First Sunday of Advent November 29th, 2009

First Sunday of Advent
November 29th, 2009

Ah the first Sunday of Advent, the first day of the church’s new year. There’s no easing into it== as usual the Gospel is designed to sweep away the cobwebs, to shake us up!
Jesus and his disciples are at the temple. Like good tourists, the disciples are ooing and ahing over the beauties of the temple. They’re almost worshiping the temple building, assuming its solid walls will last forever.
But Jesus squelches their naïve enthusiasm with a scorching prediction that the walls of the temple will tumble to the ground and chaos take over the world.
The disciples look around them, even reach out and touch for reassurance the massive stones of the walls of the temple. But as Jesus speaks fear rises in them, and maybe one or two imagined they could feel a slight trembling in the stone.
Really? Even these stones will crumble? This magnificent temple, the secure center of the entire Jewish culture? But how? But why? Yes, it isn’t perfect: there is corruption, the rich get richer and the poor get poorer, yes, there is armed revolt and a brutal occupation. But that’s just the way it is—isn’t it?”

Like the disciples, it’s hard for us to stand back a bit and look objectively at the world we live in.
It’s a good life we live, by and large. It happens that all of us here live somewhere—maybe not where we would choose, but we are sheltered. We have enough to eat.
But we just have to look around us—out into the campgrounds or cars parked in the shadows of lots around Plymouth, and we’ll find people living in tents or vehicles. The demand on our local food pantries right now is intense—and many of the people who receive that food are subsisting on it.
Our neighbors, some of them—some of us—have to choose each month between paying for rent/mortgage, food, and medicine. Hospital bills can force even people working one or two jobs into bankruptcy. And speaking of jobs how many people still cannot find even a part time job to make ends meet?
And that’s here, in small town New Hampshire. Add to this, in other regions of the country, issues of racism and immigration, and we have to admit that even in this great nation people are suffering from problems not of their own making.
But that’s just the way it is for some people in America, isn’t it?

And then there’s the world beyond our world.
In Mabvuku a bag of “mealie meal” can literally mean the difference between life and death. There not enough cash for a school uniform means no school, no education, no way out of the slum. There a violent political system makes political protest life-threatening.
But that’s just the way it is in Zimbabwe—isn’t it?

What is Jesus doing in this gospel? What is his point—just to scare his disciples? Or discourage or depress them?
No—his point is this: that none of this is the way it has to be—in Israel in the first century, in Zimbabwe and in the United States right now. It just doesn’t have to be this way.
Here’s Jesus’ good news: no matter how permanent, how entrenched, how unyielding are the systems of this world, they are not the ultimate reality.
They will all collapse. The only thing in human history that remains firm and unchanging is God’s promise to be with us. The promise that God will judge the structures of this world. That ultimately God will move the world in the direction of justice and mercy. That God, that God!, will have the last word.
“Don’t give up in despair,” Jesus is saying to us this first Sunday of Advent, “Don’t give up in despair at the mess humans have made of this amazing world. Stand up and raise your heads, because your redemption is drawing near.”

Let’s try something, a brief meditation to begin our Advent:
Visualize something that particularly bothers you about the way the world is right now—politically, ecologically, morally. Don’t focus on something in yourself—look outward at the wider world in which we live.
Imagine those circumstances, that structure, of injustice and cruelty cracking, collapsing, going out of focus—whatever way you can best visualize it weakening and disappearing.
Imagine then the hand of God reaching down and recreating that aspect of the world. Tenderly, creatively.
Imagine as clearly and concretely as you can: the new and fresh way God has recreated the world.
See yourself helping, tending the new thing God has made.

Today’s Advent gospel, even though it intends to shake us up, leaves us with a powerful image of hope: “Look at the fig tree,” Jesus says,”tf ytand all the trees; as soon as they sprout leaves you can see for yourselves and know that summer is already near.”
The people of the Middle East love figs for their sweetness, of course. But they also believe that figs have the power to heal.
Such a surprising and lovely image, isn’t it?—in the midst of change, in the midst of chaos, suddenly appears a fig tree about to bloom.
A sweet image—like God’s promise through the ages that the world doesn’t have to be this way, that the world, tiny bit by tiny bit, tiny piece by tiny piece, can be healed.