Rediscovering Jesus: Redeemer

You can see a video of this sermon at this link.

1 Corinthians 1: 18-31

I’d ask you as we begin today to take a few moments just to look at the cross we have at the front of our sanctuary. 

 

What are the ideas that come to mind as you look at it?

Pause.

 

It’s a beautiful cross. We have a similar one over our main entrance, reflected in the window behind it, another on the outer wall of this sanctuary facing Gorham Street.

 

Clearly, it is not only a beautiful cross, but also an important symbol of this congregation. And the cross – in whatever shape – is one of the identifying symbols of Christianity throughout the world. 

 

Among the things I think about when I look at a cross is a simple question: Why did Jesus have to die on a cross? If only the answer were as simple as the question.

 

Last week, Pastor Jessica in her sermon invited us to go ice skating with Jesus on Lake Mendota.  So today I am going to go ice skating with Jesus -- on the thin ice out there. Trying to make sense of what the crucifixion was all about has been one of the great controversies in the history of Christianity.

As a kid, I learned a simple – and perhaps the most common -  explanation. Jesus died for my sins. He was my redeemer. And just to make sure that I understood that I had something to do with this, every time I sinned – whatever that meant as an eight-year old – I was pounding one of those nails a little farther into Jesus’ hand. But, thank goodness, he suffered so that God would not hold my sins against me. 

 

Thank you, Jesus!

 

In theological terms, this whole issue is called atonement. As luck would have it, I wrote my thesis for my theology degree about atonement. Don’t worry – I am not going to read my thesis here for you today. (If you are up for reading 75 pages about atonement, I’d be happy to email it to you.)

 

What I would like to do, though, is suggest that there are many ways to think about why Jesus died on the cross. How we think about that can actually affect how we live our lives as followers of Jesus.

 

Even though the phrasing “Jesus died for our sins” is one of the most common explanations, it is hardly the only one. Yes, it is woven through familiar hymns and prayers.  

 

Think about that classic hymn, “The Old Rugged Cross.” 
“On a hill far away stood an old rugged cross,” it begins. 

 

And the second verse says:  

“In that old rugged cross, stained with blood so divine,

A wondrous beauty I see,

For ’twas on that old cross Jesus suffered and died,

To pardon and sanctify me.”

 

All of this comes out of a time when people put Jesus’ death into a model of transactions – maybe calming an angry god with a sacrifice or settling a debt in court. 

Spiritual guide and Franciscan priest Richard Rohr described this as “the strange idea that before God could love us God needed and demanded Jesus to be a blood sacrifice to atone for our sin-drenched humanity.”

 

We talk a lot in our time, in this congregation, about God’s love and God’s grace, saying that God loves us, no matter what. No matter what, God loves us. God did not need Jesus to be killed to make things right with humanity. 

 

So I’m back to my question. Why did Jesus have to be killed on a cross?

There are the very concrete realities he faced. His teachings, the way he lived challenged both the religious and political establishments of his time. The Temple leaders and the Roman occupiers held power and they were threatened by this wandering rabbi.

 

We know all too well what can happen when power is challenged, especially if that power thinks it is impervious to the will of the people or to the basic rights of humanity. 

 

We have seen that play out over and over around the world – in the massacres of the indigenous people here, in the colonizers in Africa and Asia and Latin America, in the Israeli occupation of Palestine, in the beatings and murders of people seeking a more just society. 

 

We have witnessed that abuse of power once again in the last few days with the horrifying videos of five Memphis police officers pummeling Tyre Nichols to death, apparently as a way of using brutally to show that they had power.

 

And we have seen the cross perverted into a sign justifying violence, whether on the shields of crusaders in the Middle Ages or on flags as insurrectionists stormed the U.S Capitol on Jan. 6 two years ago.  White nationalists, white supremacists, neo-Nazis have taken that image of the cross that we honor and appropriated it into a symbol of hate.

 

Yes, we live in a world where people are killed for challenging power. That’s what happened to Jesus.

 

The earliest Christians struggled with that, as we heard in that letter from Paul to the people of Corinth that was our scripture reading for today.

