Be Alert and Pray for Strength (December 1, 2024)
Jeremiah 33:14-16; Psalm 25:1-10; 1 Thessalonians 3:9-13; Luke 21:25-36
“There will be signs in the heavens and on the earth,” Jesus says, “and people will faint from fear and foreboding. But you, when you see these things take place, you stand up and raise your heads, because your redemption is drawing near.”
Advent is a time when we come together in our worship to look to the future when Christ will come to us. Most of us, most of the time, associate looking to the future with positive feelings – we look forward to things we expect to find delightful. Certainly as children we look forward to Christmas with anticipation and excitement. Even as adults, with all the stress of the holiday season that we sometimes experience, the celebration of Christmas is something we want to look forward to.
And for people of a certain age – those of us who were formed in the years after the Depression and World War II – we have been trained to think to look forward to a future that’s going to be better than the past. The future will be amazing. We all thought that by 2024 for sure we’d all have flying cars. We had opportunities that our parents and grandparents never had; and we assumed that the next generations would have even better lives than we did.
I don’t know when that changed, but I think many of us do not have those kinds of positive feelings about the future these days. We worry that the next generations will face problems that we never did – the world is more uncertain today than at any time in our adult awareness. We have pandemics, wars in many places, political strife and anxieties, the threat of climate change. Many of us have a hard time presuming that the future promises a better life for our children and grandchildren.
And even apart from our concerns about the world in general, as we get older it’s harder and harder to look forward to the future. Aging has a way of reminding us that there are things we won’t have the opportunity to do in the time we have left, we keep finding new things we can’t do anymore the way we did when we were younger, and that is not easy to accept.
Jesus told his disciples that days will come when people won’t think about the future with joy or anticipation, but they will faint from fear and foreboding about what they perceive is about to happen. When I was younger I thought that was a bit overdramatic, but now I’m not so sure. A lot of us, I know, are feeling fear and foreboding about our future. A lot of us, and a lot of our neighbors, are not waiting for the future with the excitement of a child thinking that Christmas is almost here, but with fear and foreboding. And as we begin this season of waiting together, I think it’s important to name that worry and fear that so many of us are feeling these days.
It is helpful, I think, for us to remember that we are not the first people to feel this way. For centuries now, on the first Sunday of Advent, congregations all around the world have been reading this gospel passage from Luke, or similar passages from Matthew or Mark, and many of them have strongly felt fear and foreboding about the futures that they could see. Many of those congregations have faced greater challenges than we do, and they had fewer material and technological resources to draw upon to meet those challenges.
The prophet Jeremiah, from whom we take our first reading today, certainly knew about fear and foreboding about the future. For years, Jeremiah told the people of Jerusalem what would happen if they did not start practicing justice – that God would abandon them, that the temple and their entire way of life would be destroyed, and that the people would be expelled from the Promised Land and go into exile as refugees. They didn’t listen to Jeremiah, and then exactly what Jeremiah had foretold became reality. It was a complete catastrophe. Many were dead, most homes were destroyed, and the survivors were forced to flee the Promised Land as refugees and exiles.
If there was every anyone entitled to say, “I told you so,” it was Jeremiah. But as soon as the calamity Jeremiah had long foreseen actually happened, Jeremiah completely changed his message to a message of hope and restoration. As bad as life is right now, Jeremiah told anyone who would listen, as afraid as all of us are about what happens next, remember this: God is faithful. God keeps God’s promises. And one day Israel and Judah will return to the land, and God’s justice will be practiced in the land as it never was before. They will have God’s law written on their hearts and God will grant forgiveness and mercy. You and I may not live to see that day, but know that it will come.
That sounds good. Hopeful, I suppose. In the end, God’s love and mercy will be victorious and all will be made whole and all will be made right and so we have nothing to fear. I believe it. And yet, between now and the day when God’s kingdom finally comes, a lot of bad things can happen – can happen to me, can happen to you, can happen to people we love, can happen to neighbors far and near who don’t deserve bad things to happen to them.
So in the gospel today, Jesus begins by telling his disicples: “When these things begin to take place, stand up and raise your heads, because your redemption is drawing near.” Jesus says others may faint from fear and foreboding, but you stand up and raise up your heads, stick your neck out, because you know that your redemption is drawing near. You know that God is coming, so you know you don’t need to be afraid. OK, yes, we have nothing to fear, we know that – and yet, some of what will happen while we are waiting for scary, still fills us with fear and foreboding.
How do we deal with this? How do we live with confidence that God will come, that things will get better – not just better, but completed, perfected, saved, redeemed – and with the knowledge that things may very well get worse before they get better. How do we live while we are waiting for God to come? This is a difficult question, and I don’t want to give a quick and simple answer to it. Our gospel reading today does give us at least one part of the response.
At the very end of the gospel passage, Jesus looks at his disciples whose heads are spinning at all of these cosmic catastrophes that are coming, and he tells them: “Be alert at all times, praying that you may have the strength to escape all these things that will take place, and to stand before the Son of Man.” Pray that you may have the strength to escape all these awful things that you feel such fear and foreboding over. Pray that you may have the strength to stand before the Son of Man.
Pray. Pray for strength. Not “be strong – pull yourself up by the bootstraps of faith, make yourself strong by believing that God is coming.” We pray for strength because we don’t have it. Even though we have faith – that’s why we pray, because we know that God hears prayers – but we don’t have the strength that we know we need and so we have to ask God for it. The only way that we can stand up before the things that make us afraid is to acknowledge our fear and our helplessness before God and ask God for the strength that we need.
And when we pray, when we confess our fear and our foreboding and our need for strength beyond our powers, we cannot help but look forward to the day when God will answer our prayer. We do not only look forward to the day, probably very far in the future (but who knows?), when God’s kingdom comes in its fullness and all things are made right. We also look forward to the day, probably very soon, when God comes to us with the strength we need to stand up in the face of whatever makes us afraid. For God is always coming to us – not just 2000 years ago in Bethlehem, not just at the end of time, but every day.
So: be alert. Be alert for the way God is coming to you right now. Pay attention. And ask for the strength to stand up in the face of whatever makes you afraid right now – so you can stand before Jesus when he comes, so you can see him face to face, as he comes to you now in your neighbor. When he comes, if you know that your strength does not come from you but is a gift given to you by God in response to prayer, your redemption is indeed drawing near.