Advent Lutheran Church

"Live ready! (Advent I)"

            Grace and peace to you from God the Creator and the Lord Jesus.  Amen.

There is probably no season in the church year that is more completely out of sync with our culture than the season that we begin this morning, the season of Advent.  In our culture, we’re focused on Christmas, family get-togethers, parties, presents (only 27 more shopping days left!).  But the Church offers an entirely different emphasis.  In the Church, and especially on this first Sunday in Advent, we concentrate not so much on the birth of Jesus, the infant of Bethlehem, but on the return of Jesus at the end of time as the judge of humanity, the judge of you and me. 

Every year, on the first Sunday in Advent, we consider a Gospel story that seems designed to scare us out of our wits.  Appropriately enough, Jesus and his friends are in church, in the temple in Jerusalem, when he begins to tell them about Judgment Day.  It will be a day like no one has ever experienced, Jesus tells them.  The sun and the moon will fail to give off any light; the stars will tumble from the sky; the power of heaven will be shaken; there will be a massive, piercing trumpet blast; and the Son of Man will suddenly appear with all of the angels of God.  Time for Judgment Day.

The disciples’ big question, of course, is When?  The end of the world?  Judgment Day?  It would be nice to have a little notice, a little warning, a little time to prepare.  Nothing doing, Jesus tells them; no one knows when it will happen – not the angels, not me; only the Father in heaven knows, and he’s not saying.

We don’t know when it will be, Jesus tells them, but we do know what it will be like.  We saw a preview of it generations ago, back in Noah’s day.  Back then, people were going about their normal, everyday routines; there was nothing out of the ordinary.  And then the flood came and ended life as everyone knew it.  It will be like that, Jesus says; complete surprise, no warning.  Two men will be working side by side in the field; one will be taken, the other will be left behind.  Two women will be working side by side at the grinding wheel; one will vanish, the other will remain.  There will be no warning, no time to prepare, Jesus says, so be ready; live prepared lives.

There are some Christians who love this passage because they use it to support their belief in something called the rapture.  It’s the belief that one day the chosen people of God will be whisked up into heaven, into God’s glory; and the “unchosen” people will be left behind to face God’s wrath.  In fact, the authors of the Left Behind series of novels played on the notion that the righteous people will be spirited up to heaven and the unrighteous will be left to face the fire of damnation.  The Bible, however, is much less clear than the writers of those novels; there are indeed some passages in Scripture that indicate that the people who are “taken” are the righteous people who will be taken into heaven, but there are other passage that suggest just the opposite – that those who are taken will be tossed into the fires of destruction.

In the end, Jesus says, we are to leave the details completely up to God and instead concern ourselves with the point that he is making, which is that we are to live prepared lives, that we are to be ready.

I was channel surfing the radio one morning when I landed on a religious station here in the metro.  The program host was talking about judgment, and he said that whenever we pray the Lord’s Prayer and get to the petition that says Thy Kingdom Come, we should be careful.  We should be careful because when we pray for God’s kingdom to come, we are inviting God’s judgment down on ourselves, so we should make ourselves ready for it by living a life of personal purity and goodness so that we have our credentials in order when that judgment comes.

That radio host failed to mention that, as pure and good as we try to make ourselves, we are always in need of God’s grace and mercy and forgiveness.  But his sense of urgency in being ready was refreshing and right on target.  It’s that same sense of urgency that we hear in our second lesson this morning, from Paul’s letter to the Romans.  That letter was written no more than 17 years after the Resurrection of Christ, so Jesus’ words and actions would have been very fresh in their memories, very vital.  And they believed that Jesus would indeed come again soon, literally soon, so there was no time to waste, no time for secondary concerns; the night is gone and the day is near, so get your spiritual house in order – be ready!

The question for Christians of any generation is How?  The Department of Homeland Security just decommissioned the multicolored warning system, but the idea was useful: We can’t live constantly on Red Alert!  We’re not built to live at that level of intensity.  So how do we live prepared lives? 

