Sermons

Nov 27 - The Rev. Brian C. Taylor

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The sun and moon will be darkened, and the stars will fall from heaven. The angels will be sent out and gather the elect from the four winds. The Son of Man will come in clouds with great power and glory. And so Jesus says to all Keep alert, for you do not know when the time will come. Keep awake.

The early church wrote these words in order to warn their community about the immanent end of the world and the coming of a new one. The Roman Empire had recently decimated Israel, and their 1,000-year existence as a nation was over. The small and fragile Christian community was scattered and persecutions had begun. They went into hiding. Everywhere they looked it was death and disaster. It was the end of the world as they knew it.

At the time, they had no way of knowing what would come next. Their resurrection faith told them that new life would emerge from this darkness, but they had no way of knowing what form that new life would take. They thought that Jesus would come in the clouds with power and glory.

New life came in a different way. Jesus entered their hearts, their communities, eventually the Empire itself. Starting with the 4th century, the good news and good works of Jesus spread faster and farther than anyone could have imagined. Before long there were monasteries with thousands of men and women praying, Christian centers of learning, hospitals that showed mercy to the sick and the dying, and systematic care for widows, orphans, and the poor. Millions eventually came to believe in Jesus and his life-giving way.

And so at the end of the world as they knew it, the early church placed their faith in the One who makes all things new. Remarkably, they remained open to whatever new thing God would bring; it wasn’t the second coming of Jesus, but it was a big and glorious new thing.

This was no small thing. They could have held on, insisting that God’s kingdom would come into being with the restoration of the nation of Israel, calling people back into the Hebrew covenant, demanding that everyone get ready for the second coming of the Messiah. But they let this old vision go, and were open to the new thing that God was doing. They allowed the Spirit to move among them and bring about a different kind of kingdom with the flourishing of their faith all over Europe. They kept alert, they kept awake, and weren’t caught sleeping when God began to create a new thing.

The world as we know it is ending. It always is. But there are times in history when an era ends more definitively than others. The way we are in relationship to the earth is ending. We have quadrupled the population of our planet in the last hundred years. Man-made gases from our industrial societies are warming the ocean and the atmosphere, the polar ice cap is shrinking, and we’re headed into more monstrous hurricanes and floods, droughts, famines, diseases, and extinction of countless species. We can’t go on like this.

The way we are in relationship to one another is ending. With a much closer proximity to one another’s clashing cultures and values, with instant communication and a global economy, it no longer works to exploit the poor and pollute their land; it no longer works to be prejudiced towards those who differ, dismissing their pain and their convictions; it no longer works to go our separate way as a nation, ignoring world consensus, as if we are not answerable to anyone; it no longer works to ignore the root causes of violence, even when directed against us, and seek only to dominate others through sheer might and intimidation. Win-lose situations don’t work anymore in this shrunken and intimately connected world.

The way our religions hold together is ending. In our own Anglican Communion and Episcopal Church, two conflicting world views have come to a head, and they cannot continue to live together. One believes that morals evolve, and that scriptures and theology have always been influenced by human limitations, and therefore need to be re-evaluated in each generation. The other insists upon moral absolutes, and obedience to unchanging authority. We are only a small part of a worldwide religious split that is occurring everywhere – among Muslims, Jews, and others.

And so the world as we know it is ending. In all these ways we can try to hold on to the old world even as it is passing away. We can insist on our individualistic freedom to consume to our hearts’ delight and exploit the earth; we can charge ahead into foreign wars, confident in the inevitable triumph of the American way; we can demand that everyone stick to old moral values and biblical interpretations. But it won’t work. The old world is passing away.

There was an old joke that we told about our church back in the 1970’s when we were arguing about the passing of our 1928 Prayer Book with its Elizabethan language, and the end of the all-male priesthood. Do you know how many Episcopalians it takes to change a lightbulb? Five. One to install the new one, and four to sit around and complain about how much better the old, burned out one was.

An old world is passing away in our generation. A new one is struggling to come into being. Stay alert. Keep awake, for you don’t know when or how or in what form the master will come, and you don’t want to be caught sleeping, or holding on desperately to a thing that is dying.

I hope that we will learn to live more ecologically, reduce the world’s population growth, be much more careful about building international consensus, find alternatives to war to solve our problems, stop exploiting the many poor so that the few rich can benefit, and go forward as an Episcopal Church with the courage to proclaim to the world a fresh, progressive, inclusive, and yet very traditional religious view.

But these are only my wishes. I can’t see the future, any more than the early church could see theirs. All I know that the world as we know it is ending. I have a resurrection faith that tells me that God will make things new; and like the early church, all we can do is stay awake and try to remain open to a new thing that God may be doing among us.

What is true for us as a world is also true for each of us personally. Some of you are going through a separation or divorce. Some of you are grieving the death of a loved one. Everything you knew, everything you thought was solid - all the ways you related to time, meals, companionship, relatives, holidays, money, children, your home, everything is different and you are disoriented.

Or maybe some less dramatic chapter of your life is ending, and you feel that you have turned a corner but don’t know where to go next. Your job has grown stale, your faith has grown cold, relationships might be confusing right now, the kids are acting out or have left home, you’re losing your health or your youthful strength…something is ending, and you’re disoriented. We all go through these times. And when we’re in them, we can’t see the future. It is tempting to hold on to the way things used to be, and to be afraid of the unknown future.

In these times, we’re called to do what the early church did in their times. We can let go of an old world that is passing away, and we can remain open, in faith, to the One who makes all things new. We can remain open to the new life that God will bring to us. It may not look like our past; it may surprise us; it may require us to change. But if we allow it to come into being, rather than holding on to something that is dying, it will be life, and it will be good.

This is the essential Advent message. Like a pregnant woman, we are to keep alert, nurturing the hidden life that we believe is growing within and among us. Even as the world as we know it is ending, even as our personal lives are changing, we are to look to the Lord in patience and faith. Something new is striving to be born.

Keep alert, for you do not know when the time will come. Keep awake. Watch for the coming of the Lord.