Fast Forward
December 02, 2007
December 2, 2007
Rev. Susan Gilbert Zencka
Frame Memorial Presbyterian Church
Texts: Isaiah 2:1-5; Matthew 24:36-44
We don’t like waiting. We don’t like uncertainty. And advent combines both. For those who are looking for Jesus to return, there’s a lot of waiting and uncertainty associated with that, too. So we replace Advent with Christmas, and some people replace uncertainty about a Second Coming with elaborate explanations of prophecy. And we resent Advent when we don’t get to sing Christmas carols because after all, this is Christmas time, and we hear them on the radio and at home and in the mall, so why not sing them????
And sometimes we dread Advent as a time of preparation because there are too many errands to do, the lines are too long, the weather is newly bad, there are too many parties to attend and to host, and there’s not enough time to do any of it, even when we put ourselves on fast forward, and so we end up missing the picture-perfect holiday we have always wanted and being acutely aware of our shortcomings instead – of having not enough money to give what we’d like, of being not organized enough to entertain as we’d like, of our family being so, well, themselves that we can’t get along as we’d like, and so we’re disappointed and feeling like we’ve missed it instead of understanding that perhaps we hit it more perfectly than we could ever have hoped but haven’t realized it. What?? The failure of our Christmas season is when we do it most right?? How is that?
Christmas is all about our inadequacy to heal our own wounds, to meet our own needs, to manufacture our own happiness. Christmas is about the Creator of the Universe stepping into human time and space to tell us more carefully, patiently and thoroughly than ever before that we are not meant to be complete unto ourselves – we as humans, individually and socially, have become broken in ways that we cannot fix ourselves, but that we can allow the Prince of Peace to heal and transform.
But unfortunately, we turn this Advent time of waiting and preparation – a time that is meant for slowing down into a time to speed up and overload. A time that is meant to be emptied out and made ready is instead jam-packed full and hurried through. We don’t understand the point of waiting though, and we don’t really understand what we’re waiting for. After all, we’re not really waiting for the Baby Jesus are we?? We sure know how this story is going to end … And there were in the same country shepherds abiding in the field, keeping watch over their flock by night. And, lo, the angel of the Lord came upon them, and the glory of the Lord shone round about them: and they were sore afraid.
Well then, we’re way ahead of the game, because we are already afraid – we’re afraid that we won’t get it all done, we’re afraid we won’t be able to afford it, we’re afraid people won’t like what we’ve gotten them, or we’re afraid they don’t love us well enough to know what we want…and if we can’t get the togetherness right, then the prospect of aloneness frightens us even more….but again, I’ve gone to fast forward, because we were asking what exactly are we preparing for, when he’s already been and gone….you know?? Jesus isn’t coming this year. He came before ….so long ago that it almost seems like a children’s fairy tale, and we know the story by heart, so God isn’t doing it differently this year – the surprises come from us, we think. And so we celebrate Christmas by trying to become God – trying to do it all, trying to make everyone happy, trying to pull off miracles, and even when it all comes together…it only goes so far.
Because, you see, Christmas wasn’t supposed to satisfy. Christmas isn’t about getting it right, as I started to say before, Christmas is about the fact that we are simply incapable of getting it right and getting ourselves right and so God jumped into the game, God jumped right in with both feet, to let us know that we weren’t supposed to get it right – we were just supposed to get it.
We were supposed to get it that we need God more than we need or want anything. We were supposed to get it that God isn’t waiting on the sidelines to say “I told you so…” when we goof it up. We were supposed to get it that God really really wants us to really really want Him.
And as we read this week’s lectionary readings, we’d like to feel that we connect to them, because this is the one season when we’d really like to feel that we get it where church is concerned, but somehow they don’t mesh with our own pre-Christmas experience and so we’re wondering whether we’re missing it, or maybe instead the preacher is just not getting that this season is supposed to be about comforting messages of warmth and predictable cozy hope packaged with pageants featuring rosy-cheeked children and time to share hot chocolate together while singing the familiar carols. So what’s with these weird readings, and what oh what do they have to do with Christmas? Isn’t that what we’re doing now??
