Luke 21:25-36
“There will be signs in the sun, the moon, and the stars, and on the earth distress among nations confused by the roaring of the sea and the waves. People will faint from fear and foreboding of what is coming upon the world, for the powers of the heavens will be shaken. Then they will see ‘the Son of Man coming in a cloud’ with power and great glory. Now when these things begin to take place, stand up and raise your heads, because your redemption is drawing near.”
Then he 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. So also, when you see these things taking place, you know that the kingdom of God is near. Truly I tell you, this generation will not pass away until all things have taken place. Heaven and earth will pass away, but my words will not pass away.
“Be on guard so that your hearts are not weighed down with dissipation and drunkenness and the worries of this life, and that day catch you unexpectedly, like a trap. For it will come upon all who live on the face of the whole earth. 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.”
Drunkenness, worries, and dissipation. Apparently three long-time ways to handle this crazy world. Dissipation though, I had to look up. It’s wasting stuff or squandering things. It’s basically running around like a chicken with your head cut off! All three are as temping today as in Jesus’ time! After all you can easily find stories today so dark they blot the sun out in the sky and tell you about distress among nations! The noise of hatred is deafening. Noise so loud it’s like the roar of the sea! Like a never ending set of waves crashing over us, knocking us off our feet, over and over again with wave after wave of horrors in Israel and Gaza, racism, hatred, cruelty and all the rest. It makes us faint from fear and foreboding.
To get a break from it all, folks then and now turn to what the experts call maladaptive coping strategies. Folks try to drink it, shop it, medicate it, or eat it away. I saw someone on facebook putting up their Christmas tree before Thanksgiving in an attempt to “decorate” their troubles away! Escape, in all it’s many forms is one of the ways we try and cope.
Another method people use for coping is to slam the brakes on the world, trying to convert any forward momentum into heat and try to stop the world in some delusional, idealistic past. A time when memories radically mis-remember that things were better… the world wasn’t as confusing… back to a time when things were GREAT. Unfortunately, brakes work by using “dissipation” and when folks slam on the world’s brakes, all that progressive energy, inevitably gets turned into white-hot heat which is then thrown out into the world in the form of hatred, anger, bigotry, racism, violence and rage.
This might surprise you, but neither escaping the world nor dissipating the world’s crazy turn out to be the Jesus Way. Neither then nor now. Instead, Jesus says the way to deal with an off the rails world, is to STAND UP, RAISE YOUR HEADS, LOOK UP and SEE your redemption drawing near… We need to… LOOK UP. We need to LEAN IN. And we need to LIVE!
Every alert of breaking news draws our heads down into our phones, drawing us deeper into the depths. Heads down, diving deeper, we fester in the horribleness… don’t we? Jesus tells us instead to “LOOK UP!” Because when we raise our heads and look up, what we’ll see is Christ… present among us… standing right beside us in the eyes of our neighbors… even in the midst of all this mess! And in some mysterious way that I can NOT figure out for the life of me… when we look up we are promised a glimpse of God in Christ, making something new!
But LOOKING UP requires practice… training… repetition… exercise. We get a little bit of just that when we give each other a sign of God’s peace. We LOOK UP… We LEAN IN and WE SEE Christ in the eyes of the people we greet. In one another’s eyes, we’re reminded again and again that we are not alone.
We'll get another bit of practice when some striking bald fellow holds up the chalice and patten at the alter today. THAT invites us to look up… to get another REP of LOOKING UP practice from the worries of the world so that we can SEE, in some mysterious way, that Christ really is RIGHT HERE… RIGHT HERE with us in the bread and wine, transforming this crazy-train of a world even now with light and love and life.
It also happens when we shout, “Thanks be to God, Alleluia, Alleluia!” at the end of our worship. Because with that shout we LOOK UP, we see the Body ofChrist rising all around us. When we LEAN IN we see Christ alive in the eyes of our neighbors and when we hear one another shout Alleluia! We’re both inspired and empowered, not to try and ESCAPE the world or stop the world and get off, but to jump right INTO THE WORLD… right smack dab into the deep end of the crazy, and SHOW the world what it looks like to really LIVE this life we’ve been given! We shout “Alleluia!” because God has chosen US, and calls US all to cannonball into this pond we call life and let the ripples of kindness, compassion, generosity and love radiate out from this place far beyond where we might ever be able to see or imagine.
The world doesn’t need us hiding in fear. The world doesn’t need us trying to grind it to a stop. The world doesn’t need us looking for signs in the stars or the moon or in headlines or in breaking news. What the world needs… is for each and every one of us to LOOK UP, LEAN IN, AND LIVE the life we’ve been given as a gift from God. To jump into the world with an Alleluia cannonball that will soak all of creation from head to toe with the power of God’s love, transforming even this current world’s nut-job caused awful-ness into the life of abundant joy for ALL of creation that God made us to live! Our call for this Advent is to LOOK UP, LEAN IN, AND LIVE! Amen.
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