O come, O come, Emmanuel.
Amen.
“Come, Lord Jesus.” That simple prayer is a short summary
of the season of Advent. Come: Advent is the season in which we hope for
rebirth. Later in Christmas we will celebrate the rebirth of hope. Just as God
came to us some 2,000 years ago, we pray that God comes again to culminate the
reign of peace over all the earth. Lord: In the time of the Bible, there were
lords, but they were more warlords than saviors. Calling Jesus “Lord” is a
subversive prayer that means that we follow not the ways of the empire, but of
he who was killed by the empire. And Jesus: His name is derived from the Hebrew
name of Joshua, which means “God saves.” Jesus’ name symbolizes the liberation
that he will give us from all that enslaves us. “Come, Lord Jesus.” It is a
simple, but extremely dangerous prayer.
One of the great preachers of our time is Tom Long, and
he talks about the fact that many Christians, and most notably, preachers, have
lost the idea of eschatology in their faith. Eschatology is the theological way
of saying “the end times.” As we hope for rebirth this Advent, what sort of
rebirth are we waiting for? There is deeply engrained expectation in Scripture
that one day there will be a rebirth- that there will be a new heaven and a new
earth, that the Son of Man will come in clouds with great power and glory. But
how we understand this hope is not often helpful, or founded in Scripture.
Some can’t wait for the eschaton, the end, to come. There
are some that are so bloodthirsty and arrogant that they can’t wait for the end
to arrive, hoping to be proven right. And they can tell you exactly how it will
play out, and in fact, if you want to know for yourself you can just pick up a
copy of Left Behind and read all
about it. This notion of the end times focuses too much on doom and gloom. And
to be honest, it is not a very compelling vision. If the end will be about
judgment and not reconciliation, then it is not about Good News.
There is a story of a person who asks a question of a
scholar about how we should understand the idea of the eschaton. After he gives
a vague non-answer, someone responds, “so you’re saying that we will need to
agree that Jesus is coming again, but not really.” And there are many that we
can label as “liberal” who explain the idea of the end in that sort of
worthless way. And that isn’t a very hopeful theology to me either, because it
actually says: don’t get your hopes up that things will ever get any better,
you just need to be a bit more optimistic. This belief depresses me, because it
says that the only possibilities that are out there are the ones already on the
table. But, as a Christian, I hope for something more.
John Lennon famously sang “Imagine there’s no heaven /
It’s easy if you try / No hell below us / Above us only sky / Imagine all the
people living for today.” In Christianity today, you don’t have to do much
imagining, you just need to listen to a few sermons and you’ll get a good
glimpse of a religion with no heaven. We either talk about the end times in
such literal terms that it becomes something that we’d rather not have happen,
or we try to dismiss it by saying that we will transform the world ourselves,
no God needed. But there is no hope in either of those ways of believing.
So when we pray “come, Lord Jesus,” what is that we’re
praying for? Are we expecting the words of Isaiah to come true? Today’s reading
from the prophet began with “O that you would tear open the heavens and come
down, so that the mountains would quake at your presence... to make your name
known to your adversaries, so that the nations might tremble at your presence!”
It is an extremely subversive and dangerous prayer. Asking God to tear apart
the world as we know it means that everything we know will end. The theoretical
physicist and Anglican priest, John Polkinghorne has remarked that for the most
part, we hope for things not to happen. We hope that the stock market doesn’t
crash, we hope that the cancer doesn’t spread, we hope that we won’t get
caught. But the hope of Advent is a hope for something to actually happen. It
is a hope for the world to be remade. And so we pray- “come, Lord Jesus.”
Next Sunday, we’ll be worshiping through a service of
Lessons and Carols, so we won’t have the chance to explore another set of
wonderful passages from Isaiah and Mark. Both passages will say “In the
wilderness prepare the way of the Lord, make straight in the desert a highway
for our God. Every valley shall be lifted up, and every mountain and hill be
made low; the uneven ground shall become level, and the rough places a plain.”
This is an eschatological hope- a hope that things will actually change, that
the world will be remade. But this is a tough message. If you live in one of
the high places, it means that you will be made equal to those who live in the
dark valleys.
It seems
like every time you get on the interstate for more than a few miles, you run
into a construction project. And generally, they are annoying. You have to go
slower, you have to pay attention to new traffic patterns, and sometimes you
end up on a road that you didn’t expect to find. This is exactly what the
prayer “come, Lord Jesus” is asking for. When the uneven ground becomes level
and the rough places plain, we’re talking about a divine road construction
project, which will be just as unsettling as a lane closure on 85. If we are
bold enough to pray “come, Lord Jesus,” then we should be ready for the
discomfort and challenges of change.
