On Guard

Luke 21:25-36

1st Sunday of Advent

3 December 2006
 

There are four words that get uttered in our home a lot these days.  Four words that are said many times every day, with exuberance and conviction.   The little boys who say these words have no idea what they mean, but that doesn’t stop them.  Arms in the air, smiles on their faces, they announce in happy toddler voices: “To infinity – and beyond!!!”

If you’ve seen the movie Toy Story, then you recognize those words.  They are the motto of Buzz Lightyear, a spaceman action figure, who says the words anytime he is getting ready to blast off, ready to go not only farther than anyone can comprehend – but even farther.  Ever since the first Toy Story movie came out in 1995, children everywhere – and sometimes their parents, too – have uttered Buzz’s famous words, with gusto.   There’s something about the phrase that seems to embolden the person who says it, making him feel like he can do anything.  He can go farther than he ever thought, and then farther.  The little kids who say these words of course have no idea what a grand metaphysical concept they are proclaiming.

 

Today, we all stand like two year-olds in front of one of the more mind-blowing texts of Scripture.  This little piece from Luke is called apocalyptic literature.  Apocalypse means an “unveiling” or a “revelation.” Apocalyptic literature attempts to reveal something from realms we cannot really begin to comprehend, from a world beyond infinity.  It is a pulling back of the covers from the edge of time to give us a little peek of what stands beyond what we know .  We try to interpret such a revelation, but it is a mystery we cannot fathom.  We are like toddlers calling out in ignorance, “To infinity – and beyond!” only we do it with significantly less enthusiasm.

 

There have been many famous attempts, and many lesser-known ones too, to try to quantify and calculate exactly what apocalyptic literature is trying to say about when the end of the world will come.  Jesus says, “There will be signs in the sun, the moon, and the stars, and on the earth distress among nations confused by the roaring of the sea and the waves.”  And even though elsewhere he proclaims that no one will know the day or the hour, people set to looking for the signs and trying to figure out a timeline for the end of the world.  In the 1800’s, a wealthy farmer named William Miller determined that Jesus would return sometime in 1844.  Some 100,000 people then abandoned their farms, sold their homes, or quit their jobs to wait.  

 

In our own era, there have been other attempts to declare a date.  The Jehovah’s Witnesses declared the world would end in 1914, and later revised that to 1975.  Pat Robertson announced it would end in 1982.  Hal Lindsey said 1988.  And of course all manner of people predicted the end would come in the year 2000.

 

For those of us with comfortable lives and a preference for moderation and rationality, such end-times enthusiasm can seem misguided, at best.  We like to think of life as a little more secure, a little more predictable, a little more under-control than all that. Historically, apocalyptic literature has been aimed at people more in touch with the tribulations of life than most of us are, it’s for those who feel more acutely than we do the dissonance between God’s sovereignty and the crushing realities of the world.  It is literature written for those who live with the great grief of dashed hopes.  People on such an edge often lean a little harder towards the hope of another world.

 

But many of us have managed to put some distance between ourselves and the horrifying fragility of life on our planet.  We are not the ones who go to bed hungry, (or “food insecure” as our administration now calls it).  We are not the ones who must go to sleep to the sound of mortar fire, or who must pass through military checkpoints in order to go to work.  We are not the ones who must live our lives on guard for the bullet, the bomb, the break-in, the barely-enough paycheck or pantry. 

 

Still, there is enough awful news out there that if we pay attention at all, we become devastated and heartsick.  The flickering images of the nightly news, the screaming headlines of the newspapers, the stories of war and terror, natural disaster and violent crime and environmental devastation – it sometimes seems that the world is hurtling towards destruction.  Our urge may be to hunker down, to focus on our own little cocoon of family and security, and try to pretend the rest of it away.   But sometimes you just can’t.  You wake in the night with a start, the house is dark and quiet, and though everything seems all right, something like dread comes over you.  In those moments, it is the dread that seems most real – not the little cocoon of security you’ve created.  You see it more clearly then than you are able in daylight – things are not as they ought to be.