And the answer is no and yes. The answer is no – we’re not supposed to be doing Christmas now. We’re doing Advent. And yes, these readings have everything to do with Advent. Advent means coming. And the real challenge to us as Christians during this season is to understand what that means for us. And the beginning of Advent is calling our attention to the fact that we are living in the middle of the cosmic battle between good and evil, and this is a battle where we have an important role – where God is trying to enlist us to fight, and the forces of evil win a battle each time we choose to simply opt out. The readings this week remind us that the stakes for creation were and are so high that God sent his only Son to the front lines. By coming among us as an infant, the King of the Universe has opened his heart to us in a way we usually don’t fully appreciate.
Because most of us hold something back. We hold back even in those relationships that are woven through our hearts – with our closest friends, or even sometimes in our marriages, or with our children or our parents we are on guard, afraid of being judged, being hurt, being rejected, but God didn’t hold anything back at all – God knew how desperately we needed him, and how hard it is for us to admit needing anything or anyone so the Creator risked first…and came helpless among us. And the miracle of that is what we really are going to celebrate in 23 days.
But in the meantime, we wait. And while we wait, we watch. We watch ourselves and notice that we do have a part to play in the drama for eternity – just as the ordinary carpenter, and girl, and shepherds and wandering wise men also were chosen, so are we. Not because we are special, but because they weren’t – because God uses clay to make humans, and uses ordinary humans to make his kingdom.
So we do have a part in it all – there are places that we can make a difference, and that’s really all God asks – that we allow the Holy One to make us different so that through us God can make a difference in this ordinary corner of his world. And the gospel tells us not about a rapture in which the saved will be rescued from a hard future – because if you read the scriptures as a whole, God makes no promises about his people skipping suffering, actually, quite the opposite is repeatedly promised. The gospel tells us that we need to be alert to what’s going on around us all the time, because it’s part of what God is doing over the long haul.
And if we are alert to God’s opportunities in our everyday lives, and if we allow ourselves to really need him, we find ourselves looking forward to his coming every day.
Because Advent isn’t so much about how he came among us before, although that is part of this season for sure. But Advent is about something much more immediate, and that’s about how Jesus comes into our lives each day – if we let him enlarge our world by coming in. And yet, we can’t just wait – we need to prepare as well – we need to be about his work each day already, so that he’ll have something to come for – I can tell you this because I know it’s true.
It’s as hard for me as it is for anyone else to allow myself to need God – our whole culture has intimacy issues, and in America, in particular, where we value independence and self-sufficiency, it’s very hard for any of us to see that we might be better together than on our own. But I know I can’t do it on my own, and I’ve experienced the coming of God – not with trumpets or with the angels singing “Glory to God in the Highest.…” And I’ve noticed God’s work among us – most especially when we are able to deeply share with one another and truly listen for God in each other, and trust in the possibilities of God coming among us.
Jesus comes among us in your faithfulness and mine, and comes in things you are doing and things I am doing when we take the care to faithfully seek him – not just his will or his love or his strength or his patience but him, when we seek to know and love him. Jesus is waiting for each of us to love him enough to let him live through us. Jesus comes today.
And is Jesus coming in some other way? Ultimately…finally…. Triumphantly? If so, it will be in a way we know NOTHING about – despite books and movies and so-called prophets who claim to have the inside track and who claim to have decoded the coded prophecies. And you can be confident that there is nothing reliable in any one of the attempts to fast forward into that final future and map its course – because no one knows, none of the explanations are trustworthy, not one. What Jesus said again and again and again and again was NO ONE KNOWS, not even the Son. And I guess I always wonder why some folks think they’ve figured it out when even Jesus doesn’t know. Do we figure that God told the secret to the authors but somehow Jesus got left behind?? Because that doesn’t make much sense to me. Jesus said he doesn’t know, and no one knows. It seems to be pretty clear that part of our faithfulness lies in embracing the not-knowing.
