December 2, 2012 – Luke 21:25-36
Luke 21:25-36
Do Not Let Your Hearts be Weighed Down
First Sunday of Advent – December 2, 2012
First Lutheran Church – Winnipeg, MB
When Jesus begins to point to signs of difficulty,
there doesn’t seem to be much that will be immune.
There will be cosmic distress: signs in the sun, moon, and stars.
Distress among nations in the tumult of war.
Distress in the environment: the roaring of the sea and the waves.
Internal human distress: when it says that people will faint, the meaning is even stronger:
people’s breath will be taken out of them, as if hit in the solar plexus.
and we know what happens if a person’s breath leaves them for too long.
Even, the text says, there will be distress in heaven: the powers of the heavens will be shaken.
Truly, there is much to worry about.
As I said last week, Jesus knew what was coming: Jesus is smart.
He knows that violent Jewish resistance to Roman rule will bring destruction.
And it did: in 70 A.D. the Temple was destroyed by the Romans and 1000s were killed.
It seemed like the end of the world to many, but it was not.
Luke wrote his Gospel 10 or 15 years after this catastrophe, and the memory of it is still fresh.
But Jesus’s words had lost none of their contemporary resonance in about the year 80 A.D.
Luke’s people were living through some kind of persecution for being Christian.
Truly, there was much to worry about.
It seemed like the end of the world, but it was not: we are the proof, inheritors of Luke’s hope.
We now know that there is constant and great turmoil in the cosmos:
stars are continually imploding and continually being born.
Life somehow emerges from this great violence.
The nations seem to be in constant turmoil: there is turmoil in Israel and Palestine,
Iran and Afghanistan, Egypt and Congo, Myanmar and Pakistan.
The environment seems in tremendous turmoil, with the rapid disappearance of entire species,
rising oceans, drought in some areas and massing flooding in others,
as well the rise of super storms like Hurricane Sandy.
All of which sometimes seems like an inner picture of the turmoil inside ourselves and
the worries of daily life that can seem overwhelming.
Finances. Children. Mental illness. Physical sickness. Cancer. The abuse of others.
Our need for acceptance.
All of this is tiring. It can seem like the end of the world.
I have not been immune to any of this.
I have suffered the deaths of people I loved from a relatively early age.
And I have suffered from mental illness.
When I was trying to describe my depression to a therapist once,
I said that the thing it most felt like was like swimming in the ocean and
then suddenly being caught in a powerful undertow.
It was like being in the grip of something much, much bigger than me, something frightening,
thinking I might die, caught and swirled in many directions all at the same time,
so many that I lost all sense of direction, of orientation,
of which way was up, if there was an up.
It froze me in despair because I didn’t know which way to go.
So I just stopped moving, and yet was entirely exhausted by it all.
So when Jesus says that there will be confusion from the roaring of the sea and the waves,
and that people will faint from fear and foreboding of what is coming upon the world,
I have an uncanny sense of what that feels like.
And it is not good. Not good at all. It’s bad.
However, as the Lutheran pastor John Petty points out in his blog this week,
What appears to be bad news is really good news for, says Jesus,
when these things happen, it means that your deliverance is drawing near.
So don’t be weighed down by worry but raise your head and look around you: watch for it.
I have to say that the photograph taken by our youth minister Caroline Wintoniw that I
sent out to you by e-mail this week really resonated with me just as much as I think that
it really resonates with this Gospel text.
It shows a person from below emerging from some dark water, with head raised,
into sunlit waters above.
Indeed, not just with head raised, but with back bent and arched.
A literal translation of what Jesus says when he says stand up and raise your heads is actually
bend yourself back and raise your heads, because your redemption is drawing near.
Sin, says Luther, is like being curved in on yourself;
redemption involves bending yourself back to meet it.
There is a massive effort here in bending yourself back, as the photo implies.
This is not a passive waiting but a waiting with massive effort.
A massive effort that is worth it because the redemption is real.
That depression came – and comes – with a lot of anxiety, a lot of worry.
There was a lot to worry about. I was 19 and had no idea what to do with my life.
It seemed like the end of the world, but it wasn’t.
It was the beginning of something new.
