2021-11-29
Brooke Strong
Sermon Text
Scripture: LUKE 21:25-36
If I had to guess, I would suppose that the story we heard a moment ago was not the story you expected to hear this morning. It’s as though you sat down with your child or grandchild to read them Good Night Moon, and instead what you got was Silence of the Lambs, or a brutal encounter with Thanos in the Avengers’ Endgame, or, maybe worst of all, a Michigan juggernaut that simply wouldn’t let up. Here we are at the beginning of the season of Advent. Christmas lights are appearing everywhere. Carols are playing in the all the stores. And as church people, we know that we’re entering that welcome season when Jesus is anticipated and then born. It’s Advent, for heaven’s sake! Isn’t it time for happy stories? Shouldn’t we be hearing the tale of Jesus’ birth?
And we will—eventually. The Christian church, though, with a remarkably deep wisdom, essentially says, “Not so fast!” We’ll get to that soon enough. For now, though, we’re going to sit a bit. We’re going to wait. We’re not going to succumb to the temptation to skip right to dessert. Instead, we’re going to eat our kale and broccoli. We’re going to live in these in-between times, anticipating and yearning and hoping—living with what is broken and incomplete, waiting, essentially, for something that is not yet here.
When I was a child, like probably many of you, I couldn’t wait for Christmas. I would buzz with excitement, so eager, was I, to open my presents, to see what Santa had brought, to find out whether my deep wishes would come true. I would lie awake in my bed on Christmas Eve, unable to sleep, aching for the morning to come. It was a kind of sweet agony, pining, as I was, for the moment I would begin opening my gifts.
While it’s not possible to replicate that feeling in this anticipatory season of Advent, it is possible, and even necessary, for us to enter into that time of waiting and looking forward and expecting. Advent is like being at the airport and waiting in the texting lot for the lover you haven’t seen in months. Advent is like sitting in the waiting room of the maternity ward and longing to hear the news of the birth. Advent is like waiting for the mail on the day college admissions departments are going to let you know your fate.
Painful as that waiting often is, it can also have about it a glowing air of expectancy and anticipation. We picture the lover, or the baby, or the college we’ll attend. It can thrill us. We imagine the dinner we’ll have with our lover, or the lullabies we’ll sing to our baby, or the dorm and the classes and the roommates we’ll have when we go off to college.
That’s something like what we do in church in the season of Advent. We look forward. We anticipate. And maybe most important, we enter in to the imagined blessings of what’s to come. We make ourselves part of the story. We are actors in the drama, and we’re part of ushering into being that world for which we long.
And, really, this is what hope is. Hope, the theme of this first Advent Sunday, is a strange combination of what is pure gift, and, at the same time, what we join in bringing to fruition. Think of the examples we mentioned a moment ago. All of them are extraordinary gifts. We couldn’t possibly bring our lover or spouse into existence. Nor could we have created their unique qualities. Those are things that are given to us. The same is so abundantly true with a baby. I could not possibly have created our two sons with all their features and characteristics and idiosyncrasies—nor our daughter-in-law, nor our two granddaughters. They were, and are, pure and simple, gifts. The same is true with college. So much is beyond our control. I was waitlisted at the college I eventually attended. I was assigned a particular dorm, with people who became my friends. I encountered remarkable teachers. Gifts, all.
At the same time, though, I had to enter in to all of those scenarios for them to bear their richest fruit. While my marriage has been an unimaginably wonderful gift, in order for it to flourish, Mary and I have needed to spend time together and to work through what has caused us tension. Same with parenting—I spent time with our sons, trying to find the right balance between adoring and shaping. We read books together and played sports and watched construction teams building roads. Same with my experience at college—I played first-year soccer and basketball, I acted in college plays, I took advantage of my unusual major called the History of Ideas. In order for waiting to bear fruit, we decide to immerse ourselves.
And this is the way it is with faith. We have been given far more than we could ever ask or imagine (Ephesians 3:20). God has adored us and held us close at every minute of every day for our whole lives. And, at the same time, there is no richness in life unless we dive in as though we’re diving into a pool. The pool is refreshing and exhilarating—that’s the gift part. And we can only know that if we ourselves take the plunge.
Jesus knows a thing or two both about waiting, and about diving in. He uses language strange to our ears but keenly attuned, at a symbolic level, to this dynamic of waiting. If we take his language literally, we’ve totally missed its force. This is figurative language. It’s metaphorical. It’s imagistic. And it’s rich.
Jesus also knows that this time of waiting can be full of strain and anxiety. “It will seem like all hell has broken loose” he says—“sun, moon, stars, earth, sea, in an uproar and everyone all over the world in a panic” (Luke 21:25-26, The Message). And what he’s saying is that not all waiting is like waiting for Santa Claus. Some waiting is sheer agony. Some waiting is for biopsy results, or for ultrasound images of the endangered pregnancy, or for the perhaps suicidal child to return the phone call. Some waiting is for the scourge of slavery to be undone, or for the damage done by European colonizing to be recognized, or for the many threats to climate change to be reversed. Waiting can rip us apart. “It will seem like all hell has broken loose.”
My family and I had a recent inkling of this sort of intense waiting, of “hell breaking loose,” on Thanksgiving Day. When our younger son, Taylor, arrived at our house on Wednesday, he felt under the weather. That evening, as he went to bed, he had some mild pain in his chest, but otherwise seemed OK. Thursday morning, he said he felt worse—his chest hurt and his pulse rate was high. I asked if he thought he should go to the emergency room, and without skipping a beat, he said yes.
