The real enemies of Christianity
are not our critics.
They keep us on our toes.
The real enemies are so-called Christians
who smuggle their personal pathologies
into the faith and distort it into something false
– something that makes people
cruel instead of kind,
judgmental instead of forgiving.
No one has done more harm to Christianity
than John Nelson Darby,
a 19th Century clergyman who invented
the modern heresy of dispensationalism,
the currently popular version of religion
that threatens people
with the Coming of Christ in vengeance.
It’s the God’s gonna get you kind of religion.
If you want to know the difference
between the orthodox faith
and the Left Behind heresy,
I recommend Barbara Rossing’s book,
The Rapture Exposed.
For today, it’s enough that you know,
that dispensationalism isn’t Biblical
and it isn’t the orthodox Christian tradition.
We don’t dread the 2nd Coming as a disaster.
We pray thy Kingdom come,
because God’s kingdom is one
of freedom and peace.
We pray, Thy will be done,
because the same God, whose love
gave birth to the Cosmos,
wills mercy and healing all creation.
For centuries, the Church has read the lessons
about the end times during Advent
because the destiny of creation isn’t that
God will wipe it out,
but that God will redeem it
in something that looks like Christmas.
The essence of Christianity isn’t fear
but hope in the face of all the chaos
we read about in today’s gospel lesson
and what we read in the newspaper each day.
We do not dread the coming of Christ.
We hope for it.
Zechariah described our God-ordained destiny
as a day in which there is no night.
Isaiah described it as a time when every tear
would be wiped away,
and the lion would lay down with the lamb.
In Advent, we are looking forward
to something like Christmas
– when angels will sing and people
will be still and happy in reverence.
Hope is extraordinary.
Hope dares to believe in something,
to trust in something, we cannot yet see.
It’s the difference between Christianity
and the religions that teach
passive acceptance of things as they are.
Christians are not satisfied with things as they are,
and we do not want to be satisfied
with things as they are.
We hope for better.
We strive for better.
The German theologian, Jurgen Moltmann, says,
“ . . . (E)xperience and hope stand
in contradiction to each other . . .
with the result that . . . man
is not brought into . . . agreement
with the given situation, but is drawn
into the conflict between experience
and hope.”
He means hope sets us against the status quo.
Jesus describes that contradiction
in today’s lesson.
Our experience is sometimes pretty grim,
but, in spite of experience,
we set our hearts on hope.
Whenever the world is falling apart,
people faint with fear and foreboding.
But that is precisely the time, Jesus says, to
stand up, raise your heads,
because your redemption is near
. . . the kingdom of God is near.
Today, when war is raging around the world,
the sea is rising as the polar ice caps melt,
mass shootings splatter blood
in churches, schools, and malls,
wildfires rage and storms drown the coastlands,
things are falling apart on a grand scale.
When our families split into conflict,
people we love are lost in addiction,
and we are falling apart ourselves,
we are apt to faint with fear and foreboding,
apt to panic or collapse into despair.
But Jesus says, this is precisely the time to
stand up, raise your heads,
because your redemption is near
. . . the kingdom of God is near.
That doesn’t mean to roll over
and go back to sleep
because God will take care of it.
Quite the opposite.
To stand up and raise our heads
is to engage the world,
to challenge the status quo,
to do something godly,
to do something Christ-like
in the face of all the powers of death and darkness.
Moltmann says,
. . . (H)ope causes not rest, but unrest,
not patience but impatience. . .
Those who hope in Christ, he says,
can no longer put up with reality as it is,
but begin to suffer with it, to contradict it.
That means we roll up our sleeves
and do something about the melting ice caps
and the divisions that rend
our nation asunder.
In a world intent on waging war,
we are even more intent
on waging reconciliation.
When the people we love disappoint us,
we find new and better ways to love them.
Godly deeds and Christ-like actions
are not guaranteed to succeed
in the short run.
In fact, they are more likely to get us in trouble
than to make our life smooth
and comfortable.
The adage, “No good deed goes unpunished,”
is usually true.
Mother Teresa kept these words on the wall
of her home in Calcutta as a reminder:
If you are kind, people may accuse you
of selfish . . . motives;
Be kind anyway.
If you are honest . . . people may may cheat you;
Be honest . . . anyway.
What you spend years building,
someone could destroy overnight;
Build anyway.
Give the world the best you have,
and it may never be enough;
Give . . . your best anyway.
. . . It was between you and God
. . . not between you and them anyway.
That’s hope.
Christian hope is that God redeems
all the righteous actions
-- not just the righteous people –
every righteous act.
Everything that has ever been done
or ever will be done
for the sake of justice and peace and healing
will be brought to completion by the hand of God
in the fullness of time.
Our part is to take those actions first,
take those actions now.
We act in hope regardless of the result,
doing what God calls us to do,
and trusting God to fulfill his purpose.
Advent is the season to practice hope,
to do something generous or merciful or kind
– against all odds that it will matter
– because we trust God, not the odds.
Put a flash light in the basket
for a homeless person
in the hope that it will light his way
to a better life.
Send a Christmas card to someone
who doesn’t like you.
Write a letter to your congressman
even if you don’t think he’ll read it.
This is the season to hope for Christmas
to pray for the world to be made new,
to pray to be made new ourselves.
When Lent comes,
we will repent of a whole laundry list of sins.
In Advent, we repent of only two sins
– the sin of sin of satisfaction, that says,
We’re just fine, thank you.
and the sin of despair that says,
It will never be better.
-- both sins against hope.
In Advent, we dream of a better world
and do our part to make it happen.