The preacher I mentioned earlier, Tom Long, tells story
about a group of university chaplains who are meeting with local clergy. One
clergy person asks “how are the students morally?” One of the chaplains
responds “they are wonderful people- ambitious and caring. So many of them
tutor at-risk youth and volunteer at the local soup kitchen.” But the Jewish
chaplain follows up by saying, “you’re right, they are good kids, and they
should be commended for their service to the community, but they lack any
vision of salvation.” Long then notes that if you do not have a compelling
vision of what God is doing to renew Creation you can’t go to the soup kitchen
every day, eventually it will beat you down. Having an eschatological theology sustains
our faith.
If we have no hope or expectation that things will never
get better, well, I think that’s the definition of hell on earth. Regardless of
what you think about the Grand Jury’s decision in Ferguson, this lack of
eschatological thinking is what is leading to the unrest around the country. It
seems that racial tensions will never go away. It can seem like minority rights
will always be trampled. It can seem like there will never be peace in the
Middle East, that Congress will always be dysfunctional, that the recession
will never end, that cures for diseases will never be found. But in the face of
those fears and doubts, eschatology proclaims that God Almighty is, and will
continue to be, the Savior of the world- that we await God to tear apart the
heavens and redeem Creation. And so we pray, “come, Lord Jesus.”
As much as I believe that we have a role in God’s plan of
salvation for the world, we must realize that we are not the bringers of
salvation. It is not our job to bring the Kingdom of God into its fullest
being- that is the God’s work. One modern form of idolatry is that we confuse
our role with that of God. The belief that it is our job to transform the world
is one of the extreme ends of the spectrum of salvation- it is a humanist
approach to salvation. But we are here this morning to worship God, not ourselves.
There is a reason why we have a cross at the center of our altar and not a
mirror. But the other end of the spectrum is just as dangerous- it says that
God will one day come and fix all of our problems for us, so there’s no sense
in doing anything. One of the worst conclusions to come from this line of
thinking is people who pollute the earth and justify it by concluding, “well,
God’s coming to come destroy it eventually anyway.” There is no hope in either
of these positions.
While Jesus reminds us that we don’t know when the day
will come, what a proper sense of eschatology gives us is an acknowledgment
that one day things will be set right. One day, the God will tear apart the
heavens and God’s peace and salvation will be known fully. And this understanding
of eschatology is our hope because it gives a shape to life. Our hope is that
we know how this story ends, and so what happens in the middle is defined by that
conclusion. TS Eliot said “in my beginning is my end,” but in eschatology we
might say “in my end is my beginning.”
We often baptize infants, and when we do, we call them
children of God. But that is not to be the first name in their lives, only to
be later called other, uglier names throughout their lives. No, the name “child
of God,” will be their eschatological name, the name they are called when they
come to see God face to face. We don’t start as pure, redeemed, sinless,
perfect creatures, only to be chewed up and spit out by the world. At the last,
we will be those things- and that final redemption is our Advent hope, that is
the power of eschatology in our lives, and why we need to reclaim it as a
necessary part of our lives.
So how do we respond, how do we wait for that final
culmination of all things? As Jesus says, we stay awake, and pay attention to
signs that the Kingdom is coming on earth as it is in heaven. There is a saying
that a sailor without a destination is unable to tell the difference between a
good wind and a bad one. Eschatology tells us what the final destination will
be- it will be the wolf lying with the lamb, it will be the feast on the holy
mountain of God with all the nations gathered, it will be with every knee
bending at the name of Jesus, it will be when every soul tells out the
greatness of the Lord.
In the meantime, until the final culmination of all
things comes, there is the tension of living as we wait for redemption to come.
Suffering is not fun. Racism, violence, and poverty are not realities that we’d
chose to have running rampant in our culture. But the hope of Advent, the hope
for rebirth, the hope of eschatology is that they will not endure forever. What
will remain at the end will be the love and grace of God. And isn’t this what
the Christian faith is all about? The Resurrection has the last word over the
Crucifixion. That doesn’t erase the scars, but it does redeem them. One
theologian has said that “the greatness of Christianity lies in the fact that
it does not seek a supernatural cure for suffering, but a supernatural use of
it.”
“Come, Lord Jesus,” may be the most desperate and daring
prayer ever uttered because it is a plea from the depths of need for God to
tear apart the heavens and remake the world. Eschatology is often misunderstood
as either being about divine wrath on the one hand, or on the other is
incorrectly focused on our abilities instead of God’s grace. In Advent, as we
long for God to transform the unjust structures of this world, we have hope
that the suffering of today will be transformed into the salvation of tomorrow.
If we have the faith in God to be our Redeemer, if we have the hope for God’s
peace to be known, and if we have the boldness to ask God to tear apart the
heavens and earth and bring forth God’s new Creation, then let us pray those
powerful words- Come, Lord Jesus. Amen.
