIDS.
In a world intent on waging war,
        we are even more intent on waging reconciliation.
When the people we love disappoint us,
        we find new and better ways to love them.

Godly deeds and Christ-like actions
        are not guaranteed to succeed in the short run.
In fact, they are more likely to get us in trouble
        than to make our life smooth and comfortable.
The sardonic adage, “No good deed goes unpunished,”
        may be close to the truth.

But Christian hope is that God redeems all the righteous actions.
Everything that has ever been done or ever will be done
        for the sake of justice and peace and healing
        will be brought to completion by the hand of God
                 in the fullness of time.

But we have to take those actions first.
We have to take those actions now.
We act in hope regardless of the result,
        doing what God calls us to do,
        and trusting God to fulfill his purpose.

Advent is the season to practice hope,
        to do something generous or merciful or kind

        – against all odds that it will matter

        – because we trust God, not the odds.

Put a flash light in the basket for a homeless person
        in the hope that it will light his way to a better life.
Send a Christmas card to someone who doesn’t like you.
Write a letter to your congressman
        to support the Millennium Development Goals
                 even if you don’t think he’ll read it.

My favorite line of verse by the poet Gary Snyder
        says it all.
“Plant sequoias,” he said, “Plant sequoias.”

This is the season to hope for Christmas
        to pray for the world to be made new,
        to pray to be made new ourselves.

When Lent comes,
         we will repent of a whole laundry list of sins.
In Advent, we repent of only two sins

         – the sin of despair and the sin of satisfaction,
                  both sins against hope.
We turn away from saying, “We’re just fine, thank you.”
And we turn away from saying, “It will never be better.”
In Advent, we dare to dream of a better world
         and do our part to make it happen.
                                                     

                                                              Amen.