Beyond Belief: Sermon for the 1st Sunday in Advent, Year A

Why is it, we all must wonder, that the start of the liturgical year—Year A, even, in the three -year cycle—begins with talking about the end? And I don’t mean like reading the last page of a book first kind of end, but THE END. We begin with a vision of the final judgment at Jesus’s second coming, the one we proclaim about in the Nicene Creed that will be when Jesus “will come again in great glory to judge the living and the dead and his kingdom will have no end.” His kingdom—you know, the thing we celebrated last Sunday.

Eschatology is that branch of theology which deals with “the study of the end of things” (“eschatos” means “last”). The gospel reading for this week is eschatological, as it is traditional for Advent to begin with a gospel reading that deals with this subject. 

It is the end of Year C and the beginning of Year A. It is the end of the Season after Pentecost, also known as “Ordinary Time.” And indeed, Advent reminds us that we do not live in ordinary time during this month of preparation that is at once both joyful and solemn. Thus, in this Advent reading, we have a discussion of the end times, right as we balance upon the edge of the beginning.

This passage we read from Matthew’s gospel today itself was one that was quoted to me often in my childhood churches. Many of them talked often about the “end-times,” and this was one of their favorite images: two people will be working side by side, and one will be taken and the other “left behind” when Jesus makes his “second coming.” 

I didn’t like hearing that back then any more than I imagine you do. It didn’t help when my mother tried to scare the living hell out of me-- yes, I mean it-- by taking me to see some low-budget alleged “documentary”—notice the air quotes I used with my fingers when I said that word— called A Thief in the Night, about what the earth would be like for those who were “left behind.”

Nuclear war, disease, disruption and yes, even mutants—these were all the fates awaiting those who were left after Jesus took the faithful bodily up to heaven and left everyone else down here on earth to suffer—which didn’t square with what I knew about Jesus, either. This one imagined that the United Nations became a tool of Satan during his reign on earth and forced everyone to wear “the Mark” or face execution by guillotine, because why not a guillotine? I remember sitting with my big-haired mama in a darkened movie theatre with a bunch of other families with their big-haired mamas as they, I guess, tried to scare their kids into being “born again.”

It didn’t help that the preacher behind this series of films—yes, he managed to get FOUR of these pieces of cheesy garbage made and actually watched by millions of people—always cast himself in the movies and he looked like Grampa from the Waltons but talked like Oral Roberts when he REALLY got wound up. 

So I sat there in the dark with my arms crossed against my chest, slouched down in my seat eating the margarine-drenched popcorn my mom had brought into the theatre in a grocery sack and waited for it to be all over. I was waiting for, you know, it to end. And then I struggled not to laugh at the absurdity of waiting for a movie about the End Times to end for the last hour, because I was sitting next to a bunch of people who believed that this movie was the best chance to save our souls. 

The problem I had with the strategy behind this movie was that it put all the emphasis on the end. It really didn’t matter HOW you lived your life—so long as you personally accepted Jesus as your savior. You could still be mean to people, and make fun of the poor and hate foreigners and refugees—and I knew people who smugly assured me that they were “saved” who did all those things while also assuring me that the Buddhist family in the newspaper were all doomed to hell even though they cooked Thanksgiving meals for the homeless in their restaurant every year. You could look down your nose at those different from you all day long, only just as long as you believed in Jesus, you would go to heaven, these movies subtly and not so subtly told us. 

But when we look at the message of the gospels in their entirety, we see a Jesus who called us to be disciples during our lives right now—to heal the sick and feed the multitudes and welcome the outcast.

For all of this talk about Jesus coming again like a thief in the night in Matthew 24, there’s the outline of what it means to be a faithful follower of Jesus in Matthew 25, where the king judges the nations based on whether they cared for the hungry, the thirsty, the naked, the sick, the prisoner, and the stranger.

For every place in the scriptures that it talks about Jesus’s second coming, there’s many times as much of an emphasis that Jesus’s birth and life already initiated the coming near of the Kingdom of God.

