Advent: A Time to Uphold the Normalcy of Justice

1 Advent A      December 1, 2019
Is. 2:1-5      Psalms 122
Rom. 13:8-14   Matt. 24:37-44


 Lectionary Link 

  Today is the First Sunday of Advent and that means it is first day of the New Year, the Christian New Year, so Happy New Year!  Did you party hearty last night to bring in the New Year?  Or did you forget about the Christian New Year, again?    So, why do we have a church calendar?  Why do we have calendars and watches and all measures and qualifications of time?  One of the tasks of life is to influence our orientation to time.  We are born to organize time.  So, we have clocks and calendars.  Today, the church calendar has many competing calendars.  We have many orientations for the times of our lives.  We have fiscal calendars, we have school calendars, entertainment calendars, concert calendars, we have agricultural calendars, we have commercial calendars, (the know, the one where Christmas begins the day after Halloween), we have personal family calendars built around the birthdays and anniversaries of family members, political calendars, work and job calendars, we have sports calendars galore for every sport on every level.  Every calendar that we follow provides specific orientation toward directing our activities in time.

        The church calendar did not always have so many competing calendars.  The modern era has created so many social occasions in life requiring many calendars to organize alternative participation to church life.

        So, what is the church calendar and its purpose?  And what is the meaning of the season of Advent?  When we try to study history, we can't study it all at once.  We break it up into time periods and location of people.  We establish curricula to study the entire body of knowledge in bits and pieces.

         The church calendar is an annual cycle of the presentation of the full body of Christian knowledge.  In short, the church calendar is a curriculum of Christian knowledge.  It is a method of progressive learning and repetitive review of themes in our faith based upon the events in the life of Jesus and the theology of that these events came to have in the early church and church history.

          So, what are the themes of Advent?  Advent means coming.  Advent is a season of two comings.  If the Messiah came first as a babe in Bethlehem but then died as the Suffering Servant Messiah, there had to be a second coming to be a theological corrective to fulfill the definition of the Messiah by many Jews.  For the followers of Jesus, there were other comings of Christ between the first coming and a future great coming.  Jesus came again from the dead in his post-resurrection appearances.  In the theology of the early church Jesus left in the Ascension, only to return in the experience of Pentecost in the Holy Spirit.  The Holy Spirit is also the Spirt of Christ.  Still Jewish Messianic theology required a conquering kingly Messiah, and so there arose the theology of the big Second Coming of Christ as a future figure of corrective justice for a suffering world.  The big second coming and return of Christ was what the early church needed as way to answer the Jewish belief that Jesus of Nazareth did not qualify for the full definition of a Davidic, kingly Messiah.  The Second Coming theology fulfilled the fuller definition of what the Messiah should be.

     Advent is a season about anticipating a big second coming of Christ.  Why do we need such a discourse of the second coming?  We need the Second Coming, because we need to continue to believe in the normalcy of justice.  We need to believe in fairness.  We need to believe that eventually in some ways, all accounts will be settled.  We need to believe in the normalcy of agricultural complex for feeding the people of the world, over the industrial military complexes of the world which have been the lifestyle of humanity at war.  (We wish the resources of the world could be used to feed and care for people, rather than be dominated by swords and the weapons of warfare). 

         The oracle words of Risen Christ given in the Gospel words were to prepare the Christians for the uneven events of what can arise in the free conditions of the world.  Like in the days of Noah a flood can arise and wipe out lots of people.  In the time of the early church, Jerusalem would be destroyed; there would be uneven persecutions and martyrdoms.  Like in the days of Noah, some were taken away in the death,  while others are left behind to survive and keep the church alive and well.

     In the modern era, many have let themselves be dismissive of Advent and the Second Coming of Christ discourse.  Why?  The fundamentalists have literalized them as exactly predicative of specific futures, and 1000's of apocalyptic preachers have tried to predict the exact dates of the end of the world, even though they were told by Jesus that no one knows the end, but only the eternal father.  And if only the Father knows, who is everlasting, it means there is no end day, there is only the latest day.  Time means that there will only always be the latest day.  Life is continuous, but we live by the unit of the story with beginnings and endings; we need book ends for stories even while we know that arbitrary beginning and endings of stories cannot limit the continuity of time.  Our entertainment life is full of stories of endings and the exacting of justice by the good guys over the bad guys.  If people have left the church and the stories of Advent justice, they still embrace the Advent themes in their novels, science fiction and cinema.

      During this season of Advent, let us be comfortable with the normalcy of justice and when we know poignantly, that we don't live in a fair and just world, we still do not give up the ideals of justice.  We continue to make an Advent station at the story of the second coming of Christ as our belief in eternal justice and our hope that a God-human being can persuade all this cosmos into a harmonic unity.

       We will keep forever, the Advent second coming tradition, because in the worst of times, our entire being recoils against injustice.  And in Advent, we profess that we live toward justice as what we believe should finally win in this world.

        Let us not be uncomfortable with the language of the Second Coming of Christ; if we deny it in our faith, we will find it in the secular culture where many people have gone to find the story forms for belief in justice.  But let us not be so proud in our rightness, that we think God will and should intervene to prove that our particular view and lifestyle is better than anyone else's.  The fundamentalists essentially believe in the Second Coming of Christ as way to say that God is going to come and prove them right.  Let us not use the stories of the second coming of Christ to trivialize God in such way; but let us seek solace in the stories which proclaim the justice of a loving, winsome, Christ, forever.  Amen.