 

“The message about the cross is foolishness to those who are perishing, but to us who are being saved it is the power of God… we proclaim Christ crucified, a stumbling block to Jews and foolishness to Gentiles, but to those who are the called, both Jews and Greeks, Christ (is) the power of God and the wisdom of God.”

 

Their leader had not only been tortured and killed, but all this had happened in the most public and humiliating way. Clearly a crucified leader was a stumbling block for those who might consider joining his followers. Those followers – and those they were talking to – would have to make that leap of faith to the Resurrection for the crucifixion to make any sense.

 

The cross, after all, does not stand alone. That nimbus – that circle – around our cross can be a reminder that there is life beyond the suffering and death of Jesus. And it can be a reminder that Jesus’ suffering and death need not be explained simply as a sacrificial sin offering but as one piece of a life that reconciled  humanity to divinity, that took the worst humanity had to offer and transformed it from the cross through the resurrection.

 

Having said all this, I don’t want to diminish the importance for some folks of their commitment to the idea that Jesus died on their behalf. That is a belief that clearly has deep roots in Christian history, even in the Gospels themselves.

 

There was the time Jesus was talking under the cover of darkness with Nicodemus when he said one of the most quoted sentences from the Gospels: “For God so loved the world that he gave his only Son so that everyone who believes in him may not perish but may have eternal life.” That’s the verse – John 3:16 – you sometimes see on signs at sporting events and other places where Christians choose to publicly proclaim one manifestation of God’s love.

 

Jesus talked about himself as the Good Shepherd who would lay down his life for his sheep. John in his Gospel uses the image of the Lamb of God, connecting Jesus to the lamb sacrificed for the Jewish Passover meal, although in Judaism, that is not done as an atonement for sin but as a remembrance of the Exodus journey to freedom from slavery.

 

In the Gospel according to Matthew – but only in that Gospel – Jesus says as he gives the cup of wine to his closest followers, “this is my blood of the covenant, which is poured out for many for the forgiveness of sins.”

 

That idea that Jesus died to save us – that Jesus is our Redeemer – can give us a degree of confidence in the way we live our lives, can be an invitation to gratitude for the life and death of Jesus.

For me, though, it is also an understanding that has problems – as do all of the understandings of why Jesus died on the cross.   I’m uncomfortable with the idea that God chose to send his son to die. I’m not convinced that each mistake I make is another hammer blow to those nails. As I said at the beginning, it’s a simple question with complicated answers.

 

Let me offer just a few other ideas about all this.

 

One comes from two contemporary writers – Will Willimon, a retired Methodist bishop, and Stanley Hauerwas, a theologian who has taught at Duke and Notre Dame among other places.  They wrote about the role sin played in the execution of Jesus.

 

They describe those sins as religious and government leaders lining up to protect their powers, allies abandoning him, bystanders mocking him. Violence is used to try to solve a “problem.” Yet on the cross, Jesus asks God to forgive those who are doing this to him. 

That, Willimon and Hauerwas say, “throws a monkey wrench in to the eternal wheel of retribution and vengeance.”

 

I don’t think a monkey wrench hanging over our sanctuary would be quite as beautiful as our cross, but it is a neat image of how Jesus’ actions as he was dying offered a very different way to respond to violence. This does not let violence have the last word. And the resurrection does not let death have the last word either. From that, I can draw hope as I navigate the realities of our world today.

 

Another idea comes from Richard Rohr, who I mentioned earlier. He summarized the teaching of one of his theological heroes named John Duns Scotus this way: “Jesus did not come to change the mind of God about humanity (it did not need changing)! Jesus came to change the mind of humanity about God.”

 

Instead of counting sins, weighting guilt, punishing people, Jesus offered a new world where, in Rohr’s words, “God's abundance has made any economy of merit, sacrifice, reparation, or atonement both unhelpful and unnecessary.”

 

When we change the trajectory from what we and others do wrong to what God’s love offers all, then we can be reconciled to each other and to God. And reconciliation to God is really at the heart of all of this.

 

One more way I like to think about all of this. 

 

It seems to me one of the continuing themes of Jesus’ life was about forgiveness. When we say the prayer each Sunday – and other times as well – that Jesus taught his followers, we say, depending on our backgrounds, forgives us our debts – or our trespasses – or our sins – as we forgive others.  

