Mark 4:1-20 "Sacred Seeds"

You are welcome to use parts of this sermon, but if you do, please attribute them properly!

         It was a gorgeous autumn Saturday.  It was the kind where the air is crisp, and the sky is ever so blue, and the leaves have turned their brilliant shades of yellow, red, and orange.  When you have a day in the fall like that here in Maine, it is not rocket science to know intuitively that it is also deer season.

         On this particular day, three men – friends they were - were going hunting together.  One was a doctor, one was a lawyer, and one was a preacher. They had not ventured far into the woods when an enormous and well-fed 12-point buck came into view, looked directly at them, and seemed to position itself for a perfect shot – its side exposed, and its head held high and still. 

         Each of the hunters took aim and fired at the big buck at exactly the same time. The deer fell to the ground like a stone – instantly dead.  Within a few minutes, the men had surrounded the carcass and were in the midst of a heated debate about whose shot actually had killed the deer.

        It was not long before a game warden came by and asked what the three men were arguing about.  The game warden listened carefully, took a look at the buck, and confidently announced that he knew whose shot had killed the animal.

         “It was the preacher who got the buck!” the game warden declared.

         “What? How do you know?!” the other two demanded.  

         The officer replied, “Easy. The bullet went in one ear and out the other.”

         “Listen!”  Jesus said.  “Those who have ears, let them hear.  Do not let what I am teaching you go ‘in one ear and out the other’.”

         That is how Jesus would often start his lesson.  “Listen!  Those who have ears, let them hear.” And then he would, as the Gospel writer tells us, speak to the crowds in parables – in those little stories that always had big points. 

         Now, the word, “parable,” comes from a Greek word meaning “to throw or cast alongside.”  As Episcopal pastor Steve Pankey writes, “Parables are helpful because they take a hard-to-understand concept like the Kingdom of God and lay down alongside it something that is easily relatable from real life.  

Sometimes a parable is simply a simile, “the Kingdom of God is like…” Other times they are long, drawn out metaphors.”

         In other words, the parables Jesus told were supposed to help his listeners – the disciples, the crowds, or even us today – get a better handle on what the Kingdom of God was all about and, as a result, what was in fact the nature of the Almighty.  Not that the parables were always straightforward and easy to understand at first glance, however. 

         It is like in the movie “Jumpin’ Jack Flash”.  Lutheran pastor Luke Bouman notes that “Whoopie Goldberg’s character must solve a riddle to help a spy to come in. In order to communicate with the spy, she has to figure out a ‘code key’ in the Rolling Stones song, which gives the title to the movie. The problem is that she doesn’t have an internet search engine to direct her to the lyrics of the song. She listens in vain to try to figure out the words. At one point, exasperated, she cries, “Mick, Mick, speak English!” But to no avail. Mick Jagger’s words elude her.” 

         How like Jesus’ parables! Sometimes we just want to cry out:  “Speak plainly, Jesus. Give us some indication of what the ‘ kingdom of God’ is about. Don’t keep speaking in circles.”

         However, those “circles” we accuse Jesus of speaking in were always grounded in ordinary, everyday pictures of life as his listeners would have experienced it.  For example, Jesus frequently used images from agriculture to describe the kingdom of God – wine grapes, mustard seeds, and, as in today’s parable, a sower – a farmer – scattering seed across the far reaches of his field.  Everyone would have understood the imagery.  That is a given. 

         You see, the peasants to whom he spoke – if they were not fishermen – were farmers.  After all, this was Galilee, and rising up from the shore of the Se of Galilee were fields stretching as far as the eye could take in.  The people who gathered about Jesus knew about productive land.  They knew about hard soil and rocky soil and weedy ground and the good earth.  They could all picture the farmer on the hillside, a heavy seed bag draped around his shoulder, walking up and down the length of the field, tossing handfuls of seed as he walked, ensuring that the entire acreage would be covered by the day’s end. 

