Readings for the First Sunday of Advent (Year C)
This sermon was preached at Christ Episcopal Church in Eureka CA on November 28, 2021.
Good morning! I hope you all had a joyful and satisfying Thanksgiving. I’m currently addicted to Thanksgiving leftovers so I’m trying to quit cold turkey. Ha!
Well, today we begin a new liturgical year so happy new year! This year we will be reading primarily through the Gospel of Luke, which according to my friend Dr. Alexander John Shaia focuses on the final phase in the Hero’s Journey: the return to the community and the way of service. Remember, Matthew’s Gospel focuses on the change that launches us on the journey of transformation while Mark represents the trials we inevitably face, and John describes the joy of receiving the boon of wisdom and insight. Luke’s Gospel is about returning to the community with our newly gained wisdom and sharing what we have learned, serving the community, and working for justice in the world. Luke is all about walking in the Way of Christ’s love for all. Luke is, in fact, the first part of a two-part volume commonly referred to as “Luke-Acts.” The Book of Acts recounts the adventures of the early Christians, who were initially called followers of “the Way” (Acts 9:2; 19:9, 23; 22:4, 24:14, 22). And the Gospel of Luke reads somewhat like a travelogue since the majority of the text describes Jesus heading to Jerusalem with his disciples while telling stories and sharing adventures along the way. [I remember a class being offered at Fuller Theological Seminary on “The Gospel of Luke and Road Trip Movies.”]
Now we begin at the end. We begin our reading from Luke towards the end of the Gospel, in the chapter right before the Passion narrative, as Jesus speaks at the temple like an apocalyptic prophet. The reading picks up on the apocalyptic imagery we encountered in our final reading from Mark a couple weeks ago and it also picks up on the theme of the kingdom of God we discussed just last week on Christ the King Sunday. The kingdom of God is any territory in which the divine voice of Love reigns supreme over all other voices, the voice that says, “You are my child, my beloved, on whom my favor rests.” The kingdom of God is where we rest and find strength and renewal in our belovedness. In today’s reading from Luke, Jesus says, “When you see all this chaos and confusion around you, when people are fainting from fear and foreboding, when you see these things taking place, you know that the kingdom of God is near” (Luke 21:31). Here, he’s using cosmic, apocalyptic imagery to describe the destruction of the temple, the tragic loss of the center of the Jewish world. The first readers of Luke’s Gospel were reeling from the violent trauma of Roman destruction of the temple and here Jesus is saying, “When you see this, that’s when you know the kingdom of God is near.” In other words, when you lose those things that can so easily become idols, that’s when you know that you are near the reign of the voice of love.
One book that I recommend we read together this Advent is a book by local Methodist Pastor Bethany Cseh (Shay) titled Stepping into Advent: Making Space to Recognize the Nearness of God, which includes short readings for each day of the Advent season. She will be guest preaching here on the Fourth Sunday of Advent. In one of her meditations, she describes a kind of apocalyptic tumult that was upending her life. She writes, “[The] wilderness wasteland gave room for doubt to whisper in my ear, ‘If you really are…’. I began to question my ministry, my identity, my personhood, my value. I wondered who I really was and if anything I did mattered as my people left [as I experienced loss], one after another…[As the world fell apart…when you see these things take place, you know the kingdom of God is near]. But it was there in that wilderness [in that loss] where I began to learn how desperately dependent I was on God. I learned to sink into such a comforting and abiding Presence. I felt safe and held, seen and valued by the loving arms of God. I could sense God had come near and the wilderness allowed me to prepare room for God’s nearness. And it was in that lonely and vulnerable place where I began to accept my belovedness. I could finally see me as me. I saw me as God sees me.”[1]
When we lose all our other identities (which will all fade away in the end), the kingdom of God is near because we are in the process of discovering and claiming our true and ultimate identity as a beloved child of God. The kingdom of God is near because we are giving God’s voice of love supremacy. Sometimes, it’s when we are forced to let go of all those other sources of identity and value and self-worth that we learn to fall back on our belovedness. That’s when we rest in the identity that is rooted in God’s dominion of love. When we rest in our identity as God’s beloved children, we can learn to love others in a way that does not demand to be loved back, we can love others without creating a relationship of unhealthy codependence in which we need them to give us a sense of value and self-worth.
This Advent season, may we make space to recognize the nearness of this “kingdom,” especially in the midst of tragic loss, trauma and tumult; and, in the words of St. Paul to the Thessalonians, may our Lord Jesus Christ lead us in the Way and may he make us increase and abound in love for one another and for all, just as his love abounds for us. And may he so strengthen our hearts in holiness that we may be blameless before our God and Father at the coming (adventus) of our Lord Jesus with all this saints. Amen.
[1] Bethany M. Cseh, Stepping Into Advent: Making Space to Recognize the Nearness of God (WithBethany, Blue Lake CA, 2021), 16.
DANIEL DeFOREST LONDON 