In the Sunday Lectionary, that
three-year cycle of scripture readings a lot of us mainline churches use, the
longest bunch of readings is called Ordinary Time. It’s time that’s . . . Ordinary. That is, it's not Advent or Christmas - or
Eastertide, nor is it Pentecost. It’s
just ordinary, and it spans 34 Sunday's in two separate chunks. And last week was the 34th and final
Sunday, and as usual, I breathed a sigh of relief, because I’ve gotten mighty
tired of Ordinary Time. Every Sunday I look up the number, and it says
twenty-second Sunday in Ordinary Time.
Or thirty-first Sunday in Ordinary Time.
Or four-hundred and seventy-eighth Sunday in Ordinary Time. (OK . . . so I made that last one up.) But
you get the picture . . . it seems to drag on and on, numbing in its sameness,
wearying and gray, like the gift that keeps on giving well past its
welcome. Maybe it's just me, just some
preacher-crankiness rearing its ugly head.
Or maybe I'm just tired of preaching about Jesus' trip to Jerusalem, I
don't know. But whatever it is, I want
Ordinary time to go away.
It's not always that way, though . . .
right after Pentecost, I'm glad to be in Ordinary Time. After reading and hearing and preaching about
Jesus' death and burial and resurrection and ascension, I'm ready for a
rest. Ready to sit back and relax, and
hear stories about living. Jesus calming
the seas. David killing Goliath. The feeding of the five thousand. Stories we
grew up with. The old, old
stories.
But 'long about October, after a Summer
of ordinary weather, our late-eighties-early- nineties,
rain-as-scarce-as-hen's-teeth weather, I begin to get restless. I begin to fidget and fuss, and look forward
to the cool, to something new. And September
rolls around with its hint of fall and I know something's up. I know things are about to change, and
they've gotta be for the good, because it's been a long time, a long, dry ordinary
time and hope chokes the air like wood smoke from the season's first
fires. And while color slashes the
trees, and snowflake leaves layer the ground, I begin to believe that
deliverance is coming, deliverance has come, and that deliverance will
come again. I begin to believe in the
possibility of Christmas.
In both passages this morning, there's a
yearning, a longing for deliverance, a hope for change. In Luke, Jesus foretells his own second
coming, and he describes it in vivid detail. “The Son of Man will come in a
cloud, with power and glory,” he says and “when these things take place your
redemption draws near.” Jesus spoke of his return to earth, and whatever he
meant by it, whatever he meant by a kingdom on earth, Luke's audience took it
as comfort, as rescue from oppression.
The people were cowed, uncertain, beaten-down physically and spiritually
by the Romans. When Luke wrote,
Jerusalem had been sacked and the temple destroyed and Christians were an
outlaw sect, despised and marginalized.
Luke's readers would have been comforted by Jesus' words, and yet
longing, aching for release.
Seven hundred years before Luke,
Jeremiah witnessed a catastrophe. The
Babylonians had overrun Judah and carried its people off to captivity. As in Luke's time, the great temple on Mt. Zion
had been destroyed. The center of their
lives, the ground of their identity, their being, had been burnt out,
reduced to a blackened shell. All the
furnishings and opulent fittings had been carried away to Babylon by the destroyers. Jeremiah sat in Babylon—a captive himself—and
wrote this oracle of hope, looking forward to a time when God would cause a
righteous branch to spring up from the house of David. A time when Judah would be delivered, and
Jerusalem would live in safety.
Jeremiah yearned for the coming of a
savior, the coming of deliverance. He
predicted a King, a branch of David, a shoot of Jesse. And our Jewish brothers and sisters still
await their Messiah, and a time when Jerusalem will live in peace, and Jews
will be safe again.
But for us, Jesus is that
savior. He is the Messiah, the anointed
one, in the direct line of David. For
us, the Son of Man’s first coming brought deliverance from sin, and began our access
to the Kingdom of God. We believe that
Jeremiah spoke of that first coming, that first Christmas long ago, when wise
men journeyed and shepherds watched their flocks by night. But in Luke, Jesus speaks of a second
coming, his own, when he will arrive in might and glory, and sweep the powers
and principalities before him like so much chaff in the wind.
In our readings this morning, we put
together passages that evoke the past and the future, that point to Christ's
first coming and to his last. Two points
in time—the beginning of the coming kingdom, and the end, its fulfillment.
At Advent, we have this double vision,
this looking backward and forward in time.
We sing “O come O come Emmanuel” and “Watchman Tell us of the Night,”
and point in two directions at once, like the scarecrow in the Wizard of
Oz. We point to things past and things
future, but what about the here and now? What about the present? Do we merely remember at Advent? Do we only
re-enact an historical event, and look forward to a future hope?