         In this parable, Jesus tells us that there are four kinds of ground on which the farmer’s seed might fall.  There is hard ground – like the path circumnavigating the field – trampled on by countless feet over the ages.  Even the best of seeds could not possibly find a home there. Those seeds would go to the birds. 

         Then there was the rocky ground – like many a farmer’s field here in Maine.  In making our vegetable garden plot, we dug up more cobble – hen and goose egg sized rocks – wagon loads full that we hauled off – along with a couple of good-sized boulders as well.  Though seeds might sprout in rocky ground, in the long run, the soil is not deep enough to sustain them.  And with a dry start to the growing season, those seeds will soon shrivel up and die.

         And soil infested with weeds?  Do not tell me about weeds!  We have a constant battle with them!  They can overtake a garden row in no time flat.  They spread their leaves and dig in with their roots and seem to multiply overnight – depriving many a tiny beet or cucumber plant of needed sunlight and over time choking them out.

        What you need, Jesus teaches, is good soil, fertile soil – soil that is well-composted with lots of worms to break it down.  You need soil with the rocks removed, and the weeds overcome.  When you have that kind of soil, he says, your harvest will be thirty-fold, sixty-fold, a hundred-fold.

         Imagine a harvest like that!  What an unbelievable statement Jesus was making.  Surely it is the climax of the parable – the “Wow!” factor that would make everyone really listen up.  As the research of Church of Christ pastor John Marks Hicks indicates, “It is a bountiful, unexpected and wondrous harvest. Thirtyfold, sixtyfold and hundredfold yields are beyond the imagination of first century farmers. Yields of five or six were typical in Italy; Nile-irrigated fields in Egypt typically yielded seven. Yields of four or fivefold, however, were typical in Palestine; (in fact,) thirtyfold has only been achieved in modern Israel with good weather and improved technology.”

         Pretty impressive!  And, or course, following the logic that Jesus offers in his explanation of this parable, the hearts of people are like those different kinds of soil:  the hard hearts, the shallow hearts, the crowded hearts, and the good hearts. It sounds so neat and simple – little boxes – a place for everyone and everyone in his or her place. 

         And we generally put ourselves in the good soil category because it would be more than we could stomach to put ourselves anywhere else.  And other folks we divide between the other three boxes because there would be hardly room enough in the good soil box because we are already there.

         However, if we choose to interpret the parable only in that narrow way, we are selling both it and Jesus short.  In addition, we are making highly inappropriate and inaccurate assumptions about those farmers who first listened to Jesus telling this little story.  As Steve Pankey writes, “Any farmer worth his salt would know that you don’t turn on the seed spreader when you leave the barn and let it just fling seed all down the road, onto the shoulder, and into the drainage ditches.”  Surely Jesus knew more about farming than that.

         And I think he does – because I do not think he meant for this parable to be about the soil – or even about the seed.  If it was, then Jesus becomes the moral arbiter, expecting us to categorize ourselves as hard, rocky, weedy, or good soil. However, we cannot do that – and Jesus knows it too.  We cannot pigeon-hole ourselves as having hard, shallow, crowded, or good hearts – because none of us is one kind of soil.  None of us has exclusively one kind of heart.  Sometimes we are one, and sometimes another.

         So, you see, this parable is not about us.  It is not about dirt.  This parable is about the one who extravagantly throws the seed everywhere.  This parable is about the sower, and that is why it is titled such. 

         This parable is about a God who surely knows it is foolish to throw seeds on questionable soil but does it anyway.  There are no soil analysis tests done beforehand.  The Sower does not sit down ahead of time and figure out how to avoid the rocky places, how to tell where the soil is too hard for anything to take root, or how to anticipate where the weeds will be.  The Sower just flings the seed.

         I like to think that the Sower knows as well  that there is enough seed to go around – to fill all the nooks and crannies.  And if some is “wasted”?  Well, who is to say what waste is anyway? After all, even the birds feast off some of the seed.

