Jer. 33: 14-16 Psalm 50:1-6
1 Thes. 3:9-13 Luke 21:25-31
Lectionary Link
In our modern arrogance we can be very dismissive regarding those primitive people of the Bible. Those poor people lived in such conditions and ignorance they had to fantasize to survive their terribles lives; they had to invent super heroes like the Messiah, the Son of Man, and the Son of God. They had to have wild visions about human/animals beasts hybrids, dragons, angels, and magic trees of life, and big battles with fire coming down from the sky, and the bad guys being confined to lakes of burning fire. Those poor people of the past with their silly myths.
O but wait, O arrogant post-modern people; what about your list of your messiahs?
And this does not include all of the fantasy figures of Disney and the animated world. This does not include all of the people in science fiction, the Spocks, the Terminators, the Yodas, Chewbaccas and seeming endless more. We cannot say that biblical people were more obsessed with super heroes and apocalyptic end of the world as we know it scenarios than we are. We are much more obsessed and we are much more proud of all of the media that we have to bring our myths to the virtual experience of our populace. Those poor biblical people only had writings and oral story-telling prophets and preachers.
But are all myths and fantasies equal? They are equal in the sense of expressing the universal human feeling of hope, hope for a future, a better future, a future that is free from pain for us and everyone, a future where the good guys win and the bad guys are sent to significant situations of reform.
In the Gospel today, we see the oracles words of the Risen Christ, coming to the very vulnerable small Jesus Movement communities, who were spinning the story of a "Son of Man" that had been written about by their D.C. Comic-like visionary who speculated and entertained the fire of hope with narratives of hope, narratives of salvation and refuge, of what was coming in different ways, ordinary way but also great and cataclysmic ways when God had to do something very big.
Let us as modern people not feel smug about ourselves and look down upon the biblical people as being inferior in their hope. They like us had access to the very same hope that we have access to hope. And hope always inspires narratives, and visualizations and these narratives and visualization have less to do with the future, but a lot to do with coping in the now with whatever our current distress is.
This is the human history of hope; hope is time always providing a future. Hope is the continuous transitions of time, like the cycles in nature of the fig tree or any aspect of organic life.
The words of the Risen Christ invite us to have the wisdom of understanding the transitions in life, the little repetitive ones, and the great and impactful changes like war, and plagues, and ravages of the environment, when the sky seems like it is falling on large swatches of people close to us or in other parts of the world.
Why do we regard our apocalyptic practices in our modern genres of comic books, cinema and the like as being superiorly different that the genres of biblical people?
I believe it is because in our use of language, the proliferation of world knowledge has grown exponentially great that we have come to divide our language products into separate and contradicting genres. This has occurred because of the rise of modern science, which has created a standard for us reporting what is happening to whatever we observe.
The fantastic messiah of the Bible became the fantastic imagination of science fiction with the messianic becoming the alien Superman coming from another far away planet to work to put things right on earth.
But our genres are so divided, that we say Superman is not real; he is but part of our entertainment genre. But it is real that our world is full of entertainment genre as being truthful to human wishes and dream. That realness is also objectively true. Why would we deny the objective truth of the narratives about the Messiah, Son of Man, and Son of God as functioning in hopeful ways for people of all ages?
Can we see how we can be so "temporally provincial?" Locked into the prison of our time and thinking that we are superior simply because we are the latest people to exist on earth.
Let us have some temporal humility, and this will allow us to return to the words of transitions and endings which was present in oppressed people who were always looking for narratives of what is best about human life, namely hope for a better future, and love for what is better in the future, namely justice for all people in the world, of all times.
Let us give up our sense of modern superiority, which is made hypocritical by all our own modern fantasy of the apocalyptic, and let us enter freshly into the Advent of Christ, who came as a replacement reality for the cruel Caesars and the Empire of oppression. Let us partake of Advent endings for all cruel Empires, even the large Leviathans of States which we have benefited from the cruel oppression of many people. Let us accept the Risen Christ as the Super Person of the world who inspires us to lift up the lowly. Amen.
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