I want to wish you all a very happy new year! I can already anticipate your response: “Thank you for the greeting, Pastor. It was awfully polite. But I’m afraid you’re a little too early. We don’t mark the new year for another month yet.”
But in fact it is a new year in the church calendar. Today we celebrate the First Sunday of Advent, which is the first day of the new liturgical year.
Whichever of the two dates you prefer, to whichever of them you accord the greater significance, I think we can all agree that they share a common theme. We refer here to the theme of hope.
We ring in the new year with noisemakers and party hats, because the new year holds potential. How will it turn out? Will it be better than last year? That at least is our hope. The good things that we did not attain, receive or experience in the year that has passed, we hope to attain, receive, or experience in the year that is still to come. And why not? Anything is possible, right?
Just as it is in the new secular year, so it is in the new church year. Only the object of our hope is Christ. Christ has indeed come, but he is still to come.
And this is why our Gospel lesson calls us to keep awake. Indeed, the Apostle Paul, in another classic Advent passage, tells the faithful at Rome that the hour has come for them to awake from their sleep, because our salvation is nearer now than when we first believed (Rom. 13:11).
And our Gospel lesson depicts this salvation in vivid apocalyptic imagery: “You will see the Son of Man coming in clouds with great power and glory. Then he will send out the angels, and gather his elect from the four winds, from the ends of the earth to the ends of heaven” (Mark 13:26-27).
Very dramatic. But what does this all have to do with Christmas? Is not the purpose of Advent to help us prepare to welcome anew the Christ child into our lives? Are we not to focus once again on the babe in manger, under the loving gaze of Mary his mother, together with her husband Joseph, who are later to be accompanied by the shepherds and the angels?
And if that’s so, then why all this unsettling language about quaking mountains, a failing sun and moon, and falling stars? There seems to be an incongruity here.
Yes, but please don’t miss what the Gospel wants to impress on us today: The nativity is only meaningful if it includes the hope of the future coming of Christ and the consummation of all things.
The First Sunday of Advent thus prepares us to see babe in the manger through a set of lenses that allows us to see him at the same time as the Son of Man returning in the power and glory of the divine majesty.
To use another illustration, Advent places in our hand one of those cards whose images are able to change or move as we turn it, allowing us to view it from different angles. These cards are a product of lenticular printing technology, which I only recently learned.
The point is that we always regard the babe in the manger as the one he will become and ultimately is, which will be manifest to all in a time still to come, on a day or hour that no one knows, neither the angels in heaven, nor the Son, but only the Father (Mark 13:32).
How then are we to live in the here and now, in an era that the theologians have called the time between the times?
Put otherwise, what is the shape of Christian hope to which Advent calls us?
Jesus himself invokes an image that perhaps is more familiar to the people of the holy land than it is to us, but it may help us. He speaks of a fig tree that is budding with leaves.
Author Chelsea Harmon grows fig trees. According to her, they sprout and grow their leaves for an interminably long time compared to when their fruit is actually ripe to pick. She writes that she enjoys the beauty of the leaves, but when the time is near for the figs to appear, she begins eagerly looking through the leaves for them. Where she lives, one has to beat the racoons to the ripe ones.
When the fig tree start to sprout its leaves, we know that good things are on the way—Jesus is near, at the very gates. This excites and fills those with hope who are waiting for him, but the time between the first appearance of the leaves and the ripening of the figs is long.
Thus the image teaches us that hope involves the willingness to wait. This is one of the great challenges in life. It sometimes includes the acceptance of darkness, sometimes in defiance.
“I know that the odds are against me, but I refuse to give up hope. I will wait defiantly for the outcome for which I hope.”
To wait, then, means the ability to handle hopelessness. It confronts hopelessness, acknowledges it, grants to it its rights and its proper domain, but does not yield to its assaults (William F. Lynch). Bruised and battered as it may be, hope keeps reality open and insists that not all the facts are in.
When the people of Israel were exiled to Babylon, they lost everything. When they returned from exile to their own land, they had high hopes. But then they saw Jerusalem and the temple. They were a heap of ruins. Their hopes were dashed; they were on the verge of despair (Mark A. Villano).
They didn’t know if they could move forward into a future that looked bleak. They didn’t know if they had the strength.
The prophet Isaiah in our first lesson helped them through that dark moment. He did this first by giving voice to their anguish: “We have all become like one who is unclean, and all our righteous deeds are like a filthy cloth. We all fade like a leaf, and our iniquities, like the wind, take us away.”
