Advent Luke 21 “Uncovered”
There will be signs in the sun and moon and stars.
Nations of the earth will be distressed by the rising, roaring sea.
Everywhere people will be afraid.
When you see these things, look up,
For your redemption is drawing nigh.
If I told you these words are taken from a sermon, you might say, “That must have been some sermon.” And you would be right! Jesus is the preacher, and he is preaching as he has never preached before. He has come up to Jerusalem to observe Passover—and to die. But for now he is preaching—every morning in the Temple, then every evening he is crossing the Kidron Valley to spend the night on the Mount of Olives. And the people are getting up early every morning to find their place in the Temple to hear this extraordinary preacher. In an earlier sermon he stunned his listeners by predicting the destruction of the very building they occupy—the Temple He then went on to predict the doom of the entire city. How did the congregation react? Well, how would you react? Luke uses one word to describe their reaction. He says they were “spellbound” (Luke 19: 48). About three weeks ago, I saw a church van with this message painted on the side: “Saint James AME Church. Changing the world one sermon at a time.” That’s what Jesus is doing, one parable and one spellbinding vision at a time. But today we hear his grand finale. He’s done with preaching. He is about to begin a new ministry, the ministry of suffering. He will be dead within the week.
Jesus’s sermon for today is not a story. It’s called an Apocalypse. The word “Apocalypse” is usually translated “revelation,” but its root meaning is “uncovered.” A mask has been torn off. What has been there all along has been exposed.
In one sense the people who wrote the bible were more at home with apocalypse than we are. For them, apocalypse was the work of God and no one else. They were eager to see the earthly Jesus with his mask off. They were eager for Jesus to step through the curtain of his own human limitations, and so be exposed for the powerful Lord he is. The Book of Revelation ends with the prayer, “Even so, come Lord Jesus.” Our ancestors taught us a new language for Jesus. They taught us to sing, “Christ whose glory fills the skies.” Or, great mountain hymn, “The King Shall Come When Morning Dawns/ and light triumphant breaks.
In another sense, we moderns know more about apocalypse than our ancestors. (I won’t bore you with all the movie titles with the word “apocalypse” in them). We know what’s behind the clouds. We know how big the cosmos is and how little we are. We understand the interrelatedness of everything to everything