It’s Advent (ready or not) – the beginning of a new year in the church. You’ll notice changes that mark the change to this season of preparation and repentence: changes in color, in our music and prayers. Our Gospel readings in this new year will be mostly from Luke. Whereas Mark (in the last year) was terse and spare prose, interested in getting down the basic facts of the ministry and teaching of Jesus; the language of Luke is expansive and poetic, outwardly focused and mission oriented. Ironically, we begin each new year, our season of preparation for Christmas, with a teaching from Jesus about when the world as it is known will end. There will be signs in the heavens; there will be distress among the nations; there will be people getting the wind knocked right out of them from fear and foreboding. Sound familiar?

And then the story goes that Jesus told them a parable so short that, if anyone’s mind wandered for a minute, it was missed entirely. It reminds me of one of our family’s favorite movies of all time: Joe versus the Volcano. It’s an early Tom Hanks and Meg Ryan romantic comedy. Meg Ryan plays all of the three female love interests of Tom Hanks’ character, Joe Banks. There’s a scene in the movie where one of Meg Ryan’s characters, Angelica Graynamore, has driven Joe to the hills outside of Los Angeles at night and they are viewing the breathtaking sight of the thousands of twinkling lights of the city that look like the stars. It appears and feels, to the earnest Joe Banks who is facing his own untimely death, like the stars have fallen or like the world has been turned upside down. Angelica and Joe are quiet for a while and then Angelica asks “would you like to hear one of my poems?” “Sure,” Joe says.

After a moment of silence, Angelica asks, “Would you like to hear it again?”

That’s what I think of when I read the part of this Gospel passage from Luke that says, “then Jesus told them a parable.” “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.” [pause] I imagine Jesus looking at his audience, in a long pause that did not get recorded in the Gospel narrative, and then asking, “Would you like to hear it again?”
What sense can we make of this one-sentence parable? I think an interpretive clue comes from how the parable is placed in the Gospel of Luke. I have a friend who was suffering from a bout of insomnia, who made a storyboard of the Gospel of Luke. It was actually more like a story scroll, on about thirty feet of shelf paper. It was quite impressive. She brought it over to the church where I was working and we laid it out in the parish hall. One of the things that jumped out at us when we looked at the scroll was the extraordinarily symmetrical way the Gospel of Luke is constructed. The narrative, the sayings, the miracles, and the parables are all told in a writer’s version of synchronized swimming! Looking at Luke’s schematic helped me see patterns and pairings I’d never noticed before.

This shortest parable – the parable of the fig tree, is the last parable in Luke, at the end of Jesus’ life. And it is balanced and actually illuminated by the first parable, which is the parable of the sower. The parable of the sower, by contrast, is pretty long and its story covers an expanse of time – whole seasons of planting and growing and reaping. At the beginning of Jesus’ ministry, there is plenty of time. At the end of Jesus’ ministry, time is collapsed. In the parable of the fig tree there is no expanse of time. There is only right NOW. There is a way in which Jesus is teaching something about not getting so preoccupied with what did or didn’t happen or what might happen, that one misses the power of what one can know in the present moment.
And it is the power of the present moment to which Advent calls our attention. Advent is a season of repentance, but it’s not the kind of repentance that is popularly understood in our contemporary Christian culture. The biblical repentance of Advent is not about feeling very sorry about our sins; it’s about changing our behavior. And Advent is not a season of change in terms of personal piety or private salvation – rather Advent’s sacramental purpose is effecting corporate accountability and behavior modification. The calls for change and the promises of redemption are directed to institutions and societies and nations.

I used to teach an organizational change course to business professionals that included a lesson about the ways that we give up the power of now, and about practicing the discipline of being fully present to our corporate work. (As far as I was concerned, we were doing sacred work, even though in a completely secular context with a thoroughly secular lexicon.) What I taught about learning to be present is that there are three ways of giving up a “now.” One is to live in the past – or to blame the past or feel guilty about the past. Not liking one’s past is as effective as not liking gravity. We can (and should) learn from the past, but wishing it were different or that it still existed is a way to give up now.