         With reckless abandon, then, God throws the seeds of justice and peace and love on hearts that often refuse them or crowd them out - and only once in a while nurture them until glimmers of hope, glimpses of the kingdom, are revealed.  Just as Jesus throws seeds at the disciples time and time again in spite of their stubbornness and dim-wittedness, so God continues to work with us so we can see what the Almighty is up to in this jaded and cynical world we live in. 

         God is still speaking.  God is still recklessly spreading seeds.  As Steve Pankey notes, “The good news is: God continues to throw seed at us. (God) pours out (her) love upon us relentlessly. And when he finds even the smallest patch of good soil in our hearts, God nurtures the Kingdom within us, producing an abundant harvest: 30, 60, even 100 fold.”

         The story is not about dirt.  It is not about the soil.  It is not about us.  It is about the sower and the extravagant and generous way the seed is spread – over and over again, with reckless abandon, with no sense of what soil is worthy to receive it. 

        No matter who we are or where we are on our life journey, the seeds of justice and compassion have been sown – and will continue to be sown - in our less-than-perfect hearts.  But we have to nurture those seeds, be the soil they need to grow.Surely that is worth remembering as we become engaged in the risky business of being followers of Jesus, of doing our part to usher in God’s kingdom. 

         The seeds are there.  We are in possession of them.  They have been sown in us.  And so it is up to us – and even more so up to the church – to nurture those seeds of justice and compassion and ensure that they sprout and grow.  That is the risky business we say we will engage in.  The Sower does not do it alone.  The Sower only sows the seeds.  We nurture them.  We take action.  We serve.  We bind up the broken-hearted, heal the sick, feed the hungry, welcome the stranger.  We grow the seeds of justice and compassion.

         And because that sort of business is risky, it is so worth remembering that, we are in partnership with the sower.  Like the Sower, we do do it alone. We cannot. And if you remember nothing else from this sermon and this worship service, remember that.  We are in partnership with the sower.  We depend on the Sower, and the Sower depends on us.  Not cause the Sower has to, but because the Sower has chosen to.  We cannot do it alone.

         The winner of the Nobel Peace Prize, Mother Teresa of Calcutta, said this to her superiors as she began her first orphanage:  "I have three pennies and a dream from God to build an orphanage."

         A dream and three pennies – not much!

         And so it was that her superiors chided her gently. "Mother Teresa," they said.  “You cannot build an orphanage with three pennies...with three pennies you can't do a thing."

         "I know," Mother Theresa said, smiling, "but with God and three pennies, I can do anything."

         With God and those sacred seeds sown in our hearts, we can engage in the risky business of being followers of Jesus. With God and the seeds, we can do anything.   
by Rev. Nancy Foran, Raymond Village Community Church, U.C.C., Raymond, Maine    

         

Revelation 21:1-6 "Change!?"

You are welcome to use parts of this sermon, but if you do, please attribute them properly!

         I am not going to ask for a show of hands indicating which of those pieces of music that I just played you found most appealing, in the sense of being most worshipful.  There will not be a vote on which one helped you feel closer to God or which one expressed the gospel message to you more clearly or which one felt more authentically spiritual or religious to you.  That is not important.  What is important is the difference between them.

         The first one you heard was a Gregorian chant, which is a musical style sung that was the basis for the liturgy in medieval churches and cathedrals.  Even today, you will often hear the chanting of psalms in monasteries throughout the world – most of the time with no accompaniment – and certainly not with an organ. Unaccompanied chanting was church music until about 200 years ago when congregations began to sing hymns mostly composed for organ instead.  Until that time, chanting was the foundation of all that felt spiritual and real – and then that blasted organ came in!  Change!

         The second song you heard was a fusion of musical genres including rap that was composed as part of a project at More Than Twelve, a Pentecostal church in Vancouver, BC.  More Than Twelve is less than 10 years old and has way more than 12 at their weekly worship Sunday afternoons, which begins with a potluck supper in a coffee-house atmosphere followed by a decidedly non-traditional prayer and preaching service in the same setting. 