So Advent is about realizing that we don’t know. We don’t have it under control. We aren’t called to better planning, but to deeper openness. And so that’s why I said that maybe when we’re disappointed and feeling like we’ve missed it we should understand that this is when we hit it more perfectly than any other time. It’s when we finally accept our own inadequacy, our own incompleteness, our own insufficiency, that maybe, just maybe we might be willing to let God in…. If we ever think of it that way. And so this Advent, I’m not going to urge you to step off the celebration circuit, to turn away from the craziness, to give up the giving – because I don’t think most of us can figure out yet how to do that.
What I will challenge you to do is take 10 minutes every day to embrace the waiting. Take time to notice where you hurt, where life isn’t working, where you feel restless, where you feel a sense of need. And then, I would ask that you engage the possibility that perhaps that’s where Jesus wants you to receive him more fully….where he is ready to do something unexpected. And take some of that time to reflect on the opportunities you have each day to make his love more real, to touch someone with the love of God when they aren’t expecting it, not with a gift, but with your being present in their lives so that you can bear his presence into our world.
And here’s the paradox – mostly we tend to say Christmas is about giving. But it’s really about receiving – allowing ourselves to receive from God what Jesus lived and died to give to us. And accepting your own need doesn’t mean waiting for Jesus to do your life FOR you – the point is, God came among us to do it WITH us. Emmanuel means God-with-us. Not only DID Jesus experience the worst of human pain on the cross, but he still experiences our worst pains with us. He is willing to enter our experience with us, and transform us. And he came as a baby not to make the story sweeter, but to show us that great power comes in vulnerability, and to teach us that if we would experience the great power of God in our lives, we must first allow ourselves to experience our own vulnerability and be vulnerable with God and with others.
Advent means coming. Be awake to the opportunities for Jesus to come to you, for Jesus to come through you to others. And don’t think small. This isn’t just about being patient when you’re waiting in line, although it’s about that, too. But it is about being aware that we are each of us broken in ways that only God can heal, and it is being open to possibilities that Jesus could remake your world, and that your transformed experience could be a step to a new world for all of creation. Come, let us walk in the light of God! He is coming. Amen.
Rev. Susan Gilbert Zencka
Frame Memorial Presbyterian Church
Texts: Isaiah 2:1-5; Matthew 24:36-44
We don’t like waiting. We don’t like uncertainty. And advent combines both. For those who are looking for Jesus to return, there’s a lot of waiting and uncertainty associated with that, too. So we replace Advent with Christmas, and some people replace uncertainty about a Second Coming with elaborate explanations of prophecy. And we resent Advent when we don’t get to sing Christmas carols because after all, this is Christmas time, and we hear them on the radio and at home and in the mall, so why not sing them????
And sometimes we dread Advent as a time of preparation because there are too many errands to do, the lines are too long, the weather is newly bad, there are too many parties to attend and to host, and there’s not enough time to do any of it, even when we put ourselves on fast forward, and so we end up missing the picture-perfect holiday we have always wanted and being acutely aware of our shortcomings instead – of having not enough money to give what we’d like, of being not organized enough to entertain as we’d like, of our family being so, well, themselves that we can’t get along as we’d like, and so we’re disappointed and feeling like we’ve missed it instead of understanding that perhaps we hit it more perfectly than we could ever have hoped but haven’t realized it. What?? The failure of our Christmas season is when we do it most right?? How is that?
Christmas is all about our inadequacy to heal our own wounds, to meet our own needs, to manufacture our own happiness. Christmas is about the Creator of the Universe stepping into human time and space to tell us more carefully, patiently and thoroughly than ever before that we are not meant to be complete unto ourselves – we as humans, individually and socially, have become broken in ways that we cannot fix ourselves, but that we can allow the Prince of Peace to heal and transform.
But unfortunately, we turn this Advent time of waiting and preparation – a time that is meant for slowing down into a time to speed up and overload. A time that is meant to be emptied out and made ready is instead jam-packed full and hurried through. We don’t understand the point of waiting though, and we don’t really understand what we’re waiting for. After all, we’re not really waiting for the Baby Jesus are we?? We sure know how this story is going to end … And there were in the same country shepherds abiding in the field, keeping watch over their flock by night. And, lo, the angel of the Lord came upon them, and the glory of the Lord shone round about them: and they were sore afraid.
