First Sunday of Advent
November 29, 2009
Sermon by Rev. Dr. Marcus Pera
The Holy Gospel according to St. Luke. (Luke 21:25‑36
[Jesus said:] “There
will be signs in the sun, the moon, and the stars, and on the 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, for the powers of the heavens will be
shaken. Then they will see the ‘Son of
Man coming in a cloud’ with power and great glory. Now, when these things begin to take place,
stand up and raise your heads, because your redemption is drawing near.”
Then he told them a
parable: “Look at the fig tree and all
the trees; as soon as they sprout leaves you can see for yourselves and know
that summer is already near. So also,
when you see these things taking place, you know that the
“Be on guard so that
your hearts are not weighed down with dissipation and drunkenness and the
worries of this life, and that day does not catch you unexpectedly, like a
trap. For it will come upon all who live
on the face of the whole earth. Be alert
at all times, praying that you may have the strength to escape all these things
that will take place, and to stand before the Son of Man.”
The Gospel of our Lord.
In the name of Jesus, sisters and brothers, grace,
mercy, and peace be unto you. Amen.
If I would have placed a line or a sentence into the
bulletin this morning that would be the theme of this sermon, I probably would
have written it as saying, “Walking undaunted into Advent.” “Walking undaunted into Advent.” And by that I mean walking in with a
confidence, with a self-security and a self-assuredness, knowing who you are
and where you are going. By that, I
don’t mean conceit. I don’t mean a kind
of conceit that thinks only of one’s self, and thinks only that they are the
ones that are great. No, this confidence
is built on the promises of God. There
is a phrase that is somewhat similar in that Gospel reading for today, and that
was the phrase, “Look up.” And while it
probably, first of all, means looking up seeing your God coming, I would like
to think of it also as looking up in the sense of holding your head high,
walking into Advent with confidence; again, being secure in self and assured in
self, based upon these promises of God.
This is the First Sunday in Advent, the beginning of a
new church year. It’s like any beginning
of a new year. The beginning is also a
time for new opportunities, a time for new life. It’s the beginning of a new year, all of
these Sundays after Pentecost, and perhaps there’s a little bit of fatigue,
perhaps even a little bit of fatigue in our own spirituality. Here we come again in this opportunity for a
new beginning. And we want to walk into
this season of Advent once again with boldness, with a bold confidence and
assuredness, again based on the promises of God.
Let me say a few more words about this season of
Advent. First of all, it is a season
that actually developed a little bit later in the church calendar or church
year. It was probably about the Sixth
Century. And it was interesting because
it had a very close parallel to Lent and the season of Lent. While there was the penitential nature of
Lent, and the fasting that was to take place for 40 days, people getting ready
for baptism into the church on Holy Saturday evening, and also a worthy
celebration of the crucifixion and resurrection of Jesus Christ. It was this kind of a penitential
season.
The season of Advent emerged then with somewhat of a
parallel, also having a penitential character to it, in preparation for a
readiness of the celebration of the coming of our Lord. And so the colors change, about at the time
of the liturgical renewal in the ‘70s, where there was some refinement that is
always happening in terms of the people of God in their worship. And the color was switched from purple, as it
is and continues in Lent, to that of blue.
And the flavor or theme of a blue color is that of hope. So our primary concentration is that of
hope. That blue is also reflected,
obviously, in the parament colors that are on the altar. And also you will see me put on a chasuble,
which is the Eucharistic vestment in celebration of the Lord’s Supper. That will be blue as well this morning, as
well as my preaching stole, which is blue.
We look at that kind of concentration of that theme of hope.
The other characteristic of Advent is in the word itself—Advent. And “advent” means coming, and so we look for
the coming of Jesus. And that is where
it gets also a little bit muddy maybe because we ask ourselves, which coming
and who’s coming—the coming of Jesus, his first coming to our earth, as a birth in
Bethlehem? Is it his coming again in the
clouds, as we confess in the Creed, “come to judge the living and the dead?” Is
it his coming once again into our hearts and lives this day and this year as we
prepare again for his coming at Christmas time?
The answer is probably yes to all of these. It’s probably all of these. It is that anticipation of his coming. And a phrase or a metaphor that sometimes is
used is “pregnancy.” There is a period
of wait that is there. And that’s the
third characteristic I would point to today, that of waiting.
Dietrich Bonhoeffer, a Lutheran saint, was a person who
used a comparison by saying that Advent was kind of like being in jail, which
he was at that time for his part in participating in a plot to kill
Hitler. He was in jail. He said it is like waiting. There is nothing you can do to open the door
or open the window. You have to wait for
that to come in from the outside. But it
wasn’t during this period that Bonhoeffer did passive waiting. He did active waiting. And he also mentions in that reference from
jail—and his biographer mentions this—that on the very first day of Advent
Bonhoeffer had an Advent wreath placed right outside his cell, pointing to the
hope that resides again within this season.
So all of these things are involved. We’re in an in-between time, we’re in an
already but not yet, we’re in a waiting but we’re not passively waiting. And we’re walking ever farther into a very
bold confidence of celebrating and experiencing this season again this year.