Advent is a funny but beautiful season of the church year.
You begin the church year by looking towards what seems like the end of the world.
We prepare to celebrate Jesus’s first coming as a child long ago by first
looking to Jesus’s final coming.
This is the tension we are in, the tension of being in this inbetween time,
The time between Jesus’s first and final coming.
The person in the picture is moving in the right direction, sure.
The person in the picture knows which direction is up.
But the person in the picture is still in the water: they’re not out of it yet.
The water is heavy, right? All that weight above you: you don’t have to go far down to know
the effect all the weight of that pressure has on your ears.
It is easy to be weighed down by the loads life leans on you.
It’s hard to lift your head up. Heck, it’s hard to get out of bed, for that matter.
Our tendency is, as Luke well knows, is to be weighed down by what our NRSV politely calls
“dissipation” but which really means the result from too much drinking – “hangover.”
He knows our tendency in such situations is to drink too much until we think we can’t feel the
weight any more.
He knows, finally, that our tendency is to simply be consumed by the worries of this life,
but literally this means distractions: worries are a distraction from action.
These are some of the ways we often handle the uncertainties of life: drink and worry.
But there are better ways.
A few weeks ago I told you what happened in the midst of my despair: redemption came with the
simplest possible act of kindness in the middle of a dark night by a fellow Christian.
Here’s another story.
A couple of days ago, a woman came into my office with something she had to tell me.
Some time ago this person had told me of abuse she’d received at the hands of another person,
and this was weighing her down, and it was causing her all kinds of trouble.
She couldn’t move forward and it was wreaking havoc in her life.
We talked about it: and after a while she came to know what she had to do:
she knew she was going to have to forgive this person,
if only for her own sake, in order to move on:
she knew which way was up in this particularly turbulent water.
I told her I’d pray for her to be able to do just that.
Well, months went by. Then more months, months of waiting and waiting and waiting,
and the massive effort of praying and praying and praying, which is a great way of
arching yourself back and raising your head for the redemption that is near.
Finally, on Friday, she came into my office and said she’d been able to do it.
She’d forgiven the person who’d so hurt her.
“So how do you feel?” I asked.
She lifted her hands up and said, “Like a huge weight has been lifted.”
And so she could move on.
Advent is about waiting and watching.
And in the Bible, the waiting is almost always done in bleak situations.
People wait while they are enslaved. People wait while they are in exile.
People wait while they are besieged. People wait while they are barren and empty.
People wait in darkness.
Jesus invites us while we waiting to make the massive effort, bend ourselves back, and watch.
For it is precisely into such situations that Jesus most wants to come.
When you see these things taking place, says Jesus, you know that the reign of God is near.
In situations of guilt, Jesus wants to offer forgiveness.
In situations of hunger, Jesus wants to feed.
In situations of loneliness, Jesus wants to offer companionship.
In situations of illness, Jesus wants to offer healing.
In situations of death, Jesus wants to bring life.
Jesus wants to bring hope.
These situations seem like the end, but they’re not.
Turly I tell you, says Jesus, this generation will not pass away until all things have been fulfilled.
And they have been: on the cross in John’s Gospel, Jesus says, It is fulfilled.
Jesus has joined himself for always and forever to the suffering and distress of this world.
And that is wondrous news.
True story: at the Cherry Creek Arts Festival in Denver a few years ago,
a street preacher harangued the people to get right with God because
Jesus was coming soon.
An old man walked by, heard this, straightened up and said,
What in blazes are you talking about? He’s already here. (John Petty, ibid.)
The funny thing is, is that in Jesus’s first coming as a child in Bethlehem,
he already joined himself to the world’s suffering: born into poverty he
ministered to the vulnerable and died unjustly on a cross.
The thing is: Jesus is already there and therefore he can redeem it.
So watch for him. Pray for one another. Visit one another. Work with the poor.
Bend yourselves back. Make the massive effort. You will see him. He is here. Even now.
Hidden in bread broken and wine poured out. Do not let your hearts be weighed down.
Open your hands. Open your eyes. Open your heart. He is coming. He is here.
So let us say, “Amen.”
Pastor Michael Kurtz
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