Then he helped them remember: Yes, they are sinners. Yes, they are finite. They can’t do it on their own (Mark A. Villano). But their God hasn’t given up on them. He is their Father; he is their Redeemer, their Lord. In the here and now they are a lump of clay. But they are clay in the potter’s hands (Mark A. Villano). He will mold them into something new. For he is a God who works for those who wait for him, even in the harshest, most unpromising circumstances.
If the present moment is hard, or even hopeless, we don’t have to yield to despair. We don’t have to escape from it through addictive substances and behaviors, which, in effect, is really the same thing.
We can find courage to enter into the pain, and stay there long enough to learn from what it has to teach us. We can find courage to open ourselves to the future, try new things, adopt new patterns, not because the future is in our hands, but because it is in God’s hands.
In this connection, we are reminded of the words of the Psalmist: “But I trust in you, O Lord. I say, ‘You are my God. My times are in your hands,’” (31:14-15).
To hope in the future, in God’s future, like this, is to take responsibility for the present, to accept responsibility for ourselves and how we live (Mark A. Villano).
Jesus makes this point loud and clear in the second little parable he tells his disciples in our Gospel lesson. There a man goes on a journey. Leaving home, he puts his servants in charge, each with his work, including that of the doorkeeper, whom he commands to keep watch.
Did you catch that? Each one of the servants is to be occupied with his respective task until the return of his master. They are to go to work!
Note that they are not to speculate about when the owner will return. Nor are they to worry about what his return will mean for them when he finally does come home. They have only to concentrate on the tasks that he has set for them.
Granted, they are not to do their tasks mindlessly; they must carry them out with a certain awareness. That is, they are always to be alert, because they do not know when the owner of the estate will come home.
To be alert comes from a place of quiet expectancy. And it is necessary. Indeed, without this expectancy, how would they find the motivation to continue in their tasks, to be diligent at what they have been assigned to do?
“Whatever you do, work at it with all your heart, as working for the Lord,… because you know that you will receive an inheritance from the Lord as your reward. It is the Lord Christ you are serving,” as the Apostle Paul tells the faithful at Colosse (3:23-24).
All this suggests to us that Advent waiting is active waiting. Jesus is telling us again: “Keep alert!” That is how we’re supposed to wait.
It’s as if Jesus is saying to us: “While you wait, be about the things that I taught you. Love one another. Care for one another. Be responsive to one another’s needs. Be my witnesses wherever you go. Be peacemakers and reconcilers and healers. Don’t sleepwalk through the life I have given you. Instead, attend diligently to what I have called you to do. For it all points in the present to what I will perfect in the future when I return (Mark A. Villano).
Is it possible to live a meaningful life apart from the light of this promise? Is it possible to live without this hope?
Our world has a rather strange attitude towards hope. Most of the time it seems to exist in a “no-man’s land” between hope and hopelessness. On the one hand, it makes fun of people who hope, especially people who put their hope in the salvation that Christ promises to bring. On the other hand, it medicates or institutionalizes people who give up on hope.
Neither of these is acceptable. In fact, they are life-negating, and in the last analysis destructive. For the truth is that humanity cannot live without hope, at least not live well.
Without hope, we live in panic fear of the end. We who dismiss hope in the salvation that Christ promises to bring, crowd as much as we can into the limited span of this earthly life. We must live at a frenzied pace. YOLO. “You only live once.” “Life is short. Enjoy the ride.” While the believers may wait calmly in hope, committing their future into God’s hands, living at a measured and deliberate pace, the hopeless must hurry. The gate is about to close. Then it is all over—forever.
Or without hope, we live over a yawning abyss of nothingness. If we are no longer destined for life with God, then our personal existence has no ultimate foundations. The only real alternative to a life destined to be with God is that which the Apostle Paul put forward: “Let us eat and drink, for tomorrow we die.”
How many in our world today fit into either or both of these two categories? And yet it is all so unnecessary. For Christ has come. And he is still to come. Let us, for our part, live in the light of this promise. Let us live in this hope.
Paying heed to the Lord’s warning and carrying out the responsibilities that he has entrusted to us.
And let us always be attentive to opportunities to remind one another by our words and behavior of the Lord’s appearing. This, after all, is what Advent is all about. But let us always be sure we do so with a quiet expectancy, with a peace that comes from trusting that the Father has our future in his good and powerful hands.
Then we will be models of calm and stability in anxious and unstable times.
So come, let us enter into the Advent season as the hopeful and confident people that God has called us to be. Amen.