 

The monk and writer Thomas Merton once wrote of this kind of experience in the night.  It was his turn to be on night-watch at the monastery, and while the other monks slept, he suddenly became overwhelmed by a sense of the fragility of everything.  He wrote:

Lord God, the whole world tonight seems to be made out of paper.  The most substantial things are ready to crumble or tear apart and blow away…  Only man  makes illuminations he conceives to be solid and eternal.   But, while we ask our questions and come to our decisions, God blows our decisions out, the roofs of our houses cave in upon us, the tall towers are undermined by ants, the walls crack and cave in, and the holiest buildings burn to ashes… 1

 

When the buffers we create begin to cave in or crack or burn, what then?  Hunkering down and pretending hard realities away may work for some people some of the time, but it is certainly no kind of ultimate solution, especially for people of any kind of faith and conscience.  In the face of a world breaking apart through war, violence, evil, economic unsustainability and environmental collapse, Jesus’ word remains the same: when all of this happens, stand up, and raise your heads, because your redemption is drawing near.  

It is the opposite of hunkering.  Lift up your heads – the redemption you’re looking for, the redemption the whole world is groaning for, draws near.  Peace is coming, justice is on its way, the lowly will be lifted up and the hungry will be filled with good things.  The redemption we need is drawing near.  Lift up your heads, and look for him.

The language about that redemption is fantastical – in Luke, Jesus says that in the midst of the chaos and horror of the earth’s distress and the people’s fear and the shaking of the cosmos, in the midst of all that terror, we will see the Son of Man coming in a cloud, with power and great glory. It is language we cannot get our rational minds around, language that leaves us stammering like littlest children gaping at infinity, and then beyond.  It is so fantastic most of us have given up anything like hoping in it, or even wanting such a thing.   We’ll make do with the cracked-up world we’ve got, rather than hope in a redemption that comes in such bizarre form.

But just when Jesus has us most unbalanced, just when he has finished saying these wild things about coming in a cloud, he brings our attention to the ordinary, un-fantastical world.  “Look at the fig tree and all trees,” he says.  And just like that, we have an invitation.  If we cannot fathom a world beyond the world we know, if we cannot get our little minds around the realm of God’s wild impossible possibilities, then maybe we can do this.  Consider a tree.

The trees right now are bare, but we can trust that one late spring day the leaves will sprout, and we will know that summer is coming.  In the same way, we can count on the kingdom of God blooming all around us, even though the winter of our discontent, our violence, our devastation, our never-ending stream of global bad news is the only reality we can sometimes see.  Look at the trees, Jesus reminds us.  If you cannot put your hope in the Son of Man coming in a cloud, then find your hope in all the little kingdom signs right in front of you.  If you cannot look at the clouds, then look at the trees.  Or the flower, child, the friend.  This takes time, and attention, and openness to wonder.  You look at something with enough openness, and no telling what will shine through – whether what you are contemplating is the old tree in your backyard or a new light in another person’s eyes. “Revelation is the moment when you can see through, see into, see beyond what is going on to what is really going on” 2 – and it can happen in any ordinary moment, but only if we’re paying attention enough for God to get through to us.

“Be on guard,” Jesus says.  And there’s a way of being on guard that is fearful and panicky, anxious and, well, guarded.  Looking for disaster, and not redemption, at every moment.  But what he says is “Be on guard so that your hearts are not weighed down with … the worries of this life….  Be alert, … and pray….”  This is the stance of people who hope – not fearful and hunkered down, panicky and self-protective, but watchful, expectant, open to revelation but guarded against anxiety.  Participating in the world – not cowering or cocooning – participating in it, with the hope of people who dare to believe that redemption draws near.  Leaning towards finding revelations of goodness and redemption all around, leaning towards others with faith and hope and love.

Martin Luther once said, “Even if I knew that tomorrow the world would go to pieces, I would still plant my apple tree.”

A small, revolutionary act of hope.  Hope in a God who comes not to destroy, but to heal and make whole.  Hope in a God who comes near even now, when so much seems to be breaking apart.  Hope in a God who invites us to enter the darkening world with the light of that hope.

Frederick Buechner once wrote:  

I know of no time when the world has been riper for its return, when the dark has been hungrier.  Thy kingdom come … we do shew forth the Lord’s death till he come … and maybe the very madness of our hoping will give him the crazy, golden wings he needs to come on.  I pray that he will come again and that you will make it your prayer.  We need him, God knows. 3

We do need him, indeed.  And he is drawing near, even now.  In a world that seems to be spinning towards oblivion, he is still drawing near.  So stand up, and raise your heads, and raise your hearts, and raise your hope, and raise your life towards his and towards his world.