Christian Life-Cleaning.

Luke 21:25-36

December 2, 2018 

I.

I’ve been reading a book called The Gentle Art of Swedish Death Cleaning.  In Sweden they have a tradition in which older people make a point of divesting themselves of their unwanted possessions so that after they are no longer on the planet their heirs are not oppressed by the overwhelming task of sorting through decades of their stuff.  

I get the impression that this has kind of grown into a decluttering movement that even younger people engage in, though it is still called “death cleaning.”  In addition to making life easier for the people who have to clean up after us when we’re gone, there is a value to living more simply, directly, and lightly, without so much distracting, demanding stuff in our lives.     

I thought of that when I was reflecting on the Lord’s words here: “Be on guard so that your hearts are not weighed down with dissipation and drunkenness and the worries of this life….  Be alert at all times!”  There is a sense that Jesus advises us to live in a more direct, unencumbered, and uncluttered way, to get rid of the distracting and consuming non-essential junk in our lives, to pare things down to what we need as we wait for the end to come.

He starts this passage with a list of natural disasters, and it is as if he is saying, “There are storms coming so grab only what you really need and can carry so you can get out quickly.”  I am reminded of the character of Jacob Marley in A Christmas Carol, who appears from death weighed down by heavy chains and coin-boxes representing the stuff he greedily collected in his earthly life.  We say about our wealth that we certainly “can’t take it with us” in any material way; but I wonder if we don’t remain spiritually burdened by the clutter and the junk, the possessions and the “assets,” the mentality and feelings we hoard, cherish, and store up.

Our lives are so full and cluttered, congested even.  It is no coincidence that the situation in our basements, attics, and storage units reflects the condition of the arteries feeding our hearts, or the shape of some of our bodies, which also reflects our in-boxes, planners, and to-do lists, and the character of our landfills, and what Rt 287 looks like at 5:30 on a weekday afternoon.  Even the very atmosphere of the planet is filling up with our waste products.

There are consequences that accompany all of this.  Congestion is lethal.  I speak as a veteran of a myocardial infarction myself.  Congestion and blockage obstruct and prevent the necessary flow of life.  Life is movement and freedom.  To shut it down is to perish.  It is to starve, wither, and die.  Necrosis.      

What we need, the Lord says, is clarity, lightness, simplicity, focus, and single-mindedness.  We need room and space and openness.  We need a receptivity we do not have if our hands and arms and lives are already full of things we are carrying: responsibilities, worries, duties, tasks….  We need a quality of emptiness that may be filled by what is coming.

II.

The point of all this of course is that the end is coming.  That is the whole focus of the season of Advent.  It is about the coming of the Lord, both the first time and at least as importantly the next time, the last time.  For Christ, the love of God, is the end, in the sense of the goal, purpose, meaning, and destination, of all of life.  Christ comes to restore all things.

Jesus never says when this will all happen, which leads me to suspect that there is a sense in which it is always happening.  Jesus proclaims the nearness of the Kingdom of God at the very beginning of his ministry, as well as here at the end.  I wonder if he isn’t telling us that the Kingdom, the End, isn’t always near, if we aren’t always on the very verge of it, if it isn’t ready to break in at any time.

I mean, every generation has heard these words and then looked out the window and noticed, Yo, there are signs in the sun, the moon, and the stars out there now!  There is distress among nations now!  There is confusion now about “the roaring of the sea and the waves”!   People today are nervous, anxious, and fearful, wondering what is coming upon the world, fainting from fear and foreboding about the future.  

On the one hand these things have always happened.  On the other hand it is hard not to imagine that a lot of it is actually worse these days.  Earthquakes, hurricanes, floods, droughts, tsunamis, famines, wild-fires.  Today’s Times has a whole long article about the unprecedented decline of the global insect population, and the brewing consequences of this for all of us.  Anyone taking the pulse of the planet these days has to be concerned.

If Christ is coming to restore all things, that will not be a very comfortable or pleasant experience for people who have invested themselves in maintaining the conditions that spawned our congestion.  We’re going to find out that God cares more about the planet than about our job, our money, our property, or even our individual existence.  We should not imagine that our redemption and the restoration of creation is going to involve some divine affirmation of our lifestyle and values, ideologies and institutions.  It’s not.

