Just Before the Dawn

This is the sermon delivered by Rev. Don Van Antwerpen to the congregation of Unfinished Community on December 1, 2024, drawing from Luke 21:25-36, and 1 Thessalonians 3:9-13

I find myself starting from kind of a weird place this week, largely because well..everything about this week seems to defy expectations. Everything about today feels like it’s the opposite of what it should be. Today we’re coming to church on the first Sunday in Advent in a year which seems particularly brutal hopeless, when so many of us are only just beginning to rediscover Christ (or, for some of us, discovering him the first time ourselves), with so much going on and so much need for the glory of God to shine forth explosively, when what we need more than anything is comfort, encouragement, and celebration, and we find….this? Quiet, muted colors, candles, and scriptures talking about the end of the world?

So…happy new year, I guess?

For those of you who don’t know what I’m talking about, today is the first Sunday of the Advent season, which is the very first season of the Christian calendar. Which makes today our equivalent of New Years Day.

Well…I say happy new years, but truth be told, it doesn’t really feel like it, does it?

When we think of that first day of a new year, we kind of expect it to be…well…bigger than this, don’t we? We expect it to be a time of celebration, of merrymaking, of joy and festivities all around. We expect bright colors, loud noises, fireworks and things like that as we come together and mark the passage from one year into the next. 

But when we look around, instead of bright colors and joyous celebration, we find our church - like most every other church around the world - decked out in dark and somber colors; purples, blacks, and blues covering up the whites, reds, and greens of the post-Pentecost season from which we have only just emerged. 

We might expect, coming to church on this first day of our new year, to feel an electric undercurrent of renewed energy, of change and renewal, but instead what we are presented with is not excitement and anticipation as much as it is foreboding, even fear. 

Advent, it seems, starts us off in a scary place. 

Now for a lot of us, that can be a bit of a shock, and a bit of a turn-off, because our world is already scary enough, so why in God’s magnificent name would we want to start our year off on this kind of footing? Why would we want to begin in a place of foreboding and fear rather than celebration and happiness? 

Why does God want to start the divine story here, in the dark, when that good news of great joy is just a few weeks down the road?

The answer of course, is because we are here, in the cold and the dark. 

God’s story begins not where we want to be, but where we are, and the truth is that, for a lot of us, there is no time nearly as dark as the present. In the past month many of our lives have been filled with want can be, with very little exaggeration, described as apocalyptic foreboding. The world around us is filled with not so much vague signs of things that might come as “blaring declarations of inescapable and impending doom.” While many in power and privilege continue to imagine apocalypse as some abstract spiritual concern, a great many of us are either girding our proverbial loins for the apocalypse bearing down on us or, in some cases, facing the leading edges of it personally right now. 

So when we read passages like this one in Luke, when we start our year with passages like this, we can be forgiven for being at best, a little annoyed. We want assurance from our scriptures, we want security and comfort from our pulpits. When everything else in life is on fire, can we not turn to the Word of the Lord and expect some respite, some relief from all that is and all that is yet to come?

Why this? Why are we given this dollar-store Revelation foolishness instead of comfort? Why are we handed a stripped-down, 11-verse Left Behind cheat sheet when what we need is clarity of purpose and surety of heart? Why is Jesus talking about the end of the world when what we need is to survive in the one we have?

Well…first off, and I feel this bears repeating every time apocalyptic language like this is used in the Bible, we’re not dealing with a literal prediction of some abstract series of events yet to come in the future. Ok? 

Good. 

Now that that’s out of the way, I want to call your attention to what is actually being said here, because if Jesus isn’t being a literal clairvoyant, then our reading of the text needs to change significantly. 

You see, Jesus is describing here isn’t something that is going to happen, but something that happens regularly. Whether we like to admit it or not, human civilization all too often tends to function cyclically; empires rise and file, conquerors rise to power and oppress only to be rebelled against and struck down, evil gains dominion only for God’s goodness and love reflected in the heart of us all to push back, and bend that moral arc back towards justice once again. 

Throughout history, just as in our own personal lives, progress is never linear. 

And just like in our personal lives, we can tell when a crash is coming. Disaster doesn’t happen in a vacuum; I know that my most recent attempt at healthy eating is going to fail the minute I get to the grocery store and see that those chocolate oranges are back on sale. I know that my plans to exercise in the morning are out the window as soon as the temperature starts to turn cold, and the kids start to get grumpy, and my workload starts to increase. 

Just so, we know when trouble is coming in the world. We know that the planet is in serious trouble because…well…just look at the weather. We know that there is oppression, death, and destruction coming because just look at the behaviors of those in power - and, worse, those coming into power - and we know that great suffering is on the horizon as we watch the world descend into violence and war. 

The signs, my friends, are all there. And they are terrifying. 