         The More Than Twelve congregation consists of a lot of the marginalized folks in Vancouver – the homeless, recovering addicts, people who had turned away from the church years ago but have found their spiritual home at More Than Twelve.  However, not only the down-and-out find their way there.  There are others as well, one of whom recently bought a building to house the burgeoning congregation. They all find the rap, the visual projection, and the charismatic nature of the service to be deeply spiritual and real. What?  No organ?  That’s not church!  Change!

         You see, what is worshipful to one person is dull, boring, loud, and even irreligious to another.  What is a song that one person thinks ”everyone” knows is a song that is far from the experience of someone else. I used to find it mildly amusing as your pastor when people would talk about the music in our hymn supplement as songs that we should sing often because “everyone” knew them. 

         However, for me, growing up in a staid New England congregational church set down in the New York suburbs, why, I cut my teeth on the Pilgrim Hymnal, and the only songs I knew from the hymn supplement were “Amazing Grace’ and “This Little Light of Mine,” the latter to a different tune – and not because I sang them in church.

         Now I have shared this personal anecdote with you – along with the chant and the fusion rap – to remind you that there is no one “right” way to do worship.  Jesus never set down standards for how to praise God.  In fact, in virtually all of the stories we have about Jesus in a religious setting - the synagogue or temple - someone’s nose is put out of joint because of what he says or does.

         Worship is “right” – not when it makes us feel good – but when it impels and motivates us to go forth in Christ’s name to serve and love one another.  Worship is “right” when it transforms us, when it – dare I say it - changes us.

         You see, in the end, God is all about change.  In the end, the Gospel message is all about transformation – remaking the world through establishing peace with the earth as well as with those that inhabit the earth, transforming our relationships through forgiveness and reconciliation. 

         “Behold!  I make all things new,” God proclaims.  Now, that might sound awfully scary, but be assured that the only thing that does not change is God’s eternal willingness to share in this great adventure with us – “abide with me…O thou who changest not, abide with me.”

         A Lutheran pastor once responded to a blog post by writing:  “The church always exists first for those who haven’t found it yet. (Otherwise), it risks becoming what our bishop has called “a country club with a religious flavor.’  In other words, according to this blogger, the church – and worship – are first and foremost not about us who are already seated here this morning. 

         Worship is not about our comfort and our needs.  Worship is not about escaping the often fearful and always complicated world outside these four walls. And worship is certainly not about being transported back to the 1950’s for an hour when life seemed so much simpler – and then being disappointed when the preacher does not lead us down that particular rabbit hole.

         Worship is about challenging us – and anyone who might walk through our doors – challenging us to find the strength and the courage to allow God to transform us.  Worship is about equipping us – and anyone who might walk through our doors – equipping us to go forth into the world as really and truly and authentically Christ’s disciples.  Church is not like what it used to be in America.  Change!

         Scottish hymn writer John Bell talks about any experience working with a church in Glasgow.  Every Wednesday, he and his colleague “met with a group of twelve people who were committed to discovering relevant directions in worship for that parish. One night (he writes) we divided into two groups. Group A had a large piece of paper headed "Doctor's Surgery." Group B had a large piece of paper headed "The Kitchen." We gave the groups a half hour to write down all the changes that had taken place in their area in the past fifty years.

        The difficulty was getting people to stop. Anecdotes flew about how women used to get up at 4:30 in the morning to light a fire in an outhouse in order to do the week's washing; now they put it in the automatic. People joked about how coffee had once meant 50 percent chicory, 45 percent sugar, 5 percent coffee essence; now everybody used the 100 percent genuine filter variety. People mentioned the changes that have enabled a busy parent to rustle up a dinner of microwaved convenience foods in a matter of minutes.

         In the other corner, people were comparing old-fashioned medical remedies that often made the disease worse than better. They were extolling penicillin, heart bypass operations, and improved prenatal care.

         When the groups came together with their lists, we evaluated them. We went through the changes one by one and asked which had been resisted or were deemed unwelcome. There were only two or three on each chart.

