IT MATTERS

We live in dangerous times.  We live in dangerous times.  I’m not talking about new variants of COVID, or political instability, or racial unrest, or random acts of violence and terror, or climate change.  That’s all true too, but that’s not the danger of which our scriptures speak today on this  First Sunday of Advent.

Particularly in the Gospel of Luke, I think many of us can relate to that vague sense of bewilderment that he describes – although the physical causes of it are different.  Jesus speaks here of astrological omens in the sun and the moon and the stars, and unexplained violent movements of the tides of the ocean.  We aren’t dealing with those things, at least not at the moment, but we are dealing with all of those other things that I just mentioned.  And in both cases there can be a sense of troubling, and sometimes very dark mystery that causes people – sometimes like me – to ask, “What in the world is going on here?” Where is this all headed?  Is this the end of the world as we know it?  Jesus speaks of it as fear or anxiety over the future.  What about the economy? What about Russia?  What about China?  What about this brand new Omicron variant of the virus?  We’ve got plenty to be concerned about. 

But again, none of it is the danger of which the gospel speaks today.  According to Jesus, the great danger is lethargy – the risk that we will let down our guard in expecting his second coming in victory.  I guess we could call it disinterest by despair.

In the days, months, and first years after Jesus’s ascension in to heaven, it was the common belief among Christians that he might very well come back to Earth today or tomorrow, literally.  And people organized their lives on that belief.  But then the years turned into decades, and by the time Luke’s gospel was written down it had been about a half century since the events of Easter and Ascension.  Believers weren’t so much losing hope as they were losing interest; losing a sense of urgency; a sense that it really mattered how they behaved from day to day because of their allegiance to Jesus.  They were drifting back to business as usual.  And that is exactly the reason for what comes next in today’s gospel reading.  Jesus tells them of the truly dangerous time in which they live:

“Beware that your hearts do not become drowsy from carousing and drunkenness and the anxieties of daily life, and that day catch you by          surprise like a trap….”

The true danger is for us to begin to imagine that our conduct doesn’t really matter anyway because he won’t be back for quite a while.  The danger is indifference.

So just imagine how much greater is the danger in our own time, when we Christian believers have now been waiting for his return for about 2000 years.  Are there really any among us who expect his appearance in the next half hour or so?  Do we make any of our decisions on that possibility? The gospel’s message, and the message of this Advent time is, we should be doing exactly that.
We haven’t any idea of the day or the hour of our Lord’s return.  In fact, Jesus himself tells us elsewhere that even he didn’t know that time while he walked among us on earth.  But this teaching is not intended merely to be a scare tactic or a threat, as if God is out to get us.  Rather, it is an urgent plea for us to conform our lives, here and now, to the example that Jesus showed us.  It is to say, “It matters!”  The only ones among us who need to be at risk of the trap are the ones who convince themselves otherwise.

For centuries – right up to the time of my own childhood – the Church got a rich reward for threatening people with hell and damnation for making moral mistakes and for committing sins.  That was wrong.  The Church has never been the judge of that.  Only God is. 

But now we live in a suddenly very different time, with the threats from the pulpit largely removed, but being replaced by a sense that people are now broadly excused from taking Jesus’s teaching and life witness seriously in the way that we make decisions.

That, THAT, is why we live in a dangerous time.  The temptation is indifference.

“Do not let your hearts become drowsy,” he tells us.

But there’s more to Jesus’s words today than simply keeping us from going astray or winding up in hell.  Embedded in these same scriptures is also a promise, an assurance, a hope.  He reminds us that even in the face of all the fear and all the things that so easily perplex us, he is still in control of things, and after the fear comes reward for all who remain faithful to him:

            “You will see the Son of Man coming in a cloud and great glory…..
            so stand erect and raise your heads, because your redemption is at hand.”

We are not invited to be terrified of God in this life.  We are merely required to take God seriously, by attending well to the Savior who He sent to us.  Advent is a time to do exactly that – to remember that this world and our lives, precious as they now are, are not meant to end here.  After all the dangerous times will be another way of our existence, which neither time nor danger can threaten.  It is ours to decide whether or not to embrace that.  It matters.