Image: Mosaic from the Palatine Chapel in Palermo, Italy (photo: Public Domain)
December 1, 2024: Advent 1C
Luke 21:25-36
A Calm Watchfulness
‘Tis the season! Or rather, it’s been the season since October 18th, when the Hallmark Channel started playing Christmas movies. Now, I’m not big on Hallmark movies, but I can see the appeal. They don’t require much effort to watch. Every movie has a similar plot line, something like this: Our heroine, Jennifer, is a career woman in the big city engaged to a big-shot businessman named Felix. After Felix forgets to invite her to his family’s private island for Christmas, she reluctantly goes back to her small hometown to stay with her overbearing mother. There, she meets a single dad named Jeff who dreams of opening a bakery. Through a series of humorous misadventures, she learns the true meaning of Christmas. In the last five minutes of the movie, she dumps Felix, moves back to her hometown, gets together with Jeff, and starts making donuts. Roll credits. It’s lighthearted. It’s fun. And like sports, it’s a form of escape.
And who doesn’t want to escape the world sometimes? Life is stressful, especially at this time of year. We may also feel loss more keenly. As calendars get full, blood pressures rise. We want a break. And while there’s nothing wrong with a break, we can be so anxious that we turn inward, self-medicating with behaviors, substances, or food. We can enter a feedback loop of nostalgia and resentment.
But Jesus isn’t going to let us escape into nostalgia or self-medication. No, Jesus’s words today are like a sledgehammer to the wall.
No sentimentality here! This passage in Luke picks Jesus up mid-speech in the Temple, speaking about the coming reign of God. There will be distress among nations. Confusion. Roaring seas and crashing waves. Fainting from fear and foreboding about what is coming upon the world. In our text study this week, one of the pastors noted, “Whenever I preach on this text, someone always says, ‘Pastor, isn’t that just like today?’” Yes. It’s always just like today. We may feel it more keenly in our time, but there has always been confusion and fear among the peoples of the world. As the French proverb goes, “The more things change, the more they stay the same.”
But one thing is starkly different. And that something is a someone: Jesus, the Son of Man, is coming! He is surely coming at the end of all things to usher in a new creation, but he also arrives among us every day, in the simple acts of faithfulness we see all around us. In the bread and wine of the communion table. In the shared highs and lows at the dinner table. In the work of ministry partners like Love INC and the Food Shelf. In the way that we see genuine disciples of Jesus Christ putting themselves under his rule and striving to live as he would have them live. Jesus is coming, without a shred of sentimentality or nostalgia. Though we’re in the season where we remember his first Advent, born to an unwed Jewish girl among animals, we also look expectantly to his reign, when he will put an end to the oppressive ways of the world as we know them. And when he arrives, he will not rapture us away to some far-distant heaven. No, he will make all things new here, even the current devastation of the world. The good news of Jesus Christ is not about escape. It is about new “scapes”—namely, a new worldscape—that we are invited (not compelled) to live into. This new worldscape is defined by shalom—an integration of life that we don’t enjoy fully in this realm. But it is offered to us who belong to Jesus Christ and who put ourselves under his reign.
So with good news of a coming new world, what are we to do now? After all, it’s been 2,000 years since Jesus first walked among us. The answer is in the last paragraph of our reading: watch. Not an anxious kind of watching like the kind I heard about from a formerly Pentecostal member I had in Indiana. This person was brought up thinking that because Jesus could return at any moment, she’d better be right with God at all times! This understandably led to a lot of anxiety. But neither does it mean a kind of laxity, where we expect things to keep going as they have been. Jesus is calling us neither to anxiety nor to apathy. Jesus is calling us to an active kind of watching, a watchfulness that is secure and calm in his love. It’s the watchfulness that, as I said before, you can see in everyday things. I don’t need to re-elaborate them. It’s enough to say that where we choose to pray, to be loving, to forgive, to act in solidarity with the poor, to release contempt or hatred, to be a peacemaker rather than a peacekeeper, we are keeping faithful watch for Jesus Christ and living out his reign in our world.
This is no Hallmark Channel kind of Christian faith. This is a Christian faith that is bold, that is engaged, and that strives to love as he loves us. We don’t escape into our selves, rather we abide with Jesus in this devastated world that God loves. And when Jesus returns in his glory, we may find, much to our surprise, just how present he was with us the whole time. Amen.
© 2024, David M. Fleener. Permission granted to copy and adapt original material herein for non-commercial purposes with appropriate credit given.