         Then (Bell writes) I put up a third piece of paper headed "Church." And together we noted all the changes that had happened in the church in the past fifty years:

•   New translations of the Bible

•   New hymnbook

•   Use of instruments other than the organ

•   Family services

•   Ordination of women elders

•   Ordination of women ministers

•   Increased range of vestment colors ... and so on.

         And when I asked which of these changes had been resisted or resented, it was every one.

         The curious irony (Bell notes) is that when it comes to food for the body or medicine for the body, we are keen for the most recent development. We want our bodies well nourished and healthy. But when it comes to food for the soul, we want bread that might be stale and medicine that might be long past its sell-by date.”

         And yet, God is all about change.  “Behold, I make all things new.”  Bell goes on to say: “We need to grasp one salient and explicit truth, witnessed from Genesis to Revelation: No one comes in contact with the living God and remains the same.” 

         Look at Abraham and Sarah.  She becomes pregnant at the tender age of 90, and he is pulled out of retirement to birth a nation.  And Moses?  He goes from being a shepherd with a stammering speech impediment who happens to encounter God in a burning bush to courageously leading his people out of slavery in Egypt. 

         As Bell writes:  “This is the gospel of Jesus Christ—nothing, no one shall ever be the same. Christ will not molder in the grave. The irreversible sting of death will not destroy him. The shut tomb will not silence him. It's either change or die . . . so he moves through death, from being a corpse into being a body fully resurrected.

         And if we live in the light of the resurrection, we should not demonize or despise change either. We need to embrace it. Otherwise . . . otherwise ... we become like Lot's wife.  She stands out in the Bible as one of the people who resisted God's call to move, to change. She was so connected to, so tied to the past, to the way things used to be, to the place where she felt comfortable,” that, well that she was left behind as a pillar of salt.”

         John Forbes, pastor of Riverside Church in New York, coined the 75% rule.  A church is vital, he said, if people like what is going on 75% of the time.  The other 25% that they do not like is what the person sitting in the next pew needs even as you abhor it.

         You see, that is the other thing about worship.  It is not a solitary experience but rather an expression of a faith community – in our particular case, a very diverse faith community.  We come from a huge variety of spiritual backgrounds and experiences.  We span a wide spectrum politically and theologically. 

         We are like the weather in Maine.  What is it they say?  If you don’t like the weather now, come back in an hour?  If you don’t like worship this week, remember that someone who is as much a part of this church family as you are did, so come back next week.

         We have been blessed this year to have an opportunity through our Vital Worship Grant to try some new ways of worshipping, to explore the deeper and richer meaning of worship, and to talk about what makes worship a vital experience not only for us as individuals, but for us as a community – as well as for those folks who have yet to walk through our doors. 

         Oh, I know that some of you do not like the painting on the shutters.  Some of you did not want to come to the St. Lucia service because, well, because you really did not know what it would be like. 

And I know some of you will choose not to support our Wisdom of the Elders Service and will not like other upcoming programs and events.  But, hey, some of you do not like the fabric that is often on the altar either and the black birds in the trees during Lent. 

         And that is fine.  Your opinions are respected here because I know they are deeply held.  However, your dissatisfaction is only really fine if you have reflected on and struggled with just why those black birds or those shutters make your skin crawl. 

         Is it because all of these things are different?  Is it because these changes do not fit your mold of what worship should be, of what you think this sanctuary ought to look like?  Or - are you trying to figure out – as we all are – how ritual and tradition fit in with God’s declaration that all things are made new?

         I want to conclude with another quote by John Bell, whom I am excited to say will be visiting with us for a weekend in May as part of our Vital Worship Grant.  John writes, “What is true is that for (Jesus) worship was a transforming experience. Wherever he was in a synagogue or the temple, some people were blessed and others were livid. This is a simple statement of gospel truth, borne out from the time he preached in his home synagogue, through the instances where he healed in holy precincts on the sabbath, to his pardoning of an adulteress which happened in the temple precincts.