And in the middle of it, we have all these folks screaming willfully about how this must mean that the Son of MSM is drawing near, how all the violence and terror must truly be the will of the divine, and that everything we’d ever want is only a holy war away, and all we need to do pick up the sword against all those annoying vulnerable people.

How can we be anything but hopeless?

Because we know that, just as the fig tree sprouts in summer, just as its leaves fall to the ground in autumn, these things too will all pass in time.

But even still, the memory of summer doesn’t make the winter any less cold.

Which is why Jesus makes a point of saying that  these are the times in which redemption, in which God’s kingdom itself, is drawing near.

This seems utterly insane at first, I’ll readily admit. If God is the God of love and peace, of infinite grace and abounding mercy, why would this period of apocalyptic darkness be the time in which God’s kingdom draws nearest?

In the weeks following the US election, I saw a number of people opining that this had been the moment in which we, as a people, had the option to choose our future, to decide between a Star Trek-style utopia, or a Mad Max-esque dystopia, and lamenting - quite understandably, that we had chosen dystopia.

But, as anyone who knows their Star Trek can tell you, that utopia only came about after 3/4 of a century of nuclear war, devastation, and dystopia. And it wasn’t the work of governments, or the hand of God, or inexplicable alien intervention that ended their Mad Max era and set the groundwork for utopia…

 …it was when a handful of people gathered together in community, slapped together a few houses and a bar around an old abandoned missile solo out in the middle of nowhere, and decided that if the world wasn’t gonna climb out of the darkness on its own, then they’d just have to do it themselves.

We are attentive to the signs of the times, and the times look bad indeed. But it’s always darkest just before the dawn, and what sees us through the darkness isn’t the power of our hands or the strength of our hearts. It’s not our thick skin, our power, our privilege, our money, or even our bloody-minded determination and/or stubborn willfulness.

It’s each other.

That passage from Thessalonians shows us, simply and beautifully, what community feels like in times like these, and what it looks like to truly bear with each other, even when things are at their most grim. Paul is both direct and effusive in saying just how much the fellowship and community in Thessaloniki means to him:

“ How can we thank God enough for you in return for all the joy that we feel before our God because of you? Night and day we pray most earnestly that we may see you face to face and restore whatever is lacking in your faith.”

But as effusive as he is, as strongly as he rests in the love he has for them, and they for him, even in a time when these tiny Christian communities were isolated and adrift in a world the saw them as dangerous, alien, even at times inhuman; even then, it feels somewhat distant, as a letter long-delivered from distant shores. How fairs such feelings of community when they are neck-deep in the events of life in Thessaloniki, but Paul is off in Rome doing…well…whatever it is that Paul does when he’s not writing letters.

It seems that that way, at least until we see the two verses that count  just before todays passage

“For this reason, brothers and sisters, during all our distress and persecution we have been encouraged about you through your faith. For we now live, if you continue to stand firm in the Lord.”

And there it is.

Though their situations may be superficially different, as followers of Christ they all share in the sufferings of each other, all face challenges and difficulties which threaten our safety, our stability, even our very lives, and at no point does Paul try to minimize their challenges by emphasizing his own. The distress and persecution Paul was talking about would persist for another decade or so, but would eventually see him executed, by some accounts beheaded, simply for having the audacity to preach the good news of Christ in opposition to empire. 

But as bad as it was for Paul, as bad as it ever became, Paul chose not to get into a suffering-measuring contest, but to be deliberate in sharing in the joy of fellowship with his fellow Christians, drawing strength from that joy in his struggles just as he encouraged them to do by 

Being in community is more than just shared geography, more than shared condition, or experience, more than a shared language or nationality. It’s more than teaching, more than preaching, more than ritual, song, and any of the traditions that we hold to. Community is a commitment; a commitment to be intentional about taking joy in each other, about celebrating the mere existence of our friends and colleagues, unashamedly and unreservedly. It’s a commitment to support, in word and deed, through both practical means and through simple encouragement, everything about the people who share this journey with us, knowing that God has directed us to each other for this purpose. 

The darkest times are when we need each other the most. The hardest, most difficult seasons in life are the times in which community matters the most, and that is why when things are at their worst, when signs and portents hang overhead telling us that terrible, horrible, no-good, very bad things are heading our way, the kingdom of God is at its nearest. Not because God delights in our suffering, or because suffering and pain is somehow both necessary and unavoidable. 

No. 

The kingdom of God is at its closest when we are united in love, when we draw closer to each other - as we do in the bleakest of times - to find our way out of the darkness together. 

This is where Advent begins; the scene on which the story of Jesus Christ, God’s greatest expression of love and mercy for this twisted and broken world, opens. Not in glory or in celebration, bur right here; in the darkness, with the specter of doom hanging over all our heads, with communities of faith drawing closer to each other in the gathering twilight, singing our songs in defiance of what is to come knowing that the light at the end of this tunnel is a single star, shining over a manger, guiding us all home.

Amen.