Get Busy!

Jeremiah 33:14-16

1 Thessalonians 3:9-13

Luke 21:25-36

November 29, 2015

I.

“Be on guard,” says the Lord Jesus, “so that your hearts are not weighed down with dissipation and drunkenness and the worries of this life, and that day does not 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.”

These are not words we will ever see in a Christmas card, or fancily calligraphed across the front of a store, with angels and candycanes.  Especially not a liquor store, I suppose, or a bar.  

When Jesus urges us to “be alert” or stay awake he is saying that we need to stay present, connected, aware, and conscious of the truth.  He means we must not allow ourselves to fall into the sleepwalking existence, the blind and lame ways of our ego-centric personalities, and the societies they spawn.  He is saying we must not let the fears and anxieties of our day-to-day life, and the usual strategies we employ to numb ourselves to them, sink us even further into unconsciousness.  He means don’t become so addicted and comfortable in the darkness that we forget that it is darkness, and so become immune and unaware of the Human One, the Son of Man, the Light that is coming.

It is a very counter-cultural message, and it always has been.  Our economies feed on our anxieties, fears, weaknesses, losses, liabilities, and bad memories.  They inform us that everything would be better if we would just buy something.  In Jesus’ day most people were pretty much limited to alcohol as the way to deal with anxiety; that’s why he talks about “drunkenness” here.  

Today we have far more sophisticated technologies for escaping reality.  This is the mentality behind those absurd and ridiculous commercials for prescription drugs, with all the happy people doing happy things together (and the obligatory, long list of potential side-effects rattled off at the end).  But this whole “shopping season” thing is really pretty much the same thing.  Buying stuff is the quintessential American narcotic.

I get it.  I know what it’s like to shift into shopping-Zombie mode, to imagine that if I just buy that book, CD, or electronic device my life will finally be complete and fulfilled.  It doesn’t work.  It is a distraction.  

And the time of year when this distraction is most powerful and pervasive, is now.  I know I am overstating it when I call it a “War on Advent.”  But the world is so invested in, and profits so profoundly from, our being asleep, that it will do everything it can to keep us from waking up to what is real.  The world wants us dissipated, inebriated, intoxicated, asleep, and hungover.  

As long as we are unconscious, the other signs that appear around us will go unheeded and misunderstood.  What the Lord elsewhere calls “the labor pains” of creation will feel like the terrifying end of the world if we are asleep to what is inevitably coming: new life and blessing, redemption and shalom!

II.

This is what the prophet Jeremiah is looking forward to.  The renewal, restoration, and revelation of the true nature of what God has breathed into being.  We see this in many of the prophets; some of Isaiah’s version of this vision we will hear each week as we light the Advent candles.

It is imperative that we hold on to this insight about what is “coming” if we are to muster the confidence to let go of our fears and anxieties, let go of our impulse to narcotize ourselves, and keep awake, aware, conscious, and present to what God is doing in the world.

And it is my view that what is “coming” is not some event relegated to the future, probably the remote future, but the true nature of reality that has always been here and available to us, but which we do not perceive or accept.  From our human perspective, the blessing, peace, and goodness of this order seems like it is arriving from some other place.  That is certainly the way we talk about it.  I mean, Jeremiah seems to use all these future tenses here, as if he refers to something that hasn’t happened yet.  And one one level these things haven’t happened yet.  But it is also just the way we speak, like when we say “the sun will rise tomorrow,” because that’s what it looks like, when we know that the sun isn’t going anywhere.  Our part of the planet is turning to face it, is all.

It is not really God who changes, moves, or “comes;” it is we who are gradually able to see and dwell within a reality that is really always here. 
We are the ones who do the changing, growing, evolving, and opening, so that we are able to see more clearly what is there.  But it looks like it is coming to us.  So this “coming of God” is a manner of speaking.

This is important because it is too easy to get lazy and passive and even complacent with our “waiting.”  We can fall back to sleep, like the maidens in Jesus’ parable in Matthew 25, whom today’s Introit was about.  