Well then, we’re way ahead of the game, because we are already afraid – we’re afraid that we won’t get it all done, we’re afraid we won’t be able to afford it, we’re afraid people won’t like what we’ve gotten them, or we’re afraid they don’t love us well enough to know what we want…and if we can’t get the togetherness right, then the prospect of aloneness frightens us even more….but again, I’ve gone to fast forward, because we were asking what exactly are we preparing for, when he’s already been and gone….you know?? Jesus isn’t coming this year. He came before ….so long ago that it almost seems like a children’s fairy tale, and we know the story by heart, so God isn’t doing it differently this year – the surprises come from us, we think. And so we celebrate Christmas by trying to become God – trying to do it all, trying to make everyone happy, trying to pull off miracles, and even when it all comes together…it only goes so far.
Because, you see, Christmas wasn’t supposed to satisfy. Christmas isn’t about getting it right, as I started to say before, Christmas is about the fact that we are simply incapable of getting it right and getting ourselves right and so God jumped into the game, God jumped right in with both feet, to let us know that we weren’t supposed to get it right – we were just supposed to get it.
We were supposed to get it that we need God more than we need or want anything. We were supposed to get it that God isn’t waiting on the sidelines to say “I told you so…” when we goof it up. We were supposed to get it that God really really wants us to really really want Him.
And as we read this week’s lectionary readings, we’d like to feel that we connect to them, because this is the one season when we’d really like to feel that we get it where church is concerned, but somehow they don’t mesh with our own pre-Christmas experience and so we’re wondering whether we’re missing it, or maybe instead the preacher is just not getting that this season is supposed to be about comforting messages of warmth and predictable cozy hope packaged with pageants featuring rosy-cheeked children and time to share hot chocolate together while singing the familiar carols. So what’s with these weird readings, and what oh what do they have to do with Christmas? Isn’t that what we’re doing now??
And the answer is no and yes. The answer is no – we’re not supposed to be doing Christmas now. We’re doing Advent. And yes, these readings have everything to do with Advent. Advent means coming. And the real challenge to us as Christians during this season is to understand what that means for us. And the beginning of Advent is calling our attention to the fact that we are living in the middle of the cosmic battle between good and evil, and this is a battle where we have an important role – where God is trying to enlist us to fight, and the forces of evil win a battle each time we choose to simply opt out. The readings this week remind us that the stakes for creation were and are so high that God sent his only Son to the front lines. By coming among us as an infant, the King of the Universe has opened his heart to us in a way we usually don’t fully appreciate.
Because most of us hold something back. We hold back even in those relationships that are woven through our hearts – with our closest friends, or even sometimes in our marriages, or with our children or our parents we are on guard, afraid of being judged, being hurt, being rejected, but God didn’t hold anything back at all – God knew how desperately we needed him, and how hard it is for us to admit needing anything or anyone so the Creator risked first…and came helpless among us. And the miracle of that is what we really are going to celebrate in 23 days.
But in the meantime, we wait. And while we wait, we watch. We watch ourselves and notice that we do have a part to play in the drama for eternity – just as the ordinary carpenter, and girl, and shepherds and wandering wise men also were chosen, so are we. Not because we are special, but because they weren’t – because God uses clay to make humans, and uses ordinary humans to make his kingdom.
So we do have a part in it all – there are places that we can make a difference, and that’s really all God asks – that we allow the Holy One to make us different so that through us God can make a difference in this ordinary corner of his world. And the gospel tells us not about a rapture in which the saved will be rescued from a hard future – because if you read the scriptures as a whole, God makes no promises about his people skipping suffering, actually, quite the opposite is repeatedly promised. The gospel tells us that we need to be alert to what’s going on around us all the time, because it’s part of what God is doing over the long haul.
And if we are alert to God’s opportunities in our everyday lives, and if we allow ourselves to really need him, we find ourselves looking forward to his coming every day.
