First Sunday of Advent (A)
November 30, 2019

O God of our new year, grant us the strength, the wisdom and the courage to seek always and everywhere after truth, come when it may, and cost what it will.

Today our new church (or liturgical) year begins. Happy New Year! What did you all do for the Church’s New Year’s Eve last night? Did you stay awake celebrating past midnight? (Probably most of you did not, or you wouldn’t be here now!) That’s okay – staying up past midnight is overrated. Have you made any churchy new year’s resolutions about spiritual or religious diet and exercise to get ready for the Feast of the Nativity? I saw a meme the other day that said, “It’s almost time to switch from your regular anxiety to your fancy Christmas anxiety!” Isn’t that what Advent is for? What is Advent for?

The word advent is from Latin for coming, adventus is what Latin translators chose for the Greek word parousia, meaning presence, arrival, official visit – in the case of our Gospel reading, the coming of “The Son of Man.” What does “The Son of Man” mean? The term “son of man” occurs more than 100 times in the First Testament, without a definite article, where it clearly means mortal or human. It’s “ben adam” – literally, son of Adam, or salt of the earth, or a humble person of integrity and honor – a mensch. With the definite article, “The Son of Man,” gets used as a title more than 80 times in the four Gospels. Scholars cannot agree about how the title developed or what the title might mean. There are no examples of the title before the Gospels, and there are no credal affirmations that have to do with fidelity to Jesus as “The Son of Man.” My own opinion is that “The Son of Man” paradoxically meant “the essentially human,” or “the true mortal,” or “the complete human,” – the one so fully human that it was as if the Divine were also present. How do we get ready for that kind of coming or presence or official visit? How do we move out of the literal and sentimental into the mystical and true, as I urged us to do last week, while keeping Jesus’ feet firmly planted on the ground?

 The earliest evidence of religious observances of Advent have to do with communal fasting. There was probably a very practical reason – in order to have a feast, all but very wealthy communities would have to reduce their consumption to prepare for a large celebratory meal. Theological rationales often develop after practice, and so the idea is that spiritually preparing for a feast will make the celebration so much more joyous – and that is true enough. But it’s certainly not about eating tiny chocolates out of a boxy calendar counting up or down December days until Christmas. Our scripture readings for advent are focused not on individual, but on the communal, the corporate, the institutional, the governmental repentance and reform (especially appropriate on a day like World AIDS Day). Advent is not about private devotions and personal piety. The “you” that is to be awake, the “you” that is to be watchful and prepared for the coming of the Son of Man, is plural.

The season of Advent, then, is an annual opportunity for communities, institutions, governments to prepare as a collective, as a society, to clear barriers, remove roadblocks, build bridges over ditches, loosen bindings, and untangle obstacles to justice and peace. As Dietrich Bonhoeffer once said, the coming of the Eternal One can be “frightening news for everyone who has a conscience.” I guess it also can be frightening news for those who profit from violence and destruction of every kind. Except, the message from Isaiah we heard today assures us that when the nations fully encounter the judgment of the Divine, “they shall beat their swords into plowshares, and their spears into pruning hooks” Isaiah sees devastation coming and knows that the nations will be judged by the Eternal One. But get this! What Isaiah also knows is that judging light of God shines a light so bright and beautiful that the nations will see swords and spears for what they are – unnecessary weapons that can be repurposed to grow food to feed all who are hungry. In Paul’s letter to the church in Rome, he writes just prior to today’s lectionary portion that “love is the fulfilling of the law.” Love is the fulfilling of the law, so “let us live honorably.” That is how our communal life will bear the light. Advent is about lighting candles in the darkness rather than hiding in the darkness. Advent is about bearing the light so others can see in the darkness.

The setting for our Gospel portion for today is the Mount of Olives, in Jesus’ farewell discourse of what has been called “proverbs, provocations and preparations.”[1] Jesus is teaching his followers about the ordeals to come, and how they should comport themselves during great suffering. They want to know the timing, and his answer is that nobody knows – not even “the messengers of heaven, nor the Son.” (That bit about the Son not knowing was controversial enough that a number of later ancient manuscripts omitted it.) Once we get past the scandalous idea that even Jesus isn’t in on God’s timing, we encounter a mystifying list of illustrations about folks not knowing: people in the time of Noah, people at work in the field or grinding grain, a householder about to be burgled. The coming of the Son of Man will come like a flood? Like a thief? And what about the ones at work? If these examples all make sense as a unit, the logic is elusive, and translating makes it more, not less confusing! Where one is taken and one is left, it’s not clear at all which is to be preferred. The word for “taken” can also be “received, snatched, carried off, led off as a prisoner.” The word for “left” can also mean “forgiven, spared, let alone, or let go.” (This type of confusion is not good news for readers of the best-selling “Left Behind” series.)

There are two stories of Noah side-by-side in Genesis. Naturally, they are incompatible. The one you probably don’t know is the one where Noah is commanded to take into the ark seven pairs of all animals fit for eating and only one pair of all animals not fit for eating. God made the flood happen because God was sad and sorry to have made humans because of how violent and corrupt they turned out to be. After the flood, God realized that the devastation did not change the nature of humankind at all, because the inclination of the human heart is evil from a young age. God placed the rainbow in the sky to remind Godself to have mercy and not to destroy every living creature because of an apparent design flaw in the human heart.

An interesting thing happened to me as I was reading a Torah commentary on the stories of Noah. The Torah commentary pointed to a story of Noah in the Qur’an.[2] It occurred to me that I’ve not ever read a Bible commentary by Christians that referenced scripture or teachings of Islam. Progressive Christian commentaries reference and honor ancient Judaism, but I had to go to a Jewish commentary to find scriptural references honoring the Qur’an. The Qur’an tells a story that the Flood came because people were not worshiping only God, and the chiefs and the affluent leaders didn’t believe that Noah was a messenger from the Lord of the Worlds, sent to warn them so that they would fear God and be shown mercy. That sounds much closer to the traditional and popular Christian understanding of Noah and the Flood.

The thing is, “pay attention — keeping watch or staying awake,” is not Jesus’ final lesson or last word in the Gospels. And it’s certainly not a lesson from Jesus about tossing and turning and worrying all night long. It’s about being attentive and being alive to the possibilities of new beginnings even in the midst of the chaos of grief, and not succumbing to the deadening numbness that might get us through the day, but doesn’t make us more available to the Divine. It’s about repenting and reforming our institutional practices that keep people down and/or out.

For Jesus, generosity and compassion are the right responses to the powers of darkness – the systems of greed and violence. The response to greed is generosity. The response to violence is compassion. The response to profiting from violence and destruction is to collectively divest, resist, engage in movements within our organizations that will call them to repent and reform. We must do what we can, in and outside of the Church, to get right with God (with Love). Love is the fulfilling of the law, so let us live honorably, bearing the light “now in the time of this mortal life.” This New Year, this Advent let’s be the ones who are blessed to kindle and carry the light of Christ, to show the redeeming power of God.

Listen to Jan Richardson’s blessing for you who bear the light:[3]

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