 

We can say that knowing how Jesus assured us that God forgives us as well, knowing that Jesus forgave even  those who tortured and killed, who abandoned and mocked him.

 

That’s a transformation – not a transaction. 

 

For that, I give thanks to God.

 

 

 

 

A Year With The Psalms

You can find a video of the sermon (and the rest of the service) here.

Psalm 1 (The Message), Psalm 150 (NRSVUE)

Normally, I am pretty bad at sustaining New Year’s resolutions. I imagine there are more than a few people here who could put me to shame on that. And I imagine there are also a few people nodding their heads saying, “Yup, I sure know how that goes.”

 

But last year, I made a resolution that I actually kept. Well, mostly kept. Close enough.

I decided each morning I would read a Psalm – those fascinating, confounding, comforting, challenging, inspiring poems and songs that make up one of the most famous books in the Hebrew Bible.

I started with Psalm Number One – the psalm you heard a few moments ago in the poetic paraphrase from Eugene Peterson in The Message.  Then I would go to the next one. And the next one. After 150 days – that’s how many Psalms there are and why I also read Psalm 150 this morning – I’d start over. That gets me through 300 days of the year. And then I started again, hitting Psalm 61 yesterday.

Wait, say all you math majors out there. There are 365 days in the year. Three hundred Psalms plus 61 more does not get you to 365. Like I said, I mostly kept that resolution.

 

What I want to dive into today is the way reading the Psalms – praying the Psalms, reflecting on them – gave me a chance to explore my relationship with God, with the people in my world, with myself. 

 

This is hardly a novel idea. In monasteries all over the world, people pray all 150 Psalms each week. That makes me feel like a bit of a slacker. The Psalms show up in Jewish worship and in Christian worship on a regular basis.

They also show up in this conversation in 2015 between the famous rock singer Bono of the group U2 and Eugene Peterson, that Presbyterian minister who did such an engaging translation of the Bible.  Listen to what Bono had to say about the Psalms: https://youtu.be/-l40S5e90KY?t=657 (from 10:57 to 11:50)

 

Bono is hardly the only artist, scholar, writer, poet to be fascinated by the Psalms.

 

Our own Barry Sherbeck started a project a few years back. He described it to me this way: “I'm distilling each Psalm into a haiku and image. Some Psalms might require a trio of these rather than just one.”

 

Here’s one example from Barry. It is his adaptation of Psalm 121. That Psalm begins with these words:

I lift up my eyes to the hills—
    from where will my help come?
My help comes from the Lord,
    who made heaven and earth.

 

Here's Barry’s haiku – a brief Japanese form of poetry – and his photo of the hills in Rwanda at morning time:

hands open, palms up
watching, waiting, listening
looking to the hills

 

Barry is using a book by an author named Nan Merrill as one source of inspiration. In that book, Psalms for Praying, Merrill points out one of the challenges for contemporary readers of the Psalms and tries to offer an alternative, a sort of companion to use in dialogue with the original Psalms. 

 

She wrote: “The Psalms of the Hebrew Scripture often reflect a patriarchal society based on fear and guilt that projects evil and sin onto outer enemies. Psalms for Praying reflects the reciprocity of Divine Love that opens the heart to forgiveness, reconciliation and healing.”

 

I know I’ve had my share of struggles with the Psalms over the past year. Some are extraordinarily comforting. I’ll bet most of you are familiar with Psalm 23: “The Lord is my shepherd, I shall not want.” 

 

There are the reassuring words in Psalm 46 – “God is our refuge and our strength, a very present help in the time of trouble” with the vital reminder at the end to “Be still and know that I am God.”

 

Ah, yes, you are God. Not me. Help me to remember that one, O God. 

 

And when I stroll off the path of God’s ways, there is always Psalm 51 that Sharol wove into our time of confession today: “Have mercy on me, O God, because of your unfailing love. Because of your great compassion, blot out the stain of my sins.  Wash me clean from my guilt. Purify me from my sin.  For I recognize my shameful deeds-- they haunt me day and night.”

 

And when I doubt whether God could forgive me, there is Psalm 103 – “Bless the Lord, O my soul…do not forget all of God’s benefits – who forgives all your iniquity…who redeems your life from the pit, who crowns you with steadfast love and mercy.”