To see God’s answer, we need a wide-angle lens on Scripture.  We need to pull back a bit from this isolated passage to see that, later in this same conversation that Jesus is having with his disciples, he provides the answer.  There is a standard by which all humanity will be judged, Jesus says, and here it is: I was hungry, and you gave me something to eat; I was thirsty, and you gave me something to drink; I was sick and in prison and naked and alone, and you took care of me.  Might not have looked like me, but make no mistake: that was me.

Compassion.  That’s the standard of judgment for humanity; a patient, consistent life of compassion.  Compassion and judgment belong together.  The trick, of course, is keeping them together.  Religious conservatives like to talk about judgment, but they tend to separate it from any consideration of God’s call to compassion, a call that resounds loudly throughout Scripture.  God sends us out into the world to not only announce that God has certain expectations of us but also to do his work with our hands, and his work clearly is on behalf of the poor. 

Religious liberals are no better.  They like to talk about social action, but shy away from talk about judgment, especially when it comes to personal sin.  But as the Bible testifies and as we affirm in our creeds, Jesus will come again “to judge the living and the dead.”

Judgment and compassion belong together, and I believe that we can hold them together the more that we grow in discipleship, the more we lessen the gap between our Sunday morning faith and our Monday morning routines. 

In the latter part of the 19^th Century, a man named Louis Sullivan was considered to be America’s first modern architect.  He’s the one who coined the phrase “form follows function.”  The general idea is that before we decide what a thing is supposed to look like we should decide what it is supposed to actually do.  Form follows function.

One of Sullivan’s students was a young man named Frank Lloyd Wright.  He took his teacher’s phrase, form follows function, and radically altered it.  He believed that “form and function are one.”  Wright believed that a building should blend into its natural environment.  Indeed, if you look at photos of some of Wright’s buildings – Fallingwater in Pennsylvania or the buildings on the campus of Florida Southern College in Lakeland – it’s hard to tell where the buildings end and the landscape begins.  They blend, merge into one.  Frank Lloyd Wright called his philosophy of architecture “organic architecture.”

Maybe we should be talking about organic Christianity.  After all, this One who we follow, Jesus of Nazareth, had no distinction between his religious and his private life – they were integrated into a seamless whole.  Our journey of discipleship is really a journey into that same wholeness.

A young black man walked into his pastor’s office, upset at the injustice that his people faced.  “I don’t understand it,” he said.  “Why do our people have to suffer such oppression, such poverty, such violence?  Why doesn’t God do something?”  And his pastor replied, “God has done something about all of these things; he has created you.”  And so the young man who would grow up to become South African Archbishop Desmond Tutu became the answer to his own question.

You and I are God’s answer to injustice in the world.  You and I are God’s answer to the lack of compassion in the world.  It is not a comfortable way, and it is most certainly not a popular way.  But it is Christ’s way, and it’s a way that he equips us to live.

He equips us right here.  The baptismal font that we use here at Advent has a unique design.  If you visit other, older Christian churches you’ll find that the baptismal font is often made of wood, or sometimes of marble.  And most of those fonts are eight-sided.  The symbolism of that octagonal design is very intentional.  God created the world in six days, he rested on the seventh, and on the eighth day he recreated the world in Jesus Christ.

You and I are baptized into that new creation.  You might not feel like it this morning, but you are a new creation, and you live a new life because Jesus came to do for you what you could never do for yourself – bring you into a full and right relationship with God.  In the waters of baptism Jesus gathers you into God’s community, and each time you come to the communion rail he meets you there with his own body and blood to remind you that you are loved and forgiven by God unconditionally.  You have a new future!

We look to God’s future not with fear but with hopeful anticipation.  It’s how we live prepared lives.  It’s how we live into that day that the prophet Isaiah told us about, that day that is coming when people will beat their swords into plowshares and their spears into pruning hooks, when there will be perfect peace.  You and I have the privilege – the privilege – of living lives of compassion as live into that day of judgment.  Amen.