Is. 2:1-5 Psalms 122
Rom. 13:8-14 Matt. 24:37-44
Rom. 13:8-14 Matt. 24:37-44
Holy writings are contextual to the people and places of the people who wrote them. And people are limited to their times and their contexts; it's the only thing that they know. And what happens? One can easily make ones context the center of the entire world in value and importance.
For the prophet Isaiah, Jerusalem was to be the place to be the center of the world. In his vision the house of God there would be the place for the word of God to go forth and instruct all the nations. With such instruction they would beat their swords into plowshares and their spears into pruning hooks.
It is a "they lived happily ever after story" vision. People in every context need such "living happily ever after story" which includes their places and people as the location for the event of such happiness.
Utopian visions are comfort literature for people. Sometimes the happily ever after stories are mainly for children to inspire a more optimistic outlook on life.
The Utopian vision contradict the harsh realities of lives. Utopian vision stories inspire the utopian person to help attain such perfect conditions. Son of Man, Messiah, and Son of God, were such utopian persons who came to be written about in the various kinds of literature of people who were suffering the severe deficiencies of their life experience. Apparently the immediate intervention of God's judging and instructing word needed human heroes to make the ideal operative in actual conditions.
If you and I are cynical about figures like Son of Man, Messiah and Son of God, we should be cognizant about how our culture has moved our superheroes out of the religious context and made them secular. Our entertainment world is full of superheroes who are the good guys and girls who do individual heroic acts with supernatural powers to incrementally make the rest of the world behave in just and good ways.
When child-like readings and fundamentalists make apocalyptic utopias and heroes into actual future events, then instead of reading biblical futurism and superheroes as functional analgesic discourse for current present suffering, we get into all of the games of predicting of the end of time which so many circus like preachers do to provide for people a sense of being more in control even though no one is excluded from the uncertainty of probable future events.
About the future of any event no one can know with certainty and certainly not about when the life as we know it will pass away. So we have the channeled words of the Risen Christ within suffering communities who pondered the end of their lives as they knew them: "About the day and and hour, no one knows."
If we don't have specific certainty about the time of future how should we live? Even though we don't know the specific timing of anything in the future, we need to embrace the wisdom of probability living. Being prepared is the best way to live with probability living.
What does being prepared mean? It means having wisdom of experience of past events added with our specific free choices toward our ideal goals.
Given what we have observed and learned from what has happened, how should we now act to promote the direction of life toward what is more ideal in terms of love and justice for all?
Advent is the season of becoming more practiced in good probability living. We center upon actions which will more likely approximate love and justice in the future. And this can be difficult given all the distractions of our commercial societies which already have moved on to Christmas materialism. But it is a time when we can direct such materialism toward the things which poor and hungry people need for their sustenance. Advent is a time for us to transform the seasonal materialism into the just distribution of the goods and services of the world toward the people who need them the most.
The words of Jesus imploring us to be prepared are invitations for us to prepare our lives as expressions of justice and love for the people of the world. Let us remember that the utopian words of the Scripture are not for us to escape to an unattainable certain future; rather they are words to guide the direction of our deeds of love and justice now.
If we can lived such lives of love and justice now, we will be prepared for any probable future. Amen.
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