 

Those are Psalms that help me explore my relationship with God – and God’s relationship with me.

 

But still, there are all these discomforting moments in the Psalms. We lament with the Jewish people when they were in exile in Babylon as they sing in Psalm 137: 

“By the waters of Babylon, there we sat down and wept when we remembered Zion. On the willows there we hung our harps.” 

 

Then the lament turns to revenge: Addressing Babylon, the Psalm ends with these words we don’t often read in church: “Happy shall they be who pay you back what you have done to us. Happy shall they be who take your little ones and dash them against the rock!”

 

Yikes! 

C.S. Lewis, who you may know best as the author of the fantasy novels The Chronicles of Narnia, was also a person who dove deeply into his faith.

 

Lewis, in his book Reflections on the Psalms, offers one way to think about what he calls the curses in the Psalms. He writes: “They are indeed devilish. But we must also think of those who made them so. Their hatreds are a reaction to something. Such hatreds are the kind of thing that cruelty and injustice, by a sort of natural law, produce.”

 

That’s the thing about the Psalms. They have, as Bono said, “this rawness, this brutal honesty.”

 

Just think about the Psalm Jesus used when he was dying on the cross: “My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?”

That’s all that’s quoted from Jesus in the Gospels according to Matthew and Mark as they describe his agony on the cross.  But Psalm 22 goes on:

Why are you so far from helping me, from the words of my groaning?
O my God, I cry by day, but you do not answer; 

and by night but find no rest.

 

And then it says:

 

I am poured out like water, and all my bones are out of joint;
my heart is like wax; it is melted within my breast;

my mouth is dried up like a broken piece of pottery

and my tongue sticks to my jaws;

lay me in the dust of death. 

For dogs are all around me;

a company of evildoers encircles me; 

they bound my hands and feet.

 

This is very tough stuff. 

 

So we struggle with the Psalms. 

 

They are not stitched together in a narrative arc. They are a collection of 150 poems, songs, meditations written by many people – not just by the Israelite king, David, to whom many are attributed. 

 

They are not chronological. Psalm 68 – a Psalm that serves as a victory Psalm for the Israelites over their enemies – is thought to be one of the earliest writings included in the Hebrew Bible. Some of them date to the time before that exile to Babylon, others came later. 

 

There are historical references to Jewish history that are hard for us to understand in 21^st century America. 

 

There are lots of references to defeating enemies, which Nan Merrill in her Praying the Psalmsbook shifts from the enemies without to the enemies within each of us. But that still is challenging as we read them or pray them or meditate on them.

 

Martin Luther – the person who set off the Protestant Reformation in the 1500s, wrote in his preface to his translation of the Psalms into German that “everyone in whatever situation they may be, finds in that situation Psalms and words that fit their case.”

 

There’s a scripture scholar in our time by the name of Walter Brueggemann. He has offered what I find to be a useful way to think about the range of the Psalms. 

 

Some of them he calls Psalms of Orientation – Psalms that express “the joy, delight, goodness, coherence and reliability of God, God’s creation and God’s law.”

Then there are Psalms of Disorientation – Psalms that reflect what Brueggemann calls “the anguished seasons of hurt, alienation, suffering and death.” He calls them complaint songs.

And then there are the Psalms of New Orientation, when God makes things new in surprising ways, transforming humanity in the process. 

That’s a lot like our lives, isn’t it? Sometimes oriented, sometimes disoriented, sometimes finding something new that orients us in a totally different and good way. 

 

Think back a moment to the dire situation described in Psalm 22, where the writer feels forsaken by God. But the Psalm does not end there. Suddenly, there are words of hope. Listen:

 

But you, O Lord, do not be far away!
O my help, come quickly to my aid!
Deliver my soul from the sword, my life from the power of the dog!
Save me from the mouth of the lion!

 

From the horns of the wild oxen you have rescued me.

I will tell of your name to my brothers and sisters; 

in the midst of the congregation I will praise you.

 

This is part of what I find fascinating in the Psalms. One moment they seem predictable. Then they catch me by surprise. They may give words to my feelings or they may just leave me puzzled. And that’s OK.