         When people say they want to keep their traditions, I have to ask whether that is the same as the liberated Hebrew slaves wanting to avoid entering the Promised Land. There is a Back-to-Egypt Brigade in every congregation which cannot seemingly cope with the fact that we are no longer illiterate 17th century worshippers who need to be spoon fed by the only educated man in the parish; nor can they appreciate that the only constant about tradition is that it changes. God calls us to be signs of the coming kingdom, not a theme park dedicated to an ecclesiastical past….We all have to ask what has to die that God might bring other things to life. That is the question for those who believe in the resurrection. It did not happen without a death.”

         The Bible begins and ends with change.  In the beginning, God’s Spirit rolled over the deep, sparking creation – something emerging from a void.  God started with zero – nothing – and ended up with everything.  As theologian Frederick Buechner wrote, “Perhaps more than for anything else, God is famous for calling something precious out of something that doesn't even exist until God calls it.” Change! 

         And in the end, God proclaims, “Behold!  I make all things new.”  And Buechner continues, “In other words, there is zero again, and out of it God brought a new heaven and a new earth.” Change! 

         And in between, there is us, struggling to make sense of it all.  As your pastor and as project director for our Vital Worship Grant, I am not bent on change for change sake but rather am committed to change for the sake of enriching and deepening the spiritual life of this faith community – and anyone who might walk through our doors – enriching and deepening our spiritual life through our worship together.  My prayer is that, through worship, each one of us will become a more engaged follower of Jesus and that over time we will embrace the notion that, as John Bell noted, no one comes in contact with the Living God and remains the same – and that needs to extend to worship as well.

by Rev. Nancy Foran, Raymond Village Community Church U.C.C., Raymond, Maine

Luke 21:25-36 "Alternative Reality"

You are welcome to use parts of this sermon, but if you do, please attribute them properly!

         We are all on the treadmill to Christmas now, right?  I mean, Thanksgiving is over, and Black Friday is in the past.  The Salvation Army bell ringers are outside of the places where shoppers flock – Christmas Tree Shops, Walmart, Maine Mall. 

         At every turn, we find a life size sparkling smiling angel or mechanized nodding Santa Claus. Red and green cascades outward everywhere we look.  

         Giant inflated reindeer bedeck our neighbor’s lawn, our houses are ablaze with lights and good cheer, and, if not now then soon, very soon, if we hear Bing Crosby, Perry Como, or even Johnny Mathis sing “It’s Beginning to Look A lot Like Christmas” one more time, well, who knows what we will do. 

         What we might have pledged to pace as a walk, if it has not already, will soon turn into a desperate run.  Actually, I think of these upcoming weeks less as a treadmill and more as a giant funnel into which we are sucked in late November, swirled round and round and tossed about throughout December and finally spit out after the last dish is washed and put away following Christmas dinner. 

Choose whatever imagery you want, there is no doubt about it.  The Christmas orgy has begun.

         Yet, for all of us, I think, whether we go to church or not, beneath all the trappings of Christmas – the decorations that are designed to make us happy, the eggnog laced with nostalgia, the snow that is supposed to make it be a real Norman Rockwell holiday, beneath all those trappings, there is a deep longing, a spiritual anxiety, a gnawing hunger for something that even the best of the Christmas cookies can not assuage. 

         And so we in the church set aside these four weeks before Christmas as a sort of alternative world.  We call it Advent, which means coming, Jesus’ coming – not only as a one time commemorative event in the past but also coming again when God’s Kingdom is fully established, and maybe even coming now, even now.  And if we enter this world of Advent and immerse ourselves in it with half an ounce of sincerity and seriousness, we will find it oddly comforting. 

         Rather than red or green, we use deep purple or sometimes royal blue – not bright flashy colors but cooler, more meditative ones.  Rather than the gay tunes of Christmas (there will be time enough for those), we sing the more somber, sometimes minor key, carols that cannot help but nudge us toward an attitude of reflection and quietude.  Rather than beginning with the Light of the World that comes in the form of a newborn baby, we begin in darkness, holy darkness.