________________________
In the spring of every year, along about
Easter, observant Jews celebrate Passover.
It lasts 8 days, and is bookended by Seders, elaborate feasts where
God's deliverance is celebrated and retold. And in the retelling, it's remembered and
re-called, and brought into the present.
It's made new, fresh, and immediate.
It’s like it happens all over again—like it did happen, like it’s
happening now, like it will happen again. At the Passover table, God constructs a new
reality . . . in which the past, and the present, and the future are somehow
there, all at once.
Theologians call this kind of
re-membering “anamnesis,” a Greek word for a Hebrew practice. As an event is actively remembered, actively
re-enacted, it becomes real and present, all over again. In a sense, it happens anew and is
immediately available to the participants.
Old Testament scholar Walter Brueggemann views the Psalms as engines for
anamnesis, poetry sung in daring acts of re-creation. He claims that as Psalms were sung at
worship, God used them to invoke an alternate reality. What was sung about came about, right
then and right there.
Closer to home, the Lord's Supper is
just such an act of charged remembrance.
As Presbyterians, we believe that it’s more than remembering in an
ordinary way. As we break the bread, and
pour the wine, we are drawn into the presence of Christ. As we eat his body and drink his blood, we
are nourished for the journey, fed along the way. We are made part of the body of Christ all
over again.
At Advent we are poised on the brink of
hope, but still mired in despair. We
hope, we ache for deliverance from pain and sin and all our creaturely
cares. We remember past hope—I will
cause to spring up a branch of David”—and anticipate the second coming, when
Christ will come again. But at the same
time, we are here, today, not yet delivered, yearning for his coming, hoping
for his coming, looking for his birth.
And in the bleak midwinter, when all is dark, and all is calm, Jesus
will be born in a manger.
At Advent, we're at the crossroads of
past and future. Between the depressing,
violent, excessive now and the
ghostly past. Between marching ancestors
and coming generations, unknown and yet known.
Imagine: crowding around us,
waiting with us for deliverance, for salvation, all of God's people,
right here in this room, tense and expectant, quivering with anticipation. Can you hear them? Can you feel
them? Aunts, great-aunts,
great-great-grandfathers, all God's people of times past, times present, and
times future. Breathing, sighing,
waiting. Can you feel their breath on
the back of your neck?
There are slaves here—Miriam and Moses
and Sojourner Truth. Ezekiel and Jeremiah
and Grandma Moses. Aching, yearning,
crying to be free. Victims of apartheid,
cancer, and imprisonment, sickness, poverty and addiction. All wait to be delivered by the righteous
hand of the Lord.
Others are with them—I hear them
stirring in the gloom—inner city children, malnourished and undereducated,
hopeless in the blasted tenements of Portland.
Alzheimer patients strapped in their beds, closed up in the silence of
themselves. Shooting victims, heart
attack victims, rape victims, incest victims. Folks without money, folks without
clothes. People without food or hope
from anywhere on earth, all right here with us in this room, grasping at
Advent, looking for his birth, longing for his truth. All creation is here at this moment, groaning
with anticipation for the coming of the Lord.
And now, at Advent we can see a light,
far away, flickering in the darkness.
Our companions stir—they can see it, too—a time when the lion will lie
down with the lamb. When swords will be
beaten into plowshares. When justice and
righteousness fall down like rain, and all are redeemed. We see the Sea of Reeds, parting to let the
Hebrews pass. We see the temple, rebuilt
and shining, and a rock rolled away from a hillside grave. Apostles gathered around in fear and wonderment
and joy, hands thrust into a wounded side.
We see God's final victory over death.
We see the future, taste the hope. Nelson Mandela, singing in freedom and light;
Miriam, whirling before the Lord. The
Apostle Paul, Desmond Tutu, Mother Theresa—in our vision, all have been saved,
all have been delivered, all have been redeemed. We see our loved ones, that have left us
behind, or are bound by chains of earthly limit. Beaming at us, restored, reclaimed. There's my grandfather, freed from the cancer
that killed him, and my father, stroke free and as I remember him as a little
boy. And all are redeemed, all are
whole, and all are free.
Brothers and sisters, at Advent, all
creation sighs in hope and yearning for the coming of the Lord. For God's deliverance from the powers of
evil. And as we wait and as we groan,
and as we tremble in longing, we know that when it comes, when it bursts among
us in the dead of winter, all of God's redemptive acts, all of God's
transformation, all of God's righteousness will be present, bound up in that
blinding-white act of love.
But for now, all we can do is wait, and
watch.
Come, Lord Jesus, Come.
Amen
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