 

Someone who has devoted a lot of times to interpreting the Psalms is Richard Bruxvoort Colligan, who lives near Dubuque. He describes himself as “a freelance psalmist serving the wider, ever-evolving church.” Through his Psalm Immersion Project, he is writing new songs that try to capture the essence of each Psalm. And sometimes, he adds video and dance, like he did with this setting of Psalm 116. 

The words of the first four verses from Eugene Peterson’s The Message read like this:
I love God because he listened to me,  listened as I begged for mercy.
He listened so intently  as I laid out my case before him.
Death stared me in the face,  hell was hard on my heels.
Up against it, I didn’t know which way to turn;  

then I called out to God for help:
“Please, God!” I cried out. “Save my life!”

 

Here's Richard’s interpretation:

https://youtu.be/jOaBsjQliUo?t=10 (from 00:10 to 1:25)

 

So there are cries of anguish, prayers of praise, words of comfort. And there are also words that tell us what God is looking for from us – words that were echoed later by Jesus. These words are a reminder that from ancient times until today, God is looking for us to join the dream of a world where both justice and peace can be a reality for all.

 

Bono focused on some of those words in a conversation he was having with David Taylor, an associate professor of theology and culture at Fuller Seminary based in California. 

https://youtu.be/WXjEiy_5qQQ?t=71 (from 1:11 to 2:49)

 

So the Psalms are filled with so much that can touch our lives, words that can encourage us, words that can confound us, words that can challenge us, words that can connect us to God. 

 

I am hoping in the year ahead to repeat what I did this year – start each day with a Psalm. Maybe I’ll even hit that total of 365 this year! 

 

If you are interested in doing something similar, I’d invite you to give it a try. And if you want to email back and forth now and then and share the insights you gain, I’d be happy to be a conversation partner with you. (You can reach me at phil@cpcmadison.org.)

For now, let’s just end with one more Psalm in two distinct voices. The first voice will be Bono, reciting the beginning of Psalm 40 as translated by Eugene Peterson. Early in their careers, Bono and U2 composed a song based on Psalm 40 – you can find it on YouTube.

 

The second voice – well, that will be yours as we join together in singing the version of Psalm 40 in our hymnal – “I Waited Patiently for God.” So listen to Bono and then let’s turn the words into music with Hymn #561.

 

Here is Bono reading the Psalm:
https://youtu.be/-l40S5e90KY?t=411 - 6:50 to 7:16

 

Hymn - I Waited Patiently for God (Psalm 40)

Hope in the Chaos

Nov. 27, 2022, Christ Presbyterian Church

Luke 21:25-36

You can hear this sermon here on YouTube.

 

Pastor Jessica likes to describe the reading we are about to hear as the one for “Scary Advent.” And lucky me – I get to be the one to preach this Sunday.

 

In this passage from the Gospel according to Luke, you will hear things that sound pretty ominous – or just plain confusing. 

 

Just before this passage, Jesus had been teaching in the Temple in Jerusalem. The chief priests and scribes and elders came to challenge him. They began to plot how to capture Jesus and turn him over to the Roman authorities. 

 

Right after this reading, we move toward the Last Supper, the betrayal of Jesus, his execution.

 

We think of Advent as a time to remember Jesus’ birth, his entry into our world. But this reading does not look back to that moment. It looks forward to a time when God’s vision for the world becomes a reality, even after all the troubles that are so much a part of lives in every generation.

 

These words  might be hard to hear at first in this season, but think of them as Jesus’  signs of hope in the midst of suffering.

 

Luke 21:25-36 (NRSV Updated Edition)

“There will be signs in the sun, the moon, and the stars and on the earth distress among nations confused by the roaring of the sea and the waves. People will faint from fear and foreboding of what is coming upon the world, for the powers of the heavens will be shaken.  Then they will see ‘the Son of Man coming in a cloud’ with power and great glory. Now when these things begin to take place, stand up and raise your heads, because your redemption is drawing near.” 

 

Then he told them a parable: “Look at the fig tree and all the trees; 30 as soon as they sprout leaves you can see for yourselves and know that summer is already near. So also, when you see these things taking place, you know that the kingdom of God is near. Truly I tell you, this generation will not pass away until all things have taken place. Heaven and earth will pass away, but my words will not pass away.