         It is quite bizarre when you think about it.  Here in church we listen to our strange apocalyptic scripture readings, do as much as we can using candlelight, and participate in our sometimes melancholy liturgies while outside these doors we are beckoned to enter the world of glitter and glitz and buy, buy, buy, the razzle dazzle of the season. 

         However, maybe because of that incongruity, we are ever more mindful of who we are.  We are followers of Jesus – followers of that Bethlehem baby grown into renegade man.  We, like him, do not always conform to the world, but instead have within us the capacity to transform it.

         So – let us, for once, be true to who we are and to what we feel.  Let us own our deep longings, our spiritual anxiety, our gnawing hunger for something that maybe we cannot quite put our finger on.  Let us own the holy darkness that is Advent – and see where it leads us as we look at our Scripture reading, which is often referred to as the Little Apocalypse because it is written in a style frequently used in difficult times – and the times in which it was written and the times in which we read it were (and are) no exception.  The ancients lived then and we live now in difficult, in fearful times.

         It is “little’ because it is only a few verses and not an entire chunk of the Bible like the Book of Revelation is.  It is an “apocalypse” because, through the words he puts into Jesus’ mouth, the Gospel writer talks about the so-called end times when the Kingdom of God will be established on earth.  He is writing at a time of unprecedented chaos and uncertainty in Palestine among the Jewish people.  It is about 70 years after the time that Jesus was teaching and healing.  The end of the Jewish wars with Rome was a disastrous defeat.   For all intents and purposes, the world was ending for this ancient people. 

         Even the Temple, the place where Yahweh/God was said to reside was gone.  Methodist pastor Jeremy Troxler imagines it this way:  “The disciples are sitting there opposite the massive megachurch, St.-Peter’s-Cathedral-sized, Mall-of-America-looking Temple, gaping at the shining stones and dazzling jewels, perhaps thinking silently that the Temple building, the central pivot point of Judaism, is what connects them to God.

         Then Jesus, unimpressed, tells them, ‘All of that is going to be nothing more than a pile of rubble.’

         The disciples, shocked, ask, ‘Teacher, when will this be?’”

         And Jesus spouts off a flurry of apocalyptic jargon, the likes of which neither we nor the disciples had probably ever heard:  “It will seem like all hell has broken loose—sun, moon, stars, earth, sea, in an uproar and everyone all over the world in a panic, the wind knocked out of them by the threat of doom, the powers-that-be quaking.”  And Paris rocks from the detonation of explosions and the world is shocked by acts of terrorism.  And Russia shows her muscles.  And borders are closed to refugees.  And then—then!—they’ll see the Son of Man welcomed in grand style—a glorious welcome!”

         Yikes!  Those are pretty scary and foreboding words for the first Sunday in Advent, the start of a new church year!  Cosmic signs!  Danger!  Watch out, everyone!  Because of our strange attraction to all things doomsday, these verses are certainly enough to make us worry, if not crawl into a cave and hide.  Given this apocalypse as an alternative, maybe Walmart the day after Thanksgiving is not so bad after all. 

         But Jesus says, “No!  This is not the time to run and hide.  This is not the time to duck and cover.  This is not even the time to take sanctuary in a sanctuary, like this one.  This is not the time to surround oneself with cheery Christmas carols and inflatable reindeer and insulate oneself from the darkness that is encroaching. 

         This is the time to own your longings, to own your anxiety, to own your fears for the world you are leaving your children and grandchildren.  This is the time, as Jesus said, to get “up on your feet. Stand tall with your heads high. Help is on the way!”

         Contrary to popular belief, and much to the dismay of folks who make their living as doomsday theorists, this is not the time to retreat into freaky end-of-the-world scenarios.  And besides, if this world ended and a better one arose like a phoenix from its ashes, would it really be that bad? 

        How bad would a world be that was normed by love rather than wealth, where great human migrations did not occur because swords had actually been forged into plowshares, where planes shot down over airspace disputes and people gunned down in market squares were only modern day fairy tales and fables, where everyone had a place to call home – with a fig tree to watch for when its leaves begin to appear?  How bad would a world like that be?

