Stand up and raise your heads

a Sermon for Advent 1C
Text: Luke 21:25-36


We have a promise that God is with us, that we have a teacher and a guide. We have a promise that dreams can be fulfilled and that tomorrow can and will be a better place. We have opportunity and responsibility in our hands. We have the time and the place for this action: today, right here: to prepare ourselves. And we have one instruction: “stand up and raise your heads, because your redemption is drawing near.”

So here we are, at the end of Jesus’s ministry. On the first day of Advent. New Year’s Day in the Christian Calendar. New year, new gospel, so we dive into Luke; and in the gospel, we’re starting toward the end in chapter 21. This is one of the strange components of a Lectionary in which we don’t actually tell the story in order. We begin the year with Jesus telling us how it’s all going to end, and then we jump back to the beginning. And in the Spring, we have Lent, which hits the Temptations, and then jumps to Jesus’s final days. Then there’s Easter and Pentecost, which are chronologically sound, following Jesus’s death and resurrection, but then we get into the Season of Pentecost, where we rewind and go through Jesus’s actual teachings. All of which lead up to this one. At the beginning.

The teaching itself is a prophecy, not unlike the one from two weeks ago about the Temple. This one is bigger, though. This involves not just human stuff, but cosmological stuff: “the sun, the moon, and the stars”. And the global human response is distress—everywhere. The phrasing is truly appropriate for us as we deal with current warming trends in the oceans and news reports of icebergs that broke from the Antarctic ice shelf and are now drifting north toward New Zealand, while our region is still recovering from hurricanes and flooding: “The roaring of the sea and the waves” indeed!

I’m mindful of the fact that we don’t really know how we ought to take this type of talk. Some look at the Scriptures as something to decode. As if the secret to the end times is hidden within the text even though Jesus himself tells us that we won’t know “when the master of the house will come”. This is a cottage industry within Christianity, peaking of course with the Left Behind books. But this thinking has been with us for a long time—each time disproven by the world’s existence past the predicted date.

Another response that many have taken is to ignore this talk, either confining it to its time and place or by ignoring the graphic imagery. In either case, the purpose is to desensitize the scripture to something more palatable and less strident; depriving it of its power to affect us and make us feel a certain way. This seems just as harmful to the Scripture.

We seem to be less afraid of the details of the Scripture itself than we are about discussing what the end actually looks like. About what it means to stop being…us.

It is said that we have an obsession in our culture with youth. I think a more accurate expression of this is that we have an obsession with avoiding aging. We don’t want to be young, we just don’t want to be old. The now common practices of cosmetic surgery and taking pills to stave off the outward effects of aging serve as obvious proof of this. The issue isn’t about becoming children again (though for some, that may actually be the case), but something more elemental: our understanding of youth is that in youth, our sites are set on tomorrow. Youth is about promise and expectation and hope and anticipation. It is about what is coming in the future.

Middle age, then, comes to represent the potential realization of those dreams and hopes and expectations. It is the time in which we embody the future in a present. We then take on a caretaker roll—maintaining the world, the institutions, the practices of a person of a certain age. Our prescription for middle age is to live in the present.

This leaves our senior time as representing the past. Our bodies prevent us from doing the things that we did when we were younger and our appearance changes.

But the truth is that we prefer to think about what could be to what is and certainly prefer it to what was. We catalog aging as a process of losing hope and optimism, as we are overtaken by pessimism and “realistic” thinking. We fight idealism because our own lives have seen things that have brought anger into our hearts and tears to our eyes.

In the middle of this talk of destruction, confusion, and conflict, Jesus tells his disciples this: “Now when these things begin to take place, stand up and raise your heads, because your redemption is drawing near.” Jesus talks about the end of things, not as a source of destruction and devastation, but of fulfillment of expectations, of hopes, and of dreams. A time of the old becoming new. In death, we are born anew. We talked about this two weeks ago when we tackled the “mini apocalypse” in Mark—the destruction of the Temple and the birthpangs—but in this one, Jesus gives his disciples instructions: to hold up their heads and stand tall.

This isn’t about arrogance, indignation, or confrontation. This isn’t about feeling special or chosen. This isn’t even about feeling righteous. This is about believing. Believing that hardship leads to reward. Believing that we have somebody that is there for us when we feel all alone. Believing that, in spite of today, tomorrow will be better.

When Jesus tells his disciples to be ready, he doesn’t couple that with “because tomorrow the world will end,” but with “so that your hearts may not be weighed down”.

As is often the case, Jesus may as well be speaking right to us. This may as well be a direct line to our own time. Because sometimes we feel bad, our hearts feel pretty heavy. We look at tomorrow, not with hope and optimism, but with anxiety: because we fear loss; that something will be stripped from us. For some, this is the fear of having the car keys taken by a son or daughter—that tomorrow might be the day.

But Jesus tells us not to fear: not to be afraid of tomorrow. That we must hold our heads up to the light and see the world as it truly is. What we long for about youth is that freedom to not fear tomorrow, to not worry about what will happen this time next year or the year after that, and to not worry about loss. But who says that we don’t all have that freedom? Who says that we have to look at tomorrow with death-colored glasses? Who says that we can’t be hopeful dreamers?

We have a promise that God is with us, that we have a teacher and a guide. We have a promise that dreams can be fulfilled and that tomorrow can and will be a better place. We have opportunity and responsibility in our hands. We have the time and the place for this action: today, right here: to prepare ourselves. And we have one instruction: “stand up and raise your heads, because your redemption is drawing near.”