When he got to the ER and told them he had chest pain, he was, of course, dealt with immediately. You will not be surprised to learn that we were all by now on high alert and extremely worried about what this could be. We wondered about a heart attack, a blood clot to the lung, and several other fearsome possibilities. He was admitted to the hospital, and we waited interminably for test results. We put the Thanksgiving meal off and had pancakes for supper. It seemed, as Jesus said, that “all hell [had] broken loose,” even as we were also aware that others endure acutely painful waits of their own—after an accident or a biopsy or a stroke, or with regard to seemingly endless waits for big-picture justice to be achieved.
All hell can descend in any of a thousand forms. And it’s never easy. It can take everything out of us. And when we’re in the middle of it, it may be only the agony that we seem able to see. That, though, is not all there is, is it. Jesus knows this. “And then” as the Eugene Peterson version called The Message puts it—“then!—they’ll see the [Human One] welcomed in grand style—a glorious welcome! When all this starts to happen, up on your feet. Stand tall with your heads high. Help is on the way!” (21:27-28, alt.). Or, as the NRSV puts it, “stand up and raise your heads, because your redemption is drawing near.”
Just when all may seem lost, in other words, along comes a blessing from God, a holy gift that can reset our lives. It’s like rebooting your laptop or smart phone. God takes what’s messed up and gives us a kind of fresh start, a gift that bestows on us a renewed energy and hope.
In our case, our son Taylor learned he has myocarditis, an inflammation of his heart muscle, and he’s recovering well. And in the midst of this anxious waiting, hope has come to us in a variety of ways. In the hospital, he was given astonishingly sophisticated tests to diagnose his condition, and superb wisdom in determining treatment. He received astoundingly good care from nurses and doctors. He was prescribed medicine to dull the pain and hasten his recovery. And while it will likely be a number of weeks before he feels fully himself, he is well on the road to recovery. “Stand tall with your heads high. Help is on the way!”
We would be remiss if we didn’t mention that not everyone receives what we might call happy results. It’s not that God shows up at every point with healing that saves a physical life. We know that’s not true—we all have likely seen more than our share of sickness and divorce and bankruptcy and failure and death. It’s not that God gives each of us a fairy-tale ending. It’s more that, when we’re alert, when we pay attention, when we lift our heads, our redemption—our own particular redemption—draws near. Our role is to see that redemption as it moves mysteriously into each of our lives. Maybe, in the midst of a grave illness, an estranged friend calls and we have the conversation we should have had years ago. Maybe, in the midst of a divorce, we seek therapy that clarifies our own role in the breakup and makes us a better partner and spouse the next time. Maybe, as in the trial of those who killed Ahmaud Arbery, after a long and wearing wait, justice is finally done. Help is on the way. Redemption draws near. God makes this hope possible. And our role is to play the parts we’ve been given.
I have a friend from childhood named Don Snyder. Don was actually my babysitter. He went on to become a distinguished writer. One of the most intriguing chapters of his life has come in his early 70s. Several years ago, as some of you know, because I’ve mentioned him before, he started an organization called The Caddy School for Soldiers. He had realized that many soldiers who return from war zones are not only physically injured, they are also often psychically wounded. So he started a school at the famed setting of St. Andrews, in Scotland, where wounded veterans could develop a career as professional caddies. Then this year, Don began essentially a second campus of the school, at the distinguished Whistling Straits Golf Course in Wisconsin. A few weeks ago, that second caddy school was featured in a Today show story.
It’s a beautiful mission that has energized Don over these last few years. And here’s the reason Don started the school. When Don was a mere nineteen days old, less than three weeks after his own birth, his mother died suddenly. His mother Peggy’s death, not surprisingly, shattered Don’s father, who was now left to raise twin nineteen-day-old sons alone. In those early days after their mother’s death, as Don and his twin brother were left in the care of relatives, Don’s father, Richard, did the only thing he felt he could do in his grief—he went every night to sleep on Peggy’s grave. Night after night he spent sleeping in that cemetery. And here’s what saved him: every morning, Richard’s army buddies would come to the cemetery, and pick him up, and take him to breakfast, and get him back to his house. So now Don, in his gratitude for those soldiers’ attentiveness to his father, some seventy years later has founded this caddy school for soldiers, so he can give back to later generations of soldiers what an earlier generation had given to his father, and also indirectly to him.
There was no rushing this process, was there. It was a long and arduous waiting, both for Don’s father Richard, and for Don himself. “And then—then!—. . . Stand tall with your heads high. Help is on the way!” “Your redemption is drawing near.” Sadness and death have been turned into a work of care and love. Hope has borne fruit in a redeeming school for wounded ex-soldiers. It is both gift—those army friends of seventy years ago had saved Don’s father’s life—and commitment—Don himself has turned that gift into an enterprise that is turning other lives around. Without the waiting, the gestating, the marinating, nothing would have happened. It’s equally true, though, that without Don’s gratitude, and his investment in lives other than his own, such a lovely, and ultimately redeeming, idea would have lain dormant.
Blessed be our seasons of waiting. Even when everything may seem lost, we are reminded to hold our heads high, and to look for the redemption that is always drawing near. And as it comes, may we jump in with both feet, ready to embody that hope in all we do and are.