The judgment spoken of in our gospel passage today reminds us that judgment and justice, both tempered by grace and mercy, are two sides of the reign of Jesus. When Jesus comes to judge us, he will judge us on how well we embodied justice and mercy for those who are forced to the margins in this world we have made and of which we are a part. These people who assured me that they were saved when the rapture came also loved to quote scraps of scripture about terrifying prophecies and about a vengeful God,  one without mercy. But in John 5:39-42, Jesus accuses those who profess their own faithfulness but hollow out their responsibility to others with this observation: ‘You search the scriptures because you think that in them you have eternal life; and it is they that testify on my behalf. Yet you refuse to come to me to have life. I do not accept glory from human beings. But I know that you do not have the love of God in you.'

That movie may not have taught me anything about God. But today I went with my husband and our daughters to see the new movie about Mr. Rogers called A Beautiful Day in the Neighborhood. I had heard about how this movie made grown adults cry, including my oldest. But Mr. Rogers was one of the spiritual gurus of my childhood, and so we went.

I was fine until we got to a scene where Mr. Rogers and the cynical writer who is interviewing him are riding the subway in New York. The full range of humanity was in that subway car around them. But all of a sudden a teenager called out, “Hey—Mr. Rogers!” in kind of a tough voice. But when they got his attention, these oh-so-cool teens started singing Mr. Rogers’ theme song, “It’s a Beautiful Day in the Neighborhood.” By the time they get through the middle of the first verse, the entire car, including cops and tough guys, was singing along, “Won’t you please? Won’t you please? Please won’t you be my neighbor?” And boom—cue the waterworks.

I thought about how Mr. Rogers embodied Jesus for me, long before I knew he was a Presbyterian minister. I thought about how he was a dependable, calming influence in a time of great chaos in my own life. How he talked about how he liked each of us just the way we are. How he embodied a life of faithful witness without ever saying the name of Jesus even once.

Just like Mr. Rogers, Jesus calls us to be faithful, and Christianity as a whole is judged in our world based on how faithfully we embody the love of God within us, how prayerfully we embody the command to love God and love each other, to have love in our hearts or else faith is nothing. The call of Jesus to us is to embody Jesus’s teachings so faithfully that, as one of my favorite hymns of childhood goes, “They will know we are Christians by our love.”

“Belief” in Jesus isn’t just about heaven and the end times. It’s not just about grabbing a magic ticket to save yourself. Belief in Jesus is about having LIFE, and having it more abundantly, right now.  It’s about transforming our lives through joy, and then using those lives transformed by love to do nothing less than transform the world. 

Jesus calls us to go beyond belief to discipleship. Belief in Jesus is most importantly a call to work for the repair of the world. Belief in Jesus is about nothing if it is not directed outwardly toward those around us—that’s why there are so many commands to love one another in scripture.

Belief in Jesus is nothing if it is not transformative, leading to making us not just fans out to save our own necks, but disciples. Discipleship is about transformation of our lives and our relationships with each other, especially the marginalized, the oppressed, and the helpless, right now. It’s about working to bring the kingdom of God into being the kin-dom of God, to recognize each other as beloved children of the One Who Made Us and Loves Us.

Jesus calls us to be ready. To be ready and watchful, for Christ appears in ten thousand places. But he also calls us to transform our hearts so that we can see him here with us now. He appears—right now-- among those we easily overlook. He appears among those the rest of the world seeks to turn away, among those whose outstretched hand is sneered at not as a plea for help but as a con. He appears among those who are carrying burdens we can never see and may not understand. He appears in the vesture of those whom we tell ourselves are not truly needy or deserving of our time or attention. 

Jesus leaves no one behind, but calls the world unto himself and to his life of joyful care for each other. 

The days grow short—quite literally—as we hear these words. Yet the sure and certain promise that carries us through this darkness is that even in the darkest of nights, the light of a single candle can be seen for miles. Even when we talk about Jesus’s second coming, we are reminded that he is risen and with us even right now, calling us into deeper bonds of kinship and companionship with each other.

Amen.

Preached at the 505 on November 30, and at 8:00 and 10:30 am on December 1, 2019, at St. Martin's Episcopal Church, Ellisville, MO.


Readings:
Isaiah 2:1-5
Psalm 122
Romans 13:11-14
Matthew 24:36-44