“Be on guard 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.”

 

+++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++

 

Jesus was not painting a pretty picture here. “Signs in the sun, the moon, and the stars and on the earth distress among nations confused by the roaring of the sea and the waves. People will faint from fear and foreboding of what is coming upon the world, for the powers of the heavens will be shaken.”

 

It calls to mind that painting by Vincent Van Gogh – “The Starry Night.” I imagine some of you have seen that the immersive Van Gogh exhibit that had a long run in Milwaukee and just opened in Middleton.  And even if you have not been to that, this surely is one of the most familiar paintings around.
 
There is both beauty and chaos in this picture – much like we hear from Jesus, words that ultimately can give us hope in our own chaotic times. We’ll come back to that later.

 

When the Gospel according to Luke was written, it was probably late in the first century, after Rome had conquered Jerusalem and destroyed the Temple – the very Temple where Jesus had been speaking in this passage from Luke.

 

In some places, the Romans were persecuting the followers of Jesus. For the Jewish people – and for the many followers of Jesus who were of Jewish heritage and those facing persecution for being part of this new religious sect – this must have been a time when it  felt like their world was coming to an end.

 

I think sometimes – 2,000 years later – it can feel that way to us as well.

 

Roaring seas and waves. They are not new, but climate change has made them  ever more intense, along with raging forest fires and deep droughts. 

 

Fainting from fear. Just in the past few months, we have witnessed a continuing spate of mass murders – in a Wal-Mart in Virginia, at an LGBTQ nightclub in Colorado, at a food court in a mall in Indiana, at a Fourth of July parade in Illinois. 

 

Foreboding of what is coming. The people of Ukraine know that feeling well as Russian missiles cut off their energy supply as winter settles in. So do people in so many other places where starvation looms. So do people in this nation, divided by ancient racial animosities, split by political polarization.

 

It made the people in Jesus’ time, it makes people in our time, want to cry out for rescue.

 

There’s a familiar song that captures a bit of that feeling.

 

“Swing Low, Sweet Chariot” – a song I suspect most of you know – is attributed to an enslaved man from Oklahoma named Wallace Willis. The chariot “coming for to carry me home” is an allusion to the chariot that came for the Hebrew prophet Elijah at the end of his life. He and Elisha - the man who would pick up his stole and receive a double portion of Elijah’s spirit - stood at the Jordan River as Elijah rode the whirlwind in the chariot up to heaven.
 
There are so many of these songs that emerged from enslaved people in our nation, spirituals about the longing to be home. They were also songs about longing for freedom. Those songs will be our companions this Advent.

 

Let’s sing just the chorus of Swing Low. I’ll start with “Swing low, sweet chariot,” and then you answer “Coming for to carry me home.”

Swing low, sweet chariot.
Coming for to carry me home.

Swing low, sweet chariot.
Coming for to carry me home.

 

The first verse says:
“I looked over Jordan, and what did I see,
Coming for to carry me home?
A band of angels coming after me.

Coming for to carry me home.”

 

Yes, the Jordan River. That same Jordan River where Elijah was carried away. And for some of the enslaved people of the U.S., the Ohio River came to represent the Jordan – a place they could cross on the underground railroad to freedom. 

This painting from 1944 by the noted African American artist William H. Johnson, captures the chariot, the river and the band of angels greeting someone heading to freedom.

 

So home, in this song, is not only a reference to heaven. It is also a reference to freedom.

Luke Powery, the dean of the Duke University Chapel, has done a lot of work connecting the spirituals to this season of Advent. His book, Rise Up Shepherds, is one of the reading suggestions we are offering for this season. There will be two Bible study groups – one on Tuesday noon, the other on Thursday noon – that will use a series he has prepared exploring the four spirituals that will appear in worship today and for the next three Sundays.

 

In that book, Powery writes of Swing Low: “Home is where we will be free. God wants us to be free. God wants us to find our home in him, the One who is our refuge and strength, our strong tower.  Come home, not to your neighborhood, but to the abiding, loving presence of God.”

 

Let’s sing that spiritual again as a call and response, this time with a 1940 painting by Ruth Starr Rose, a white woman who grew up in Eau Claire in a family with a history of working for the abolition of slavery. She had a deep love of the spirituals and her paintings inspired by them won praise from African American artists and churches. 
 
