Sermon - 1st Sunday of Advent (12/1/2019)
Is. 2:1-5; Ps. 122; Rom. 13:11-14; Mt. 24:36-44
For the Advent and Christmas and even into the Epiphany season, our first Scripture reading on Sunday mornings will be taken each week from the prophet Isaiah. Isaiah lived in Jerusalem in the 8th century B.C., when Jerusalem was the capital of the small country of Judah. The distance in time between Isaiah and King David would be about the same as the distance between us and George Washington. The kingdom of Judah still had kings who were direct descendants of David, and they worshipped God in the magnificent temple that David’s son Solomon built in Jerusalem.
But only two of the original 12 tribes of Israel lived in this little kingdom of Judah. The other ten tribes had gone a different way long before, and within Isaiah’s lifetime those 10 tribes would be conquered by Assyria, and their peoples scattered. As a small country located between several of the great empires of ancient times, Egypt and Assyria and Babylon, Judah was always vulnerable to invasion and famine. In an age when every kingdom had its own gods, the gods of those empires must have seemed much more powerful and significant than the God of tiny Judah.
This is the word that was revealed to Isaiah, son of Amoz, concerning Judah and Jerusalem. First, Isaiah says, the day will come when the mountain of the Lord’s house will be the highest mountain and raised above all the hills. I’ve never been to Jerusalem but I’m told that the Temple Mount is, as the saying goes, a modest mountain with much to be modest about. It’s not imposing, like Mount Rainier or Mount Kilamanjaro.
But what Mount Zion lacks in physical height it makes up for with perspective. Isaiah understood that the God of the Bible – the God of Judah and Jerusalem – has a vantage point that is higher, that allows one to see farther, than the gods of the great empires. And one day, Isaiah says, the whole world will come to understand this. One day all the nations will submit themselves to God’s judgment and God’s justice, and when they do, the result will be – peace. The world the way God created it to be.
It’s a beautiful vision. Isaiah waxes poetic, with the famous image of swords beaten into plowshares. Just imagine, when we feel so safe we do not need to put resources into weapons of war, but can use them to grow crops and feed people. It is a beautiful and compelling vision, and yet almost three thousand years later we are no closer to making it a reality than Isaiah was. If it were easy to achieve Isaiah’s vision, we would have done it by now. But we haven’t.
Eight centuries later, Jerusalem again was threatened by war, when Jesus came to Jerusalem at the very end of his ministry. In today’s gospel reading from Matthew, Jesus is speaking with his disciples about the Arrival of the Son of Man, who would bring about Isaiah’s peaceful kingdom. He says they will be like the “days of Noah” – and what were the days of Noah like?
Noah is of course famous for the great flood which he and his family survived on an ark with a small zoo full of animals. But the Biblical story of Noah makes clear that the flood of water was the consequence of a massive flood of human violence that swept over the world. God had created the world by restraining the chaos of water – and God was frustrated that human beings had used their freedom to create a new chaos of rivalry and destruction. People tried to go about their everyday lives – eating and drinking, marrying and being married, working in the fields or at the mills, just trying to live their lives – and one by one they would be taken by violence, seemingly at random. Until in frustration God just stopped restraining the watery chaos, and cataclysm ensued for the whole of creation.
But then God promised, never again. God’s plan for a peaceful and harmonious creation, Isaiah’s vision of the future day when the whole world accepts God’s judgment and learns God’s ways of peace – this will not be imposed by force. There is a role in God’s providence for governments and militaries and police, to restrain some of the worst that human beings can do to one another. But God is no longer in the business of destroying the world in order to save it. If God is going to take away from us our propensity to foul up God’s good creation and to harm one another, God will have to come quietly, unexpectedly, like a thief in the night.
And so Jesus tells his disciples, there is no advance warning for when the Arrival of the Son of Man will happen. It will be surprising, it will not be what you expect, it will be subtle and interesting and you will have to stay awake and pay attention if you’re going to see it. As Matthew tells the story, Jesus talked to the disciples for quite a while that day, but when he was wrapping up, he said (Mt. 26:1-2) “You know that after two days the Passover is coming, and the Son of Man will be handed over to be crucified.” That was a clue.
For it was on the cross that the first coming of Christ, the first Arrival of the Son of Man, came to its fulfillment. As in the days of Noah, God chose to stop restraining evil – but this time, instead of unleashing a flood on the whole world, God took it all on God’s self, in Jesus, God made flesh. On that day, a hill outside Jerusalem became the place where one gets the clearest vision of who God is and who human beings are. On that hill God passed judgment on all the nations, and found them guilty and in need of forgiveness and grace.
And were his disciples prepared for this? No, they were scared to death. They fell asleep on him, then they abandoned him and fled and locked themselves in a room. And when the risen Jesus found them there, he offered them the greeting of the new creation: Peace be with you.
It was only then that the disciples realized that the first coming of Christ had happened, and they had missed it. Like the people of Noah’s time, they even ate and drank with Jesus just before the cataclysm came and, even then, they were so unprepared for seeing the Arrival of the Son of Man in weakness and vulnerability and compassion, that they just missed it. Jesus had told them it would be surprising, that they’d have to be really alert and really prepared to see it, and still they missed it.
We also live in a time when we can sense storm clouds gathering, when dark forces feel like they are slipping out of control. In a time that also feels a bit apocalyptic, we might look for the coming of the Messiah in force and power. We want someone to come riding in on a white horse to save the day, to fix our politics and stop kids getting shot in schools and turn down global warming and get everyone to treat each other with some respect. But I don’t know why we would think that the next coming of the Lord won’t be very much like the last one. Suprising, unassuming, humble, not coercive, forgiving, full of grace. Intelligible only from the perspective of the cross and the God revealed to us there.
In Advent, our tradition teaches us to focus on the first coming of Christ at Christmas, especially in the later parts of Advent. And to focus on the second coming of Christ at the end of time, when Isaiah’s vision of peace will be fully realized. These are the two comings of Christ described in the Scriptures, and they have much to teach us about how God works in the world.
But I would like to suggest that there are not in fact only two comings of Christ, but millions of them. God is constantly at work in our world, and if we have learned how we can be awake to Christ in the first coming and the last one, we might be able to see him as he comes to us now – in the suffering of a neighbor in need, in our weakness and failings, in the least of our fellow human beings, in the most surprising and unexpected places and people, in what terrifies and challenges us, in what surrounds and comforts us, in the word of forgiveness and grace we offer one another, in water and bread and wine. God is all of these and more, slowly and patiently teaching us the ways that lead to peace, if only we have the eyes to see and the ears to hear.