         You see, I think that is what God intends for the world – and to proclaim and model this certainty was the foundation of Jesus’ ministry.  This is what Advent is all about – waiting in holy darkness, waiting for God’s intentions to come to fruition, understanding that we are living in a time of pregnant possibility. 

         This is the time to throw yourself into Advent – because, if Advent is nothing else for you, it needs to be a time of hope, fearful hope perhaps, but great high hope nonetheless.  Great high hope because God is not finished yet – with your life or with the world. 

         When I was at Ghost Ranch in New Mexico last year, I did a really stupid thing.  I hiked alone.  I actually did not go alone.  However, the person I went with was fishing while I was hiking.  Coming back down the trail, it got foggy, and I could not find the next set of markers.  I knew enough not to wander around too much and so made my way back up to the end of the trail where I settled into an ancient and decrepit door-less, derelict ranger cabin.  It got dark, and I was convincing myself that I would be spending the night there when I saw the flashlights of a couple of forest rangers sent to retrieve me.  And all was well.

         Sometimes I get a little freaked thinking back on what might have happened, how a mountain lion could have sniffed (or snuffed) me out.  And when I do begin to wander off in those imaginings, I remember that there is a reason – a sacred reason - for me being here.  I remember that, like the disciples and those who first listened to this Gospel, I am challenged to not retreat into fear but rather to stand up, raise my head, look upward, look around me at the fig trees (or maple trees here in Maine), and wait in hope for all that God has in mind for me to happen.

         That is what Advent is all about.  It is about what is coming.  It is about living expectantly.  It is about living in the hope of God’s future as if it has already arrived. 

         As theologian Frederick Buechner wrote, “I think we are waiting. That is what is at the heart of it. Even when we don't know that we are waiting, I think we are waiting. Even when we can't find words for what we are waiting for, I think we are waiting….We who live much of the time in the darkness are waiting… for the advent of light, that ultimate light that is redemptive and terrifying at the same time. It is redemptive because it puts an end to the darkness, and that is also why it is terrifying, because for so long, for all our lives, the darkness has been home, and because to leave home is always cause for terror.”

         Buechner goes on to say: “To wait for Christ to come in his fullness is not just a passive thing, a pious, prayerful, churchly thing. On the contrary, to wait for Christ to come in his fullness is above all else to act in Christ's stead as fully as we know how. To wait for Christ is as best we can to be Christ to those who need us to be Christ to them most and to bring them the most we have of Christ's healing and hope.”

         Advent is about owning all that is not right with the world.  It is about trusting that this is not the world that God intends. It is about seeing the need for us to be Christ’s passionate presence in the world.  Advent is also about standing tall with your head held high and consciously living in that alternative world of Advent– a world where no matter what happens, no matter how bad things may get, the Gospel message of justice and compassion, reconciliation and love, will continue to be whispered and someday that whisper will become a shout because Jesus’ words will never die away.  We live in a world of deep longing and sometimes deep fear, but we also live in a world of profound hope, a world to which we are all called to be a part of because there is a reason – a sacred reason – that we are here in the first place, here connected to something – to someone – greater than ourselves.

         One blogger I read this week wrote about a street preacher he had seen: His exhortations were to get right with God because Jesus was coming soon.  An old man was walking by about this time, moving slowly with a cane.  When he heard the message of the street preacher, he straightened up, opened wide his arms, and said, "What in blazes are you talking about?  He's already here."

        As the blogger wrote, “indeed, Jesus is here, and he has always been here.  He didn't go drifting off into space waiting for some future day to come back, like some alien from outer space.  In his incarnation, Christ is interior to the world, intimately connected with it, never to let it go.”

         And if that is not reason to hope, to live in the alternative world of Advent, then I am not sure what is.  So come, don’t jump on the treadmill or get sucked into the Christmas funnel, come and wait for what is to come, come and wait in holy darkness.

by Rev. Nancy Foran, Raymond Village Community Church, Raymond, Maine