University Presbyterian Church - Chapel Hill, NC

BETWEEN THEN AND THEN

Luke 21:25-36

A Communion Meditation by Robert E. Dunham

University Presbyterian Church

Chapel Hill, North Carolina

First Sunday of Advent December 3, 2006

(This meditation draws substantially from an article by Cornelius Plantinga Jr., “Between Two Advents: In the interim,” in The Christian Century, December 6, 2000, some of which I shared in a sermon preached at University Church in Advent 2003.)

As the Christian faith reckons time, we live between the times, you and I… between the first advent at Bethlehem and the second coming… between then and then.  I suspect most of us don’t think of our lives that way very often, despite the fact that we pray every Sunday, “Thy kingdom come, thy will be done on earth….” The truth is, if we think about advent at all, says Neil Plantinga, we are more comfortable thinking about the first advent than about the second.

Christmas [the first advent] is about a baby, after all, and that makes everything easier.  We know about babies, and so we know how to domesticate Christmas.  We set up a crèche, pin up a wreath, set out a poinsettia or two. Maybe we sing, “Away in a Manger,” with the alternate tune. Altogether we figure out how to manage Christmas so that the little Lord Jesus asleep on the hay won’t end up scaring anybody.

But the second coming is something else.  As Karl Barth said, we can’t fathom the Second Advent of Jesus Christ, and we stammer when we try to speak of it…. Part of our problem is that the Bible describes the return of our Lord in literature that is hard to interpret.  The literature is apocalyptic – which means it’s an unveiling of the world that lies behind this world.  It’s a revelation that tells about the transition from this age to the next.

But the transition is rough.  It’s so full of emergency.  According to the gospel scenario, everything breaks loose at the return of Jesus Christ.  Nations go to war, and civilians run for cover.  There’s blood in the streets and famine in the fields. The earth shakes and the sea roars.  There are signs in the sky above, panic on the earth beneath, stars falling, people dying of fright – it’s a whole drum roll of disaster.

And then, in the midst of all the confusion, people will see “the Son of Man coming in a cloud with power and great glory.”  He’s the incoming Lord.  He’s the oncoming Lord.  He’s got power to judge and power to save…. It’s the climax of the human drama.  Christ coming to finish what he started.  Christ coming to gather his saints and vindicate his martyrs….

So why does [such talk] make some of us squirm?  What is it about this topic that makes us uneasy?[1]

There may be several reasons. First, we don’t know how to read the literature, or how literally to read it. Second, the Church has been expecting Jesus to return for a long time, and he hasn’t come back yet. “It’s hard to stand on tiptoe for two thousand years.”[2]  So people tend to settle into a mundane world with low ceilings of expectation. But there’s also a third reason, says Plantinga, and that reason, I suspect, describes most of us.

A lot of us have been secularized enough by now that our view of the world has flattened out, and the Second Advent of Jesus… doesn’t fit into a flattened-out world very well. It’s too fantastic, we think.  It’s too supernatural.  In certain moods we think it’s too embarrassing. It’s an embarrassing advent, and so we leave it to those embarrassing Christians who have turned apocalyptic speculation into a billion-dollar industry – prophecy buffs with their computer charts and wrong predictions that are then folded back into new predictions in the kind of prophetic improvisation that Paula Frederickson calls “apocalyptic jazz.”[3]

We get tired of all that jazz, and we are embarrassed by it… by all those “rapture” bumper stickers.  And so we just dismiss it.  It’s not the faithful thing to do, we know, but it is more comfortable. And these days, truth be told, we are into comfort – comfort food, comfortable places, comfortable routines.  There’s enough out there to unsettle us, without being unsettled by thoughts of Christ’s return.  Besides, for the most part life is good for us.  I’m not saying we don’t have our individual heartaches or fears or disappointments, but for most of us most of the time, life is pretty good.  And when life is good, our prayers for the kingdom are not as passionate as they are when we live on the edge of despair.  When life is good, we whisper our prayers for the kingdom. “Thy kingdom come,” we pray, and hope it won’t… because things are pretty good right now.

When our kingdom has had a good year [says Plantinga] we aren’t necessarily looking for God’s kingdom.  When life is good, redemption doesn’t sound so good.  That’s how things go.  God’s redemption is good news for people whose life is bad news.  If you are a slave in Pharaoh’s Egypt, or a slave in [the antebellum South], you want your redemption….

People with crummy lives want [their redemption] now.  If you are a Christian in sub-Saharan Africa today, you don’t yawn when somebody mentions the return of Jesus Christ.  When the AIDS epidemic has devastated whole populations you want your redeemer.  You want the one who has healing in his wings.  Passionate Christians want the return of the Lord.  [But] so do compassionate ones. 

When our own life is sweet, we can look across the world to lives that aren’t sweet.  We can raise our heads and our hopes for those lives.  We can weep with those who weep and hope with those who hope. We can look across the world, and across the room, and across the pew.  It’s natural to hope for ourselves, and how healthy it is to do it.  But it’s unnatural to hope only for ourselves. And how parochial it is to do it.

Be on guard, says Jesus, that you don’t get weighed down with parochial anxieties and parochial amusements to relieve them.  Be on guard against that fatal absorption with yourself!  Take care.  Stay alert! “Stand up and raise your heads because the kingdom is coming.”[4]

In that confidence, pray, work and live for others.  In the here and now, between then and then, live for others.  Lewis Smedes says that hoping for others is hard, but not the hardest thing.  Praying for others is hard, but not the hardest thing. The hardest thing for people who believe in the second coming of Jesus Christ is living the kind of life that makes people say, “Oh, so that’s how people are going to live when righteousness takes over the world.”  The hardest thing is simple faithfulness in the here and now, in our work and in our attitudes – the kind of faithfulness that demonstrates that we are being drawn forward by the powerful force of the kingdom of God.[5]

During Colonial days in Massachusetts there occurred a solar eclipse, an event which might gather our interest in these days, but which caused great alarm in those pre-scientific days.  Many people took the eclipse as a sign of impending doom, perhaps even as a portent of the second coming.  The legislature was in session at the time, and as the sky grew dark at midday, even there a panic was felt, as several legislators hastily shouted motions for adjournment.  But one lawmaker gained control of the assembly when he rose, and with a steady and firm voice said, "Mr. Speaker, if it is not the end of the world and we adjourn, we shall appear to be fools.  If it is the end of the world, then I would choose to be found doing my duty.  I move you, Sir, that candles be brought."[6]  People who expected Jesus to return nonetheless went back to their desks and resumed their work.

It is not a bad example for us. Human history will come to an end in the return of Christ; that is our faith and our hope.  Our history, yours and mine, will come to an end; that we can state with certainty.  Given God’s hand in it all, such things need not fill us with dread or longing.  One might hope they would fill us with wonder, with gratitude, with compassion and kindness toward human need, and with a holy determination to live each day with a sense of purpose and a sense of awe, to experience each breaking of the bread and sharing of the cup with a deeper measure of grace and gratitude. “I move you, Sir, that candles be brought,” he said.  It’s not bad counsel for these weeks of Advent, when days grow short… not bad counsel for life in the darkness and terror and ambiguities of our time, in the here and now in which we live, between then and then.