Swing low, sweet chariot.
Coming for to carry me home.
Swing low, sweet chariot.
Coming for to carry me home.

 

That brings us back to Jesus’ words in the Gospel according to Luke.

 

In the midst of all the scary things around you, Jesus says, “stand up and raise your heads, because your redemption is drawing near.” 

 

Redemption. We will be set free. The love of God shown to us in Jesus will set us free. In the midst of all the chaos, watch for the Son of Man – a name for the one who will mark the end of this life as we know it and bring us to the time of God's judgement. Jesus adopts that identify for himself. 

 

Redemption thus equals liberation. God’s judgment is more than a personal evaluation of our lives. It brings liberation from the fallen world and its corruption that too often seems to swirl around us. It is rescuing people from the systems that oppress them.

 

Then there is the fig tree. How did that show up in the middle of this rather apocalyptic speech by Jesus?

“Look at the fig tree and all the trees; as soon as they sprout leaves you can see for yourselves and know that summer is already near. So also, when you see these things taking place, you know that the kingdom of God is near.”

 

The fig tree is often used as a metaphor for the peace and prosperity of Israel in the Hebrew scriptures. Once you know that, you know that this little interlude is a moment of hope. It’s not just destruction and chaos that are signs of God breaking through. It’s also new leaves on the fig tree that suggest that God’s vision for the world is getting closer to reality.

 

So, Jesus, says, don’t let your hearts be “weighed down with dissipation and drunkenness and the worries of this life.”  OK – so ease up on the partying. Also, let go of some of that anxiety. 

 

More importantly, says Jesus, “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.”

 

There’s that contradiction again with what we tend to think about Advent. It is a time of waiting. And Jesus says be ready right now. 

 

It was Luke, after all, who wrote the best known story of Jesus’ birth. Now it is Luke recounting the story of Jesus near the end of his life not looking back nostalgically at the songs of angels, the gathering of shepherds, the presents from wise visitors. No, Jesus is looking forward on our behalf, offering not just words of warning, but words of encouragement that if we keep our focus on him, we will be okay in the end.

 

Sometimes these kind of apocalyptic words from Jesus are talked about as an anticipation of what is called Jesus’ Second Coming. One of the great New Testament scholars of our time – N.T. Wright – likes the phrase the “reappearing of Jesus” better. That’s a phrase that was used by the early Christians, he notes. 

 

He put it this way in his book, Simply Christian: Why Christianity Makes Sense -  "He is, at the moment, present with us, but hidden behind that invisible veil which keeps heaven and earth apart, and which we pierce in those moments, such as prayer, the sacraments, the reading of scriptures, and our work with the poor, when the veil seems particularly thin. But one day the veil will be lifted; earth and heaven will be one.”

 

So even though Jesus is on the precipice of his own torment that will lead to his death, his message still is filled with hope. Here’s a paraphrase I read: “The world is a scary place, but don’t let your hearts be troubled by it. I have overcome the world.”

 

Let’s go back to that painting by Vincent Van Gogh, The Starry Night image.
 
Van Gogh painted this when in 1889 he was in an asylum, plunged into a deep depression, feeling suicidal. The village at the bottom of the paining is dark. The sky is chaotic, yet the colors are bright. 
 
Look at the movement from the brightness of the sky to the cypress trees and the hills down to the stark village where a church spire stretches up to the sky. One interpretation of this – in the midst of his own chaos, Van Gogh was bringing the divine to the village. 
 

I think that captures what Jesus was telling the people in the Temple that day. Yes, things can be scary. Yes, there will be hard times.

 

In the midst of that chaos, though, there can be hope. That hope can be found when you stay connected to me, when you stay connected to God, when you let the energy of love flow from God through you to those you encounter along the way.

 

We don’t do this alone. We need God, we need each other. The second verse of Swing Low reminds us of that:

 

“If you get there, before I do…Tell all my friends I am coming too.”

 

So let’s end with Swing Low one more time:

 

Swing low, sweet chariot.
Coming for to carry me home.

Swing low, sweet chariot.
Coming for to carry me home.

 

Amen.