The End is Only the Beginning

There are a few things in life one can truly count on. We can point to the oft-mentioned “death and taxes” response as one certainty. Many would say that you can almost always count on the book being better than the Hollywood movie and the turkey tasting much better the day after Thanksgiving than it does the day before. In the church, there’s another thing we can count on. Every year, like clockwork, four Sundays before Christmas the case for Advent is made. Preachers climb into pulpits not unlike prosecuting attorneys -- lining up sound reasoning and arguments why churchgoers everywhere should take note of this holy season. The teaching is straightforward: do not leap ahead in haste to the celebration of the birth of Christ, preachers preach, because the journey is part of the gift. Keep awake, wait, prepare yourselves for the coming – or advent – of the light of Christ into the world.

There is always some navigation to do in these early days of Advent to strike the proper tone. Should we be penitential and self-reflective, or should the mood be more open and festive? The origins of this four-week season date back to three centuries after the life of Christ to a time when Christians prepared for every feast in the same way: by fasting and penitence. One could not have a feast without first having a fast. In the same way that few of us, I hope, did not prepare for Thanksgiving dinner by having a big lunch hours before; ideally, the time before a feast was a time to make room for what lay ahead.

Our contemporary expression of Advent may not feel like a mini-Lent, as it once did, but the emphasis on waiting by keeping awake and alert still fills a much needed purpose for Christians living in a consumer driven and secular world. We live in an ever-increasing high speed, broadband, express delivery society when information, news and life comes at us like water through a fire hose. The only way it seems like we can slow down or digest is to turn off or unplug. But if we unplug and detach for too long, we may become more isolated from reality and the world.

With so much activity and noise around us – especially during this time of year -- we can all use some time and space to step back to filter out what is real and true and lasting, from all that is non-essential and fleeting. Advent can be our much-needed spiritual buffer zone to reframe and recreate this time of year to be about much more than giving and receiving.

The message in today’s gospel catches us somewhat off guard as we begin this season that sets our sights on Bethlehem and the birth of a child. The end of time was very much on the mind of Jesus and those who listened to him. Jesus said, “But in those days, after the suffering, the sun will be darkened, and the moon will not give its light, and stars will be falling from heaven, and the powers in the heavens will be shaken.” These words resonated with a community shaped by social upheaval, political domination, and economic instability. These were people profoundly dissatisfied with the state of the world. The Roman Empire ruled with a ruthless hand, their own puppet kings in Jerusalem were corrupt and weak, and much of the religious establishment was inbred and remote. Their only hope, it seemed out of all of this despair, was for God to intervene in a dramatic way to bring about an end to the world. Jesus gave them hope that their salvation would come through a new beginning, the advent of a new age. Jesus, one greater than Moses and Elijah, who descended from King David’s family through Bethlehem, was himself a sign that things would soon be different.

With the end in sight, people of God needed to remain awake, alert, with eyes wide open. Sounds simple enough. The opposite of being awake and alert is to be drowsy or asleep or have your eyes closed. And if you were waiting for the end of one age and the beginning of another, who can afford to be sleeping? Preachers are prone to remind their listeners that many of those who lived in the time of Jesus or the immediate years that followed believed that the end would come in their lifetime. “Truly I tell you,” Jesus said, “this generation will not pass away until all these things have taken place.” But we know today what the people who first heard this gospel reading did not know. We know that the end did not take a form many believed it would in the days of such upheaval in the land that produced the gospels. The apostle Paul and the later gospel writers wrestled with the fact that Jesus’ resurrection and the destruction of the Temple in Jerusalem did not bring about the end that many were expecting. When will the end come? When will Christ come again in glory to judge the living and dead, as we proclaim in the Creed?

There have always been Christians who see signs in their day that the end is near. They are the Chicken Little’s of every age. When events swirl around them, natural and manmade, that they do not understand or can not fathom -- like earthquakes, category five hurricanes, floods, wars, droughts, greenhouse gases, and when it becomes easier for more countries to join the so-called Club of Nuclear Nations – there are some who point to these events as signs that point to the end. Well, to quote Jesus: no one knows when that day or hour will come, “neither angels in heaven, nor the Son” but only God the Father.

This is what I continue to learn about faith and about life. As we learn to live in a more open relationship with God, what we come to know is that we cannot hide our despair, disappointment, our loneliness, fear, confusion, shame, our grief, guilt, our unknowing. All of these are part of the human condition and would make anyone hope and pray for a time for God to come down and make it all go away. I recall what a teenager girl once said after surviving a suicide attempt. With all of the pressure and anxiety surrounding her, she said that before the overdose she didn’t want so much to end her life -- she just wanted to go to sleep for a while.

For those who spend a lifetime running away, numbing the pain, and avoiding the truth, it can be truly unsettling but liberating to discover that God offers us a new beginning each and every day of our lives and that new day is often much more ordinary than dramatic. We don’t need to see signs of stars falling and the sun darkening to know that God can create newness out of something old. We don’t have to forget our pasts in order to have a new future. The Apostle Paul wrote: if anyone is in Christ, there is a new creation. (II Corinthians 5:17) God is saying: you can teach an old dog new tricks and we are that old dog. It is possible to start over at the beginning of a marriage, to become renewed in the midst of a career, to face down old demons and move on, and to find love again after loss.

If we can count on such simple things as the turkey tasting better the day after Thankgiving and the book being better than the Hollywood movie, perhaps another thing we can count on is that the end that many hope for is just the beginning. In the days ahead, I hope that we will see God do what the Almighty always does -- taking what is old and making it new, taking what is tired and giving it life, and finding what is broken and making it whole again.