Transcript
Jesus said, “Now when these things begin to take place, look up and raise your heads, because your redemption is drawing near.” [Luke 21. 28] May I speak in the name of God, Father, Son, and Holy Spirit. Amen.
I know someone who, back in the late sixties, was a 10-year old boy, and his family had back then a big champagne Rambler station wagon with the rear-facing back seat. He was a new student at an elementary school in New Mexico, and apparently he hadn’t paid sufficient respect to some of the bullies in power. He had offended them enough to earn some rough justice in the open air. They decided a playground beating was in order. They told him it was coming the next day. He didn’t know what to do. Being a new kid, he walked home from school on his own, but that evening he decided to ask his father for a ride home the next afternoon.
The next day at school, boys he didn’t know were looking at him and pounding their fists into their hands. When the last class ended, he walked casually across the playground, stuck his chest out, and pretended his heart wasn’t pounding beneath it. “There he is,” he heard a boy holler, and the chase was on. He ran to the gate but it was an ambush: there was another group there waiting for him. They cornered him against the fence and moved in—as the Romans would put it in Jesus’ day—to ‘keep the peace’.
Just then, he looked up and behold, he saw his redemption drawing near. Half a block away was the big champagne Rambler coming down the street.
What is Advent? Jesus’ words today give us a point of departure. They are the latter part of a larger discourse. Their immediate context was Jerusalem occupied by the Romans. Many of the resident Jews were refusing to kowtow to Caesar; they resented Gentile invaders and their pagan religions. Things were reaching the boiling point, and were ready to spill over into a bloody and disastrous rebellion.
Jesus thought that the fervor for revolution was madness. Israel in Jesus’ day was rushing toward the brink of an existential cliff. Standing up to the power of Rome would be suicide. The Romans would make an old-fashioned playground beating of it. It would be rough justice in the open air. (For more about what that looked like, be here on the Sunday of the Passion / Palm Sunday, or on Good Friday.)
Jesus could see it coming, and he wept over Jerusalem, saying, “Would that even today you knew the things that make for peace! But now they are hid from your eyes. For the days shall come upon you when your enemies will ... surround you and hem you in on every side, and dash you to the ground, you and your children within you.” [Luke 19. 41- 43] Things were going to go from bad to worse, but Jesus said that then — when it seemed like the sun and moon and stars were collapsing — we should look up and raise our heads to behold our redemption drawing near.
Advent is waiting to celebrate the first coming of Jesus, but it’s only later in December that we start to focus on that. And Advent is looking for Jesus to show up today, into the humdrum of your life, by the power of the Spirit. The early half of Advent is focused on Jesus coming again, on what Johnny Cash is singing about in his song *The Man Comes Around.* Advent is about wanting the blessed One to come again when we’re all of us really out of school, when crowned by our tears and laughter he comes in his glorious majesty to judge both the living and the dead. Advent then as now is looking up the street, hoping to see the big champagne Rambler.
Years ago an 10-year old boy had an army of grade school boys chasing after him, and that experience plays itself out on a larger scale in our adult lives. You have your own armies to face. For you it may be a dogging cynicism, perhaps an anxiety or disappointment you can’t outrun; it may be the advancing years of mortality gaining on you or a dread illness pinning you against a fence, threatening; it may be the expectations of other people chasing after you, and the pressure you feel to stay ahead. At some point your only hope is to look for God to come help you.
Let’s enter the mysteries of Advent with two prayers. The first is today’s Collect, appointed for praying on the first Sunday of Advent and indeed
it’s expected that we would pray that prayer on every day of Advent right up to Christmas Eve, so I encourage you to do so. “Almighty God, give us grace that we may cast away the works of darkness, and put upon us the armor of light, now in the time of this mortal life in which thy Son Jesus Christ came to visit us in great humility; that in the last day, when he shall come again in his glorious Majesty, to judge both the quick and the dead, we may rise to the life immortal; through him who lives and reigns with you and the Holy Spirit, one God, now and for ever. Amen.” The operative word in that prayer is now. Give us grace that we may cast away the works of darkness, and put upon us the armor of light, now. This prayer was composed in 1549 for the first Book of Common Prayer by that master of English prose, Thomas Cranmer, Archbishop of Canterbury.
The author of the second prayer I don’t know, and I don’t think anybody else does, either. It began floating around the anglosphere in my lifetime, and for decades I’ve been praying it throughout Advent and Christmastide. You’ll find it printed in this morning’s Wrapper. I hope you’ll cut it out and put it and today’s collect up on your refrigerators. Let’s ‘do’ Advent together by saying these prayers every day. Here’s the second one. “O Blessed Lord Jesus, our choicest gift, our dearest guest; Let not our souls be busy inns that have no room for you and yours, but quiet homes of prayer and praise, where you may find the best company, where needful cares of life are wisely ordered and put away, and where wide, sweet spaces are kept for you. So when you come again, O Blessed One, may you find all things ready, and your servants waiting for no new master, but for one long loved and known. Even so, come, Lord Jesus.” In the name of the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit. Amen.