That’s why I brought with me today as an object lesson this book.  I have written and spoken about it before; it’s called The Magic Eye.  As you may know, it is full of these colorful, computer-generated designs that on the surface look chaotic, random, abstract, arbitrary, and not particularly intelligible.  But if you stare at them in a certain way, eventually you may notice that remarkable three-dimensional images start to emerge.  Initially invisible, the image is encoded in the picture; the picture, the ink on the paper, doesn’t change.  What changes is you, the observer.  And as you see this image begin to form, you say to yourself, “It’s coming!  It’s coming!  It’s almost here!”

Nothing is “coming”!  What is changing is you, the observer.  Something inside you, in your brain, shifts and grows and becomes able to interpret the visual data in a new way, revealing something really cool that was always there.  You just couldn’t decode it until some adjustment was made in you.

III.

This is what faith is like.  To the world of our ego-centric, personality-driven, socially-constructed existence, the data of faith doesn’t look any different from normal experience.  Everyone is looking at the same data, the same crazy patchwork of shapes and colors, and trying to make rational sense of it.  

So to most of us, all that’s going on in Bethlehem is a child born in a barn to refugee parents.  All that’s going on at Calvary is another traitor being executed by the Romans.  The mystery, meaning, and deeper truth does not occur to many of us; it is invisible, and the powers want to keep it that way, so that our existence is only about doing our duty in the economy making them rich, until we die.

But by faith, by that quality of perception and reception that opens within us, we see and understand differently.  We are able to see more dimensions.  We perceive God’s living Presence emerging in the world.  We perceive in Bethlehem the miraculous birth of God-Incarnate; we perceive on Calvary the amazing love offering of God for the life of the world.  And we realize that these are not one-time-only historical events, but signs and revelations of the ultimate truth of the whole universe.  We don’t just remember them in the sense of thinking about them and bringing them to mind; we remember them by inhabiting and living these truths every day. 

So that when the apostle Paul, writing to the church in Thessalonica, says, “May the Lord make you increase and abound in love for one another and for all, just as we abound in love for you.  And may he so strengthen your hearts in holiness that you may be blameless before our God and Father at the coming of our Lord Jesus with all his saints,” he doesn’t just mean keep it together until this far-off future event.  He means that the love for each other and for all, and the holiness they share together now, is the coming of the Lord Jesus.  Christ is not just the destination, he is the way.  He is the journey.  He is the quality of our relationships and community now. 

Jesus is not like the boss returning from lunch so everyone in the office has to stop goofing off and get back to work.  I do not agree with the bumper-sticker that says: “Jesus is coming: look busy!”  Jesus comes in the way we are busy following, obeying, worshiping, and serving him and our neighbors today.  He emerges in the way we live together today.  That’s way Paul elsewhere writes, “See, now is the acceptable time; now is the day of salvation” (2 Corinthians 6:2b).    

It is not an accident that Jesus refers to himself as “the Way,” and that the early church refers to itself by the same words: “the Way.”  The gathering of disciples is the Body of Christ; we are Christ’s Presence in the world by the power of the Spirit.  His coming happens in our waiting, our preparing, our equipping, and our discipleship.  If it doesn’t happen here and now, there is no point to expecting it to happen tomorrow.

IV.

The point of the season of Advent, then, is to wake us up and make us present to what God is doing with, within, and among us, now.  It is not like this is not something that we need to be about all the time; it’s just that in Advent we lift up for special attention the dimension of God’s coming.  Advent is about relaxing, letting go of our anxieties and fears, our habits and ways of thinking, our sleepwalking existence, and becoming alert and aware of what is happening now, what is coming now, what is always arriving among and within us.  

For at the heart of reality, of course, is Jesus Christ, through whom all things were made, who saves us by coming into our existence, taking on our life, and revealing true humanity and true divinity at the same time.  Knowledge of this truth is what is always coming to us in our chronic separation from God, because this truth is also simultaneously always here.    

+++++++