The end is Jesus Christ, and everything not conforming to him, to the world as he creates it, to the practices and values he embodies and teaches, will be destroyed.  Injustice, inequality, greed, theft, gluttony, lust, anger, fear, hatred, slavery, colonialism, rape… all the wanton and manifold ways of taking, extracting, grabbing, stealing, hoarding, and owning will be ruined and brought down.  God does not tolerate them.  If you trash God’s vineyard there will literally be hell to pay.

III.

The central image Jesus uses here is that of the trees, and how they portend the coming of summer when their buds get soft and green and their leaves start sprouting.  This can happen in March or even February for some trees around here, when there is still a lot of winter to go.  And yet the trees have enough inherent faith to start the business of leafing out and eventually bearing fruit, based not on the changing daily weather, but on the more subtle fact of increasing light, and a deeper esoteric knowledge of planetary cycles.  The trees tell us that what is coming is about life; it will only be a disaster for winter, ice, darkness, and death.

Just as labor pains resolve in the emergence of new life, and just as the trees’ rebirth begins in the dead of winter, so Jesus is saying that the turbulence of our present time does not point to extinction, but to renewal, restoration, and redemption.  “When these things begin to take place,” he says, “stand up and raise your heads, because your redemption is drawing near.”  This from someone who knows he is going to be nailed to a Roman cross and left to die in only a few days.  

Even in the darkest time when everything seems to be falling apart, when the forces of evil seem to be most invincible, nevertheless we live and we trust in the ultimate truth of resurrection.  Hold your head up!  Be alert!  Stand before the Son of Man!  Major stuff is going to go down.  The old heaven and earth as we thought we knew them will pass away; everything is going to change.  But the Word of the Lord will not pass away.  “It’s the end of the world as we know it; and I feel fine,” as REM used to sing.

The Word of the Lord is love.  The Word of the Lord is compassion.  This is what does not pass away.  He is life and light and forgiveness and healing.  He is blessing and peace and goodness and equality.  He is welcome, inclusion, and truth.  And he is always here, embedded and encoded in everything that he created at the beginning.  The Word of the Lord is Jesus Christ, the Son of Man.  

And all flesh shall see the coming of the Son of Man.  He will return the same way he ascended, we are told.  In the ascension, when Jesus enters heaven, he does not physically go to some coordinates in the sky.  That’s why, in that story in Acts 1, the disciples are instructed not to spend their time looking up into the sky.  In the ascension, the Lord sort of goes… everywhere.  To ascend into heaven is a way of saying that he expands, like light, to fill all things.  I wonder if we shouldn’t look for him, not to descend from the literal sky, but to emerge within and among us from anywhere.   

Christ returns and is made real in the worship and actions of all who trust, obey, and follow him.  He comes in the clouds.  Clouds have at least two meanings in Scripture: the first has to do with worship, which in those days involved clouds of incense as in the Temple where this gospel began, with Zechariah back in chapter 1.  And he also comes in another cloud, the “cloud of witnesses” who are the believers, professing his name and doing his will, whose bodies constitute his Temple, and who are collectively his Body in the world.  Christ returns in the worship and service of his people, gathered in gospel communities.

IV.

Advent therefore is a kind of “Christian life-cleaning,” a blowing out, cleansing, emptying, divesting, and opening for the emergence of God’s life with, within, and among us.  It is clearing a space; it is giving up what weighs us down.  It is about removing the congestion and the blockages in our lives so God’s love and saving energy may flow through us.  It is about making room in our hearts and in our world for the Lord Jesus to be born.

Heaven and earth are always passing away.  That’s not going to be any fun for anybody.  That process is likely to get worse.  Our ego-centric addictions have spawned institutions that are systematically destroying the planet and people.  They are not going away quietly.

But we stand on the Word of God, the word of hope, joy, peace, and love which we lift up in this season.  We live in his light, which the darkness cannot overcome.  And God forms us into a community of sharing and generosity, non-violence and forgiveness, acceptance and healing.  God opens us up so that the love poured into our hearts may also pour through us into our world.

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