Jesus invites us to turn the story around. The signs we see aren’t omens of bad things, but as signs of hope.
Jesus and the challenge of Advent
Advent 1C | Luke 21:25-36
For years I’ve tried to keep the liturgical calendar as my ordering calendar. I want to maintain the ancient pattern of the church as the way I order my life rather than the more evenly defined Gregorian calendar we all use.
The point of this is simple: to let a life of faith be the defining order of things.
Friends, this is hard!
We all have monthly obligations, not to mention seasonal ones. We all have no fewer than three New Years to deal with every year: The Gregorian calendar, the Liturgical calendar, and the school calendar. So we’re all celebrating different years; each starting at different times: August, November, and January.
And yet I try. I always fail at it. I’m like Charlie Brown with a football–maybe this time will be different.
The Liturgical Calendar
For us, the liturgical calendar begins four Sundays before December 25th. Which probably sounds like a weird way to tell time. At least if consistency to the time as an orderly construct is your priority. Our priority is consistency to the event. So, we obviously have a different motivation.
The funny thing is that the first Sunday in Advent regularly falls outside of December and has a bad habit of landing on Thanksgiving weekend. Which would be great for new year’s celebrations with family but pretty annoying for the church when half the people are out of town (or sleeping off Black Friday).
This all says much more about American culture, however, than the church.
Anticipation
What we deal with in Advent is actually the sort of stuff we do at the beginning of any year: preparation and anticipation of what is to come. We might think of it like a professor going over the syllabus on the first day of class. She can’t expect that class to have done the reading she has yet to assign, right?
Of course, this also, for most of us, isn’t our first time through this class. We know what to expect. We’ve even done the readings before! And yet, that same sense of anticipation remains.
We probably aren’t learning something for the first time. But we are reengaging with an experience in order to remember it. So in this way, Advent is a little like practice. We are rehearsing a piece of music we already know.
The rest of the calendar is just as confusing.
Some of it is guided by particular days: Christmas is always December 25th: but not all of the calendar is fixed: Easter moves each year.
Because Christmas Day is set, the Christmas season is set: twelve days. Therefore Epiphany is set on January 6. We then move into Ordinary Time known as The Season After Epiphany. Twentieth Century philosophers might be compelled to call it “Postepiphany”.
Here is where things get crazy.
Easter is tied to the lunar calendar; which is kind of bonkers. Here is how we figure out Easter according to the Book of Common Prayer:
“Easter Day is always the first Sunday after the full moon that falls on or after March 21. It cannot occur before March 22 or after April 25.”
Our Orthodox friends set Easter differently, but like ours, it moves each year. From the setting of Easter, we then go back to set up Lent a set number of days. And then forward a set number of days so that Lent’s forty days and Easter’s fifty days take up our entire spring.
Easter then concludes with Pentecost. After that, we get the extended Ordinary Time of the summer and fall as the Season after Pentecost.
Rather than giving us a regimented life that is marked with months, we are invited into church seasons which, in the northern hemisphere, flow naturally with our environment, inviting us into times of preparation and celebration.
An Agnostic Rhythm
When we’re tied to the patterns we’ve established for our lives: not just weekly church attendance, but more frequently the monthly meetings at Rotary or to play bridge: we are setting a different kind of rhythm. One that is agnostic toward the season outside.
This is a lot like the arguments people make about Daylight Saving Time: that we are speaking to preference based on how we are presently living our lives as individuals and not how people are living in their world.
Another version of this is our ability to buy strawberries and avocados year-round in Indiana: a concept that is not only alien to human history, but one that dislocates us from our very environment.
And just like my attempt to live my life differently by following a different calendar, buying local or seasonal foods doesn’t change our dislocation.
We are all part of a project that we can feel and taste and smell and see and hear happening all around us. A project that is about us and for us and with us and within us. And it is happening.
God’s work in the world is going on now.
It’s under our feet and in the air we breathe. It’s in the work we do and in the work our neighbors do. It is happening.
But nothing about living in this culture encourages us to see it. Nothing. Our ways as a people are focused on what sells rather than what serves; what excites rather than what encourages; what we receive rather than what we share between us.
And we aren’t taught to look for God in our midst because we say God is up there: an it inwhich we are to believe.
Of course, this culture is derived from Christendom: with Christianity as the dominate religious force. The Gregorian Calendar was made by a Christian leader who oversaw the dominance of Christianity in his times.
And we have our own struggles with traditions and patterns which blend the world as we know it with the one we know as God’s dream as revealed in scripture, tradition, and reason. It can be hard to tell if we’re acting in faith to God or our culture.
This invitation to see the signs of the kin-dom as Jesus describes in the gospel keeps running into the reality that faithful people built the world the way it is. They thought they were serving God. And we can see the ways it presently doesn’t.
But…rather than see that as a problem, we might see it as inherently obvious.
Becoming Ancestors
What is more true than the fact that we have the same challenges our ancestors had? That our need to shape the world to better make sense of it and align it with God’s desire will inevitably lead to changes our children and children’s children will have to fix?
As much as we are the disciples being shown the recalcitrance of the Pharisees, are we also not those same Pharisees who need to awaken from our slumber?
Thank goodness we can be both!
Signs As Hope
We might be tempted to focus on the ominous sense of Jesus’s warning in this part of Luke (21:25-36), but he is speaking to us in hope. That we may see the signs in our time as signs of hope.
Our hope is not in the preservation of the work of our ancestors, but in the ongoing dream God has for humanity.
So for us to be participants in that dream, we must understand what has come before and witness what is coming next. It takes a willingness to appreciate the good in our past and the good that is to come while letting go of what in our past no longer serves us. We must make room for what God is doing for us and for those who come after us.
This is the intersection of God’s work and our work.
Beginning with hope
As we usher in a new year in the church, we begin with a new/familiar beginning: Advent. A season full of traditions for sure. But traditions that just flow. We make gifts and bake cookies; decorate and celebrate with those whom we love. And we remember and honor those in our lives now and in our past. It is a deep time which arouses rich emotions.
But that autopilot of familiarity and an orientation toward generosity give us a once-a-year opportunity to see the signs of God’s work in the world because we are more open to them.
These traditions, like Advent itself, tumble out of their box right as the nights get their longest and our world is darkest. And it is in this time when we are invited to look for the hope of Christ. Not in those sunny summer days by the lake, but in the bleak midwinter. Not when hope is most abundant, but when it is most needed.
And Jesus promises this is when we’ll find it. Not in blindly waiting, but in signs that point to a future time, a place. Here, among us.
May your days be full, not only of the love you crave, but the signs of hope to come.