Shaken! [Advent 1C]
The Rev. Jeremiah Williamson
Luke 21:25-36
Shaken!
I know what it is like to be
shaken.
When I was a kid my family lived,
for a time, in this long brick ranch house.
It was built, I suspect, as something of a mansion; but by the time my
family bought it, it needed some updates and some repairs. But the main issue was that the neighborhood
had changed. Not in the way people often
mean that; it had changed from what was probably an old forest to something one
might describe as “shabby industrial.”
By the time we moved in there was a junk yard next door, which
frequently smelled of burning tires. And
in the hills, just a few hundred yards above the house, there was a coal mining
site.
Why I suspect the house was very
nice when it was built, was because it still had, by the time we moved in, some
very nice finishes. The kitchen had
these beautiful cherry cabinets. The
living room had a huge picture window.
And the dining room had this surprisingly elegant crystal
chandelier.
I'm not sure how long we had been
living in that house the first time it shook, but I can tell you: that first
time was pretty unsettling; it was scary.
As far as I could tell as a kid, our little valley had been hit by a
fairly significant earthquake. But that
was actually not the case at all. And
the shaking was not a one-time event; it would become a common occurrence in
that home. See, that house shook every
time the coal company blasted another hole in the earth. It was the detonation of dynamite that set
the house, and everyone in it, shaking.
And, I'll tell you, when the house was shaking, the last place you wanted
to be was under that elegant crystal chandelier.
It was an idiom come to life. There was literally something hanging over
your head. And also, it was quite
worrisome.
And that is today's Gospel lesson:
it is living under the chandelier while the foundations are shaking. Needless to say, that is a disconcerting
place to be.
And perhaps not the Gospel promise
we want during this season of Advent. We
look for this season to prepare us for the coming of the Christ-child – the baby in the manger scene: a
coming marked by serenity, when we, like Mary, can quietly ponder the meaning
of Jesus in our hearts – which we, of course, will do on a silent night, in a
horse-drawn sleigh, while the snow gently falls.
And while this Gospel does, in
fact, intend to prepare us for the coming of Christ, little in it is
serene. And yet, this is how we begin
our Advent season. Into this season of
hopeful expectation and joyous anticipation, comes the startling reality of a
world shaken, of lives shaken, of souls shaken.
We live in a time in which the
foundations that provided comfort and security for many have been shaken. Diana Butler Bass said in a recent interview,
“I think future generations are going to look back at us and recognize that
what we’re going through is really hard.”[1] The ground beneath our feet is being
shaken. The institutions that appeared
stable and timeless in the twentieth century can no longer be taken for
granted. We of course have seen this in
the Church; churches that refuse to adapt to the rigorous change of our modern
society find themselves battling to survive; churches that refuse to have their
doors shaken open to a world of postmodern pilgrims are full of empty
pews. Across the country, congregations
decades, even centuries old, dissolve into memory. Denominations, dioceses, parishes are forced
to be creative as attendance and contributions have shrunk, while health
insurance bills have grown, considerably.
The world has chosen speed over
stability; and the static concrete and steel of the last century is crumbling
in the wake of progress. Technology
continues to both shrink and expand the world in which we live. We are closer together and yet in many cases
farther apart. In real time, we share
the world's joys and triumphs. But also
its conflicts and violence are no longer remote newspaper reports; that are
tattooed on our hearts and minds, closer than ever before. The media pulses with vibrancy and fear. The scroll carries existential threats across
the bottom of our commercial breaks. The
world is shaking and we can follow it on twitter.
As our world shakes, things are
shaken loose. Judgment is really just
revelation. And we are confronted anew
with things that had been hidden from plain sight: it turns out the racism and
sexism and xenophobia that we had convinced ourselves were simply relics of the
past are very much alive, hiding in the storage bins of the human heart. As each individual voice is given a platform,
we discover the thrill and the danger of democracy. Powers fall, powers rise on a world stage;
humanity's capacity to do good and capacity to destroy seldom change but the
tools grow increasingly powerful. The
possibilities are more exciting than ever.
But also the world feels increasingly less secure, less stable, more
volatile. The foundations continue to
shake.
And all the while, as the
foundations shake beneath us, we have all of the worries of this life hanging
over our heads: terrorist attacks across the globe, travel warnings, forced
migrations and people displaced, global warming, tightening budgets, a very
uncertain future – for you, for your children, for your grandchildren. It's tough to have things hanging over your
head – especially when the ground is shaking beneath your feet.
In a culture that values safety and
security, that values comfort to that extent that we do, the shaking of our
foundations feels dangerous, even tragic.
And so politicians run on promises to restore some golden age that no
longer exists, to roll back the tide of inevitable change, to stop the
shaking. But maybe it's not so bad. Maybe we have grown too reliant on our
creature comforts. Maybe we need to be
shaken. Maybe we cannot understand
Advent until our foundations begin to crack.
Alfred Delp, a Roman priest in Nazi
Germany, lived in what he described as a “state of chaos and...hopelessness
and...darkness.” In a sermon he preached
on this very text, on the first Sunday of Advent 1941, he said, “Perhaps what
we modern people need most is to be genuinely shaken, so that where life is
grounded, we would feel its stability; and where life is unstable and
uncertain, immoral and unprincipled, we would know that, also, and endure it.”[2]
Unless we are shaken in this Advent
of our lives, we can never truly know in what we should place our trust. We place our trust in a lot of things: the
institutions of the past, the promises of the future, this present moment that
feels safe but also keeps passing us by.
The threat of Advent is that our foundations will continue to be shaken
until Christ becomes the only thing upon which we stand.
It is easy, when we read these
apocalyptic gospels, like today’s, to get caught up in the “when?”, to try to
crack the code, to try to decipher a future that feels so out of our
control. When will the shaking
stop? When will Jesus calm our worried
minds? When will Christ finally return
to set all things right? The waiting of
Advent is easier when there is a concrete end in sight. That is why this Church season we call Advent
is much more comfortable to navigate than is the Advent of our lives – this
indefinite period of waiting for Jesus to return, these two-thousand years
we've been on hold.
Of course Jesus gives no answer to
the “when?” He is much more interested
in a different question: how should we live while we wait?
The foundations are shaking. The worries of this life are pushing down on
us. The future is a thick fog. And Jesus gives us the most counter-intuitive
advice possible. The ground is
shaking? Stand up. The worries of this life hanging over you by
a thread? Raise your heads.
Paul Tillich says when our
foundations crumble, we have two choices: despair or faith. We can give into the devastating, corrupting
influence of fear. Or we can stand up,
raise our heads, and move into the fog of the future armed with nothing but
faith and hope.
Advent is a season of hope. Hope that looks into the future, recognizes
the challenges, feels the shaking, and stands up anyway. Martin Luther once said, “Even if I knew that
tomorrow the world would go to pieces, I would still plant my apple tree.” That is how we are to live while we
wait. We plant seeds for an uncertain
future because we believe that God has a dream for us and for this world that
is stronger than any nightmare in the forecast.
We invest in the kingdom of God that has not yet come. We give birth to children who will face
tremendous challenges; but we baptize those children because God has chosen
them to speak the Good News to tomorrow's despair.
The foundations are shaking. But stand up.
The worries of the future are hanging over us. But raise up your heads. The future is uncertain. But charge into it with faith and hope. Because God's plan for the future of this
world is redemption. And it is Advent:
our redemption is drawing near.
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