Another way of giving up a “now” is to live in the future. This is not to say that we shouldn’t have visions or goals or hope or imagination. But spending our “nows” wishing rather than taking action, or spending our present moments worrying – feeling anxious or afraid – will rob us of our “now” so fast we won’t know where they all went. Some of you will remember that the Gospels tell us that Jesus said “don’t be afraid” more than anything else he is reported to have said. Of course he wouldn’t have needed to say it so much if folks weren’t so afraid, but I think he knew that our ability to experience the power of right now is impaired when we are suffering what “might” happen.

The last way we give up a “now” is to try. Trying is not doing. If we “try” to pick up a piece of paper, nothing happens. This is picking it up. I used to say, “If we are trying to become a smoke-free office, there are probably people still smoking in the office, we’re just talking a lot about it.” Or, here, if we’re trying to spend more time engaged in transformative social justice work, we’re probably not spending more time engaged in transformative social justice work. But you can bet we’re feeling badly about it if we say we’re trying! Stop and listen to yourself the next time you say that you are trying to do something or the next time you say you will try to do something, because you have just said in a very polite way that you are not doing it yet, or that you probably won’t do it. Know that if you say you’ll try to do something, you have just let yourself know (and now anyone else that is in this room) that you haven’t made a commitment to do it. Telling truth about it will give you back your “now.”

So whenever you want to engage in transformative communal action, start. Do a small piece of it. Then be glad when you say “we are changing x (whatever it is).” Maybe it’s not as much as we’d like, but it’s more than before. Listen to the powerful difference between saying that Emmanuel Church is trying to witness to God’s mercy and justice and Emmanuel Church is witnessing to God’s mercy and justice. We are feeding and housing people who need physical nourishment and shelter while we provide food and a safe haven for all kinds of people who are spiritually hungry and in need of spiritual shelter.

Jesus tells his hearers what to do when (whenever) it seems like the world is getting turned upside down. When confusion and fear are colluding to reduce us to passivity and despair, knocking the wind right out of us, we are not to squander our energy, engage in avoidance or create distance or indulge our anxieties. We are to stand up, raise our heads and know that redemption (that is, freedom from whatever enslaves us) is near. We are to look at what is right in front of us right now. Truly I tell you that generation did not pass away until all things had taken place, and this generation will not pass away until all things have taken place either. You know, the Biblical idea of end times “is not about some mass immigration from a doomed world to a blessed heaven. Rather, it is about the end of …[an] era of war and violence, injustice and oppression. It is about the earth’s transformation, not about its devastation. It is about a world of justice and peace.” (1)

What did you read on the front page of the Boston Globe this morning or see on the news last night about distress among nations? Of people fainting from fear and foreboding of what is coming upon the world? How are confusion and fear and foreboding happening in our nation, across town, on the other side of your desk in your office or in school or at home, or in your extended families, or even in this room? Where is the drama of giving up the power of now playing out in our relationships, in our institutions, in our bodies? And what redemption – release or re-valuing might be near right now? What would it take for us to stand up and raise our heads? (2)

It’s been said that no tree looks more dead than a fig tree in the Palestine winter. Imagine noticing little leaves sprouting out of buds on the branches – tiny tiny hopeful signs of growth – of change – of new life. Jesus seems to be saying that in the middle of whatever is turning the world upside down, pick your head up and look for and see the signs of hope that are right in plain sight, right now. Christian hope, according to Jurgen Moltman, is not an “opium of the beyond;” rather, it is “the divine power that makes us alive in this world.” It’s not a hope that things will return to the way that they were, that the past will be different, or even that a bad thing will never happen. It’s hope that right now, Love (another word for God), Love is redeeming and revaluing what seems dead or shameful or worthless or wasted or hopeless. Advent is a season of change and a season of hope that right now Love can do that. Pick up your head and see that right now Love is making a way where there is no way. See that right now Love is very near.