Because Advent isn’t so much about how he came among us before, although that is part of this season for sure. But Advent is about something much more immediate, and that’s about how Jesus comes into our lives each day – if we let him enlarge our world by coming in. And yet, we can’t just wait – we need to prepare as well – we need to be about his work each day already, so that he’ll have something to come for – I can tell you this because I know it’s true.
It’s as hard for me as it is for anyone else to allow myself to need God – our whole culture has intimacy issues, and in America, in particular, where we value independence and self-sufficiency, it’s very hard for any of us to see that we might be better together than on our own. But I know I can’t do it on my own, and I’ve experienced the coming of God – not with trumpets or with the angels singing “Glory to God in the Highest.…” And I’ve noticed God’s work among us – most especially when we are able to deeply share with one another and truly listen for God in each other, and trust in the possibilities of God coming among us.
Jesus comes among us in your faithfulness and mine, and comes in things you are doing and things I am doing when we take the care to faithfully seek him – not just his will or his love or his strength or his patience but him, when we seek to know and love him. Jesus is waiting for each of us to love him enough to let him live through us. Jesus comes today.
And is Jesus coming in some other way? Ultimately…finally…. Triumphantly? If so, it will be in a way we know NOTHING about – despite books and movies and so-called prophets who claim to have the inside track and who claim to have decoded the coded prophecies. And you can be confident that there is nothing reliable in any one of the attempts to fast forward into that final future and map its course – because no one knows, none of the explanations are trustworthy, not one. What Jesus said again and again and again and again was NO ONE KNOWS, not even the Son. And I guess I always wonder why some folks think they’ve figured it out when even Jesus doesn’t know. Do we figure that God told the secret to the authors but somehow Jesus got left behind?? Because that doesn’t make much sense to me. Jesus said he doesn’t know, and no one knows. It seems to be pretty clear that part of our faithfulness lies in embracing the not-knowing.
So Advent is about realizing that we don’t know. We don’t have it under control. We aren’t called to better planning, but to deeper openness. And so that’s why I said that maybe when we’re disappointed and feeling like we’ve missed it we should understand that this is when we hit it more perfectly than any other time. It’s when we finally accept our own inadequacy, our own incompleteness, our own insufficiency, that maybe, just maybe we might be willing to let God in…. If we ever think of it that way. And so this Advent, I’m not going to urge you to step off the celebration circuit, to turn away from the craziness, to give up the giving – because I don’t think most of us can figure out yet how to do that.
What I will challenge you to do is take 10 minutes every day to embrace the waiting. Take time to notice where you hurt, where life isn’t working, where you feel restless, where you feel a sense of need. And then, I would ask that you engage the possibility that perhaps that’s where Jesus wants you to receive him more fully….where he is ready to do something unexpected. And take some of that time to reflect on the opportunities you have each day to make his love more real, to touch someone with the love of God when they aren’t expecting it, not with a gift, but with your being present in their lives so that you can bear his presence into our world.
And here’s the paradox – mostly we tend to say Christmas is about giving. But it’s really about receiving – allowing ourselves to receive from God what Jesus lived and died to give to us. And accepting your own need doesn’t mean waiting for Jesus to do your life FOR you – the point is, God came among us to do it WITH us. Emmanuel means God-with-us. Not only DID Jesus experience the worst of human pain on the cross, but he still experiences our worst pains with us. He is willing to enter our experience with us, and transform us. And he came as a baby not to make the story sweeter, but to show us that great power comes in vulnerability, and to teach us that if we would experience the great power of God in our lives, we must first allow ourselves to experience our own vulnerability and be vulnerable with God and with others.
Advent means coming. Be awake to the opportunities for Jesus to come to you, for Jesus to come through you to others. And don’t think small. This isn’t just about being patient when you’re waiting in line, although it’s about that, too. But it is about being aware that we are each of us broken in ways that only God can heal, and it is being open to possibilities that Jesus could remake your world, and that your transformed experience could be a step to a new world for all of creation. Come, let us walk in the light of God! He is coming. Amen.