We Are Living Always with Transitions

1 Advent C      December 2, 2018

Jer. 33: 14-16     Psalm 50:1-6

1 Thes. 3:9-13   Luke 21:25-31

Lectionary Link

Jesus said, "Look at the fig tree and all the trees; as soon as they sprout leaves you can see for yourselves and know that summer is already near."

This is a natural sign metaphor that Jesus used about reading the events of our lives.  And we are always reading the events of our lives, personally, as family, as community, parish, nation world and cosmos.

What do the signs of nature teach us?  That events repeat themselves.  A new event is a new occurrence in time but for us it always looks like something that has happened in our past experience.

It's late fall, and the leaves are brown and red and falling on the ground.  Yes, we've seen it before and we could have predicted it.  And we're prepared for it with our rakes and blowers.  On the level of our planet big events happen; earthquakes, fires, tsunamis, floods, tornadoes, hurricanes, volcano eruptions.  And these events in nature can be traumatic and catastrophic for people who are located at the wrong place at the wrong time.  People of the past have interpreted such large scale catastrophes  as God's wrath and punishment.

Signs also occur that need to be read in our human cycles.  New things occur but the new things are like what has happened in the past.

The experience of time means that life is always in transition.  An event ends and a new one occurs.  But the meanings that we place upon transitions are not the same.  When I brushed my teeth today it was a new event but it has less significance than events like births, graduation, marriage, serious sickness or illness, effects of aging and the big transition, death itself.

On the social level, wars and plagues occur, invasions, crimes happen, and people take land from other people by force.  When catastrophic violence and oppression occurred for the people of the Bible, there arose in their communities people who would provide a visualization of a future beyond the circumstances of traumatic events of oppression.  Prophets, seers and wisdom teachers offered people visions of hope; they offered a future.

Jesus told people they needed to learn to  read cycles, because if they understood the very habits of time, they could always believe in a future.

We always, at all times live in transition.  The now is a transition between what was and what will be.  And transitional seasons in our lives can be experienced as significant changes of all sorts.  Change of location, change of people, change of occupations, changes of health, changes of available resources.

The words of Jesus are advice to us to be ready.  Just as we are ready for the leaves to turn red in the autumn and fall from the tree, so we have to be ready for all of the human cycle stuff too in our lives.

And in the catastrophic stuff of our lives we need words of hope; we need words to assure that we will always have a future.

As old as the writings of the Bible are and even though they contain so many details of ancient society, there is a universal message in the Bible, that we should use for our inspiration.

The writings of the Bible present many metaphors of futurism.  Futurism is needed in special ways when current times are so difficult.  Since much of the Bible was written in difficult times, much of the writing was written to comfort people and to visualize an end to the suffering in this life.

You and I live toward the future as well and we too, need many strategies both for planning, readiness and sheer survival of some difficult times.

In our strategic planning based upon the habit of anticipating probable outcomes, we need the various wise words which are found in the words of biblical people who lived with faith based upon a hope of always having our future.

We ponder the immediate future; what we will do next.  We ponder an intermediate future; we may have a one year, two year, three year or five year plan.  We should be pondering the future which is determined by what our physical health will allow us to do.   We ponder the time of our deaths and what is beyond death.  The further out we ponder, the more mystery we have to deal with.  So why speculate or offer vision about our deaths and after lives?

We know that after we die, we will be preserved in the memories which we leave with people.  But the memories of most people will only last as long as people and history books.  We resort to a final source of afterlife in God as a meaningful inspiration for our living with hope now.

Advent is a season to ponder transition, waiting and readiness.  When we begin Advent, we know that Christmas will come just as certain as anything that we observe as a calendar date.

The early church proclaimed that the birth of Jesus Christ was something that the entire world had waited for to give us a directional sign of our human future.  The people in the time of Jesus suffered some great oppression.  The people of the early church went in and out of persecution and suffering depending upon their situation;but they believed that the Risen Christ within their lives guaranteed their future beyond whatever they were facing.

This Advent season may find us individuals, families and parish in times of transition.  What does Jesus say?  Do trees grows leaves in the spring and summer.   Of course they do.   Do transitions happen for us of all sorts?  Of course they happen to us.  Accepting the normalcy of transitions is the first stage.  The next stage involves visualizing hopeful outcomes, even if they may be significantly different from what we now know.  But remember the parting words of Jesus to his disciples when he left this world:  Lo, I am with you always, even to the end of the world.

So whatever, our future will be that we have the promise that Christ will be with us.  And that is more than enough if we are willing to accept it.  During Advent season, we await the celebration of Jesus as Emmanuel, meaning God with us.   God is with us, is the reality that enables us to survive many transitions.  And each of us have already survived many transitions on many levels in our lives and we will continue to make it through transitions in our lives.  Let Advent hope assure our faith, that we will keep surfing on the waves of the transitions of our lives.  Amen.