Advent 1
Jer 33: 14-16; Ps 25:1-9; 1 Thess 3:9-13; Luke 21: 25-36
The Rev’d Dr Deborah Meister, ODM
“Almighty God, give us grace to cast away the works of darkness and put on the armor of light, now in the time of this mortal life, in which your Son Jesus Christ came to us in great humility…”
I love the prayer with which we began today; it goes right to the heart of our life in Christ. It is the perfect prayer for the Sunday which begins the church year anew because it pulls no punches. Our faith begins in darkness and struggles toward the light, with such a bone-deep wrestling that we need a kind of armor to see it through. That resonates with me right now, when so many disturbing things are happening in this world. If someone came to me and preached some kind of utopia, “Just believe, and all will be well,” I don’t think I could accept that — not in a world where all is not well for so very many people. But this prayer — a call to struggle on toward that infant born so many years ago — that, I can feel. That, I can do. I need that armor of light, and I suspect you need it, too. But what is the “armor of light”?
The armor Christ gives us is not like the armor of this world, a casing of steel or kevlar that confers a kind of invulnerability. The armor that allows soldiers to go into places that are unsafe with some certainty that they cannot easily be harmed. That armor seeks to make them more than human, or at least, different from the people they have been sent to battle. But the armor of Christ does not set us apart from others; it brings us among them, not as conquerors, but as friends and witnesses. As people who can see all that cries out to be seen, and still proclaim a radical hope: that the worst is not the last.[1]
That’s what our Gospel is about today — that strange passage from Luke about the unsettling of the world. Jesus proclaims, “There will be signs in the sun, the moon, and the stars, and on 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.” When I was a child, it was easy to dismiss passages like that one as myth; today, with the reality of rising sea levels, it seems a bit too real. But neither perspective is really helpful in understanding the passage, because Jesus’ point is not about the signs and wonders: it’s about the people.
A number of years ago, the author turned Methodist Bishop Will Willimon told me about leading a mission trip in South America. During the day, he and the volunteers from his church would work alongside the residents of a town to repair their homes; in the evening, they’d gather around a campfire and talk. One evening, they were asked to share their favorite Bible stories. One by one, the Americans in Willimon’s group named happy stories like the Good Shepherd or the Good Samaritan. But an old woman from the village quoted St Mark’s version of the passage we heard today (Mark 13: 24-26):
“In those days, after that suffering,
the sun will be darkened,
and the moon will not give its light,
and the stars will be falling from heaven,
and the powers in the heavens will be shaken.
Then they will see ‘the Son of Man coming in clouds’ with great power and glory.”
Willimon was taken aback, and asked her why she liked it. She told him that her husband was dead; her children were gone; she was living alone in a hovel; but those words told her that the world would not be like this forever. That the worst is not the last.
My point is that passages like this one act like plumb-lines; they reveal that the world we live in is not straight and true. For readers like me, readers who are mostly comfortable — who have food and shelter and work, who have not lost greatly in their lives — the idea that the world we live in might be broken or destroyed is a terrifying thing, a future which would bring much grief. But for the peoples to whom this world has not been kind — for those suffering war or displacement, for the refugees seeking a place simply to be or for the peoples whose poverty provides the cheap labor for our industrial economy, passages like these sound very different, because this world order has not been a friend. And Jesus’ point is that, at the end, the world will not have two faces, but one. And it is our work to live as if that were true, even now.
He is calling us to a radical hope: to trust both that the earth is in God’s hands, and that God’s future is unlike the present in which we dwell. It’s not a future we can understand, because we have not yet been prepared for it. It’s a future that we grow into, walking and working in the dark. Rebecca Solnit compares that work to the mushrooms which appear after a rainfall. It may seem that they are new and strange, but they are the flowering of great fungal webs which lie concealed in darkness, stretching across miles to regulate water and nutrients and keep the earth alive. (Hope in the Dark) So it is with us who are baptized into Christ: we share a hidden unity, and even when it seems that our individual gestures do not count for much, they form part of a dark and hidden web which flowers forth into light.
Bearing that fruit, keeping that hope, requires a certain kind of attentiveness: it calls us to be attentive to what is truly of value. One of the challenges of living in a disordered world is that we are taught every day to value what that world values. Soren Kierkegaard told a mischievous story about a pair of thieves who broke into a jewelry shop and, instead of stealing anything, switched all the price tags. When the store re-opened, some of the people who thought they were buying diamond necklaces ended up paying a fortune for rhinestones, while others paid pennies for jewels which turned out to be real. With the price-tags changed, no one could tell what anything was really worth.
That’s where our faith formation comes in: by reading Scripture, by spending time in prayer and in service, we learn, in the words of St. Paul, to put on “the mind of Christ.” (I Cor 2:16) Coming together in faith, we learn what is truly of value: the “love, joy, peace, patience, kindness, generosity, faithfulness, gentleness, and self-control,” which reveal the presence of God’s spirit in us. (Gal 5:22-23) But these things cannot be cultivated only by spending one hour a week in church, or even by spending one hour a week in our newly-revived Sunday school. The advertisers and politicians have our attention for many more hours than that! To remain grounded in Christ requires intention; Christ asks us to safeguard and nourish the precious gift that he has given us.
This Sunday marks the 165th anniversary of our Cathedral, testament to the faithfulness of generations who have met here to pray, to work together, and endure that the heritage of the Anglican tradition would be well represented here in Montreal. And we do represent it well, for all that the people who built this Cathedral could scarcely have imagined the congregation of today!
But it is also the week on which a different Cathedral, Notre Dame de Paris, re-opened after the fire which devastated it five years ago. As the flames spread through that building, the firefighters put into action a plan to save the most precious relics housed in the Cathedral. Forming a human chain, they passed the relics from hand to hand, including not only the Reserved Sacrament, but also the Crown of Thorns. No one knows, of course, whether the Crown of Thorns housed there is authentic, but that’s not the point.
At their time of great distress, they risked themselves to save the two items most viscerally related to the presence of Christ: the crown of a suffering kingship, and the bread and wine which feed our souls each week. Together, those two relics point to the paradox of our hope: to a god who suffers with us; to a king who went to the cross; to our continued union with a Savior who died and rose from the dead. They remind us, each week, that our hope is real; that God’s kingdom cannot be shaken; that the worst is not the last.
That, by God’s grace, it never will be. Amen.
[1] Phrase: John Claypool