“Things Are Not Always as They Appear”
Isaiah 42:5-9
Luke 21:25-36
Things are not always as they appear. Well, if that isn’t an understatement, I don’t know what is. This is one of those lessons you can only learn from life experiences, usually learned by guessing wrongly about something. All of us have had to learn, usually the hard way, that we shouldn’t assume anything. After all, we know what “assume” means, don’t we? Then there is the old saying, “don’t judge a book by its cover.”
Just because something
looks one way, doesn’t mean that it is that way. Just because we have a hot, dry summer,
doesn’t necessarily mean it’s a sign that we are going to have a mild
winter. Just because a movie preview
looks good, doesn’t necessarily mean it’s a sign that movie is. Who would have thought that a humble, old man
who drove an old, beat up, pick-up truck would actually be
After all, it would appear that
Advent is supposed to be the time during which we await Christmas, the four
Sundays before Christmas when we light the advent candles, sing Christmas
songs, decorate our homes, and count the number of shopping days until
Christmas, not to mention prepare ourselves for the coming of Jesus, or is it
Santa Claus, on Christmas morning.
Sure Advent certainly comes before
Christmas, and it is certainly a time when we begin to prepare ourselves and
celebrate the coming of the babe in the manger who is Christ the Lord, but
Advent is one of those church seasons that is not what it appears to be, even
though everything we see during the season of Advent points to something else.
It’s hard not to get caught up in
what Advent appears to be. For us this
year, it started back in October, even before Halloween, when store shelves
began to transform themselves into Christmas displays as if on some
evolutionary economic timetable. In the
blink of an eye, stores morphed themselves from Halloween into Christmas with
no inclination that it wasn’t even Thanksgiving yet! Of course, my favorite are
the store flyers we get in the mail. You
know the ones that advertise the “One Day Christmas Sale” that takes place
before Christmas and lasts a week. I’m
sure glad we have the stores and the media to give us the signs that Christmas
is coming, because if I didn’t know that there are only 25 days…oops, make that
24 days, 12 hours, and some-odd minutes…left until Christmas, I wouldn’t know
what to do with myself.
Okay, so I
would hope that all of us would know that Advent isn’t about the countdown of
the number of shopping days until Christmas.
We have already heard during the lighting of the Advent candle that
Advent means coming, but Advent is not about the coming that we are used to
thinking about during this season.
I’m sure it surprised many of you
that we would read a text such as this one.
You probably expected some other text to be read especially since it is
the season of Advent, and now to hear a text about the end of the world and the
second coming of Christ, may stir up feelings of awkwardness and confusion, if
not a sense of anxiety.
In this time of Advent/Christmas,
filled with its “good tidings of great joy” and “peace on earth goodwill to
all,” a text like this about the earth in distress, nations confused by the
roaring of the sea and the waves, people fainting from fear and foreboding
about what is coming upon the world, and powers of the heaven and the earth
being shaken, might leave us to wonder what in the world is going on, which is
exactly the point Luke is making.
For Luke,
there is a dramatic reversal that has taken place in the person of Jesus of
Nazareth. The world’s ways have been
dramatically and radically reversed by the coming of the
What appears to be dreadful news
is in fact the great reversal of the good news of the Gospel. What appears to be the end filled with
destruction and death, fear and foreboding, the shaking of the heavens and
earth, is in fact God’s new beginning, the beginning of new things, a new
heaven and earth, a new creation. “Don’t
get caught up in the signs going on in the world, don’t get caught up at the
things as they appear to be, or you will miss the bigger picture of what is
actually going on. Stand up”, Jesus
says, “for your redemption is drawing near.”
In this time
of Advent, we are certainly preparing to
celebrate Christ's coming in history, when God's reign broke into our world in
the person of the Son of Man that night long ago in the baby born in
But
more importantly, Advent is about anticipating Christ's final coming, its about
the promise spoken about in Isaiah when God says, “the former things have come
to pass, and new things I now declare.”
It’s about the time when the One, who came from the branch of David,
will execute justice and righteousness in the land bringing God's reign in its
final fullness. It’s about the time
Jesus speaks about in the gospel lesson today when all will see the Son of Man
coming in a cloud with power and great glory in final and total victory.
It is
our conviction as Christians that history is going somewhere, and that
somewhere is to the Day of the Lord.
History may appear to repeat itself with its earthquakes and fires, its
wars and destruction, its fear and death, but in reality it is heading toward a
goal, a final moment, a new beginning when Christ will come again, when Christ
will be Lord of all.
Like
the fig tree and all the trees that appear to be dead and useless during the
winter, with their gnarled and crooked branches stretched out like skeletal
fingers, they are in fact waiting for the coming of the spring, when new life
will sprout up from their branches, so too will the heavens and the earth
appear to go through its death pains, but it will not be the end, for where
death seeemed to be the only certainty, the Son of Man will bring new life like
the coming spring.
This
is what we are preparing ourselves for during the season of Advent, which is
why everyday should be for us the last day, because God is at work even now to
bring about a new beginning – the day of redemption, the day of amazing
grace. We must never think that we are
living in settled times as we wait for God to finally decide to intervene again
in human history, but rather we must always live in the shadow of eternity, always
remaining in a permanent state of watchful expectation, always readying
ourselves to stand before the Son of man.
In the
birth of a helpless baby all those years ago, the powers of the universe found
their days to be numbered, for the day of the Lord is already moving toward us,
and with each second that passes we find ourselves closer and closer to time of
his return, when nothing will ever be the same again.
In
this Advent season, let us stand up and raise our heads, for the hope we have
in Jesus Christ, because things are not always as they appear. Christ is coming again. Our redemption is drawing near. Amen.