As I mentioned now several times, we walk into Advent
with a boldness, because it is based on promises of God. You hear that lesson and you almost say, “My,
gosh!” And you almost get a little bit
scared; the Son of Man is coming and is going to be judging the earth. There is promise that is in that lesson in
several places. And the first one that
says that when you would see all these things happening on earth, when in your
own life you experience these many different places and phases of darkness, the
promise is that your redemption is drawing near. And that word “redemption” is used in the
Gospel of Luke in a kind of way that says it is a redeeming, usually used in
connection slaves. It’s bringing people
in slavery back into and apart from their enslavement once again. This is a very youthful kind of either
metaphor or word that is there for us as well; people who are born into and
still find ourselves in all of these aspects of enslavement, enslavement to
different forces and different presences.
And yet what is true here is that we are bought back
from that; we are freed from that enslavement, to be what God intended us in
the first place to be. And God made his
first creation, and that is what we experience.
And it’s a promise that we are confident in, because, even though it
hasn’t fully happened to us yet, we have experienced that being bought back and
freed from our enslavement in our baptism.
And so we walk with that confidence, knowing that the fulfillment of
that baptismal covenant will be ours as well.
The second promise that is in that lesson is a little
bit of a similar word, and it says again, when all these things are happening,
and also when this fig tree gets some bloom on it, you know once again that
that new life is coming, spring is coming.
That is a very positive kind of imagery for us to hang onto. And then the writer says, Luke says, “The
kingdom is coming near.” Notice, he switches
there to say, “The kingdom is coming near.”
William Willimon, who was a chaplain at Duke University—now a bishop in
the Methodist church, a very fine writer and preacher—said in one of
his articles that people were waiting around for Jesus to come any time
now. And Luke was written quite a bit
later, more at the time of the turn of the century, and because of that, people
were waiting. And he calculated, by the
obvious days of the year, 29 thousand days already, and Jesus had yet not
come. 29 thousand days. And can you imagine if we would pile up and
calculate those days for us today. That
doesn’t mean that that coming of Jesus isn’t going to happen. But Luke shifted the imagery to the coming of
the kingdom, the kingdom which is God’s rule and God’s reign. And once again that kingdom has already
broken into our existence again through the sacrament of baptism for us, where
we have become sons and daughters of the kingdom. We are experiencing God’s rule and
reign.
But it is still not yet. It is still coming in its completion. And because of that promise, though, we walk
into this season of Advent with confidence.
We walk into it with confidence doing another thing in the meantime, not
just waiting passively, but we do walk into it to be faithful to our calling
and to our mission, and to our new life as members of the kingdom, and as
people who anticipate and await his coming and have been redeemed by him.
Now we turn quickly to the Second Lesson, which is
Paul’s letter to the Thessalonians. That
was written very early, probably in the forties A.D. And there, people again had this anticipation
of Christ imminent return. And Paul had
started this congregation very early, and he was so close to them, it’s so
obvious in these opening words; he had such an attachment to and love for them;
and he really is concerned about how they’re doing. And they didn’t have e‑mail or Internet
in those days. He didn’t get a word back
very easily. So he finally sent Timothy
to see how they were making it, how they had were doing. And the report comes back that, yes, they are
doing very well. And then Paul writes
this introduction, and he says three very wonderful things. He says, first of all, thank God. He thanks God for their faithfulness and their
life in Christ. And the second thing he
says is that he also prays that they would continue to love one another, as
they have been doing. And the third
thing he says then is to be faithful in their calling and in their
ministry. What an interesting and
beautiful kind of message and prayer to hear also, as we are people who walk
into Advent and as we await, not just his coming in that way but as we walk
into this transition of this congregation and await as well.
I would thank God also for you all. I have been around now long enough to see the
spirit that is here and the faithfulness that is here. I also would pray that you would continue to
love one another as you exemplify, because it is in this love that other people
know that we are sons and daughters of God.
And I would also pray that you would be faithful to the sense of mission
that you have and we have by attempting to go through processes. I understand it anew, what it is that God is
calling us to be and to become.
I want to make a quick comparison between the
The
What is also the church?
The church is also that group of people that continues to see God
working out there and points to it happening.
It’s the kind of evangelism that we do.
We say, “Hey, there’s peace happening over there,” and we say, “It’s the
And then, thirdly, we are also people who expect to live
that kingdom, that kingdom which has already broken in and is now yet not in
its fullness. We are called to be a part
then of God’s mission. And our calling
is to look anew always at what God is doing here, in us, in this community, in
our bigger community; what God is doing and how can we join God in being a part
of that mission and being faithful to it.
The power and strength for that comes from our God, who
has come and continues to come into our hearts and lives. And while God is out there in all these
different ways, we know the promise that God is and shows up in a particular
way, and that is in the Holy Eucharist itself.
Here God is present with God’s rule and reign. Here God is present with his redemption and
power once again. But here God is also
present with his promise, because this is a foretaste of the feast that is to
come, where the fullness of the
And so we walk into Advent, and we walk in boldly, and
we walk in committed to being faithful to the mission God has given us. So we pray the prayer of Advent once again
this day:
“Stir up your power, Lord Jesus, and come.
By your merciful protection alert us
to the threatening dangers of our sin,
and redeem us for your life of justice,
for you live and reign
with the Father and the Holy Spirit,
one God, now and forever.”
Amen.