Luke 21.25-36
Today’s gospel reading—is it what you expected when you came to church this morning? “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.” Unsettling words, these words of Jesus. This is less about festive holiday lights and looks more like an endless dark night.
Today is the start of a new church year, the season of Advent. But it’s pretty easy to overlook that beginning since it’s tucked behind Thanksgiving and just a month from the only New Year that matters to the rest of the world. Besides that, all of Jesus’ talk about distress and the powers of heaven shaken sounds more like an ending rather than a beginning. The secular New Year at least has the sense to look like a fresh start: a baby crawling onto the scene wearing a 2025 sash. The church’s new year, however, begins with Jesus talking about an end, the end, when as the Creed says, “Christ will come again in glory to judge the living and the dead.”
Advent, in other words, is more than a warm-up to Christmas. From early on, this season focused on themes of the Four Last Things: death, judgment, heaven, and hell. Maybe not what you expected. Yet running through it all is the theme of hope, unexpected as that might sound. Hope, because Christian faith, biblical faith, does not look away from the darkness, whether around us or within us, and pretend it doesn’t exist. Faith looks directly into the darkness and trusts that even there Christ comes to us, that in our darkness the light of God will shine. Christ is, as the Gospel of John says, the light no darkness will overcome.
At the beginning of today’s gospel, however, darkness is what we get. What Jesus describes sounds like a reversal of the very first chapter in the Bible, a breakdown of the goodness of creation in Genesis. In the beginning, God formed order out of chaos; put sun, moon, and stars in the heavens; separated dry land from the sea; and placed humankind in the garden in peace. Later in the Bible, Psalm 19 says that the heavens declare the glory of God; the dependable rhythms of day and night and seasons reveal God’s faithfulness. But in today’s gospel, it all comes apart. Chaos returns; the heavens are shaken; the waves of the sea overwhelm dry land; peace gives way to distress among nations. Where is God when the world falls apart?
Bishop Robert Barron is among the best people I know these days who can speak the truth of scripture to contemporary life and ask the questions we all are asking. In reflecting on today’s gospel, he reminds us of a basic truth of life: nothing lasts, especially not us. One of the most evocative lines about the shortness of life is in Psalm 90 “The span of our life is 70 years or 80 if we are strong…Our lives are over like a sigh.” A sigh—our lives a single, passing breath.
Even the beauty of creation is temporary. Isaiah talks about the passing quality of the world around us. “The grass withers, the flower fades.” Life with all its goodness and beauty is fragile and passing.
As for the tumult among nations that Jesus describes? In the current issue of The Living Church magazine, Joseph Mangina, who teaches at an Anglican seminary in Toronto says, “News junkie that I am, I confess to indulging in a certain frequency of doomscrolling. I move from one story to another, compiling a catalog of the many reasons to be depressed: the war in Ukraine, the horrifying events in Israel and Gaza, the crisis of democracy [around the world], the latest foolish or frightening utterance by a public figure. Doomscrolling is a hard habit to break.” Maybe you’ve found that to be true for you, too. Only this is nothing new. Nations have always been in tumult. Peace, as we are able to make it, is mostly a brief pause between battles. Wherever human beings are there is conflict. Nations come and go, rise and fall. A sigh, a passing breath.
Now the scriptures themselves don’t hesitate to look at the passing, fragile quality of life, to see bad things that happen to us or are done by us. That’s good. It means the Bible understands life as we know it and live it, can give words to express our experience—from delights and joys, to fears and anxieties—when we can’t find words of our own. Even so, why this picture of distress at the start of the new church year and not something that actually looks like a fresh beginning?
Today’s gospel is part of a collection of biblical texts called ‘apocalyptic literature.’ Popular imagination tends to think of the word ‘apocalyptic’ as being about destruction. The word shows up in headlines about climate change, disease, any threat of catastrophe leading to a future without God. But apocalyptic texts in the Bible, today’s gospel included, aren’t about a fearful future. They are not meant to frighten us (as unexpected as that might sound) but show us where to look for hope. They are meant to speak to the questions we ask and speak to every generation in all times of crisis, when life changes and things around us collapse, when old truths are shaken. Because, like Job who lost everything he had—health, family, all his possessions—when all the fixed points that we thought once made the world dependable are lost, we still have God. At the point of chaos, God is present.
It is precisely at the point when everything is shaken and our world up-ended that we are called to keep our eyes fixed on the coming of Christ and his presence with us. And there, with Christ as our fixed point, to find our true assurance and hope. Advent gives us permission to notice the darkness without giving in to it or being overcome by it.
Did you notice that when Jesus describes the collapse of the world, he doesn’t say, ‘When these things begin to happen, duck and run for cover.’ Now there are some whose courage will fail; we may be tempted to withdraw into passivity or huddle together in safety with the like-minded. But Jesus says, “Stand up and raise your heads, because your redemption is drawing near.” Today Jesus gives us courage born of faith; of peace beyond understanding, because our lives are held secure in God’s steadfast love and faithfulness. “Then they will see the Son of Man coming in a cloud with power and great glory.”
Jesus quotes the Old Testament book of Daniel. Daniel describes someone like a Son of Man rescuing God’s people after a long, dark night of oppression. The early Christians came to believe that Jesus had filled Daniel’s vision full of fresh meaning. More than a prophet or teacher, Jesus was, and is, God’s eternal wisdom made flesh, coming to us and is with us when our world is shaken. In him, our lives are held secure. He is the power and presence of God that endures when the cosmos fades away, after our bodies have come and gone, when old truths have failed us. Advent, then, beckons our imaginations to be shaped, not by the 24-hour news cycle but by the good news of Jesus Christ. And that makes us people of hope through faith and in good works. “Almighty God, give us grace to cast away the works of darkness and put on the armor of light.” The darkness in the world and the darkness in our lives, the ills of the world and the failings of our lives, will be judged. But they will be judged by Jesus Christ in his grace and mercy. He is the light in all our darkness. No darkness around us or within us is more powerful than that light. “Heaven and earth will pass away, but my word will not.”
All the fixed points in our lives are fragile, passing, will change. Unexpected things will happen—far more unexpected than coming to church this Advent Sunday and hearing the gospel reading you just heard. So we do not greet the new church year with festivity and drinking and the buzz of January 1; we greet it soberly and penitentially, lighting candles in the darkness, feasting at the Lord’s Table, praying for courage and imagination to live as followers of Jesus. Today’s readings, and this season, are about focusing our spiritual attention on what finally matters: the Son of God who comes to us and is present with us through the Four Last Things: death and judgment, in the hells we live through, and the heaven he brings us. “Stand up and raise your heads, because your redemption is drawing near.” Christ is our fixed point. Watch for Christ. Wait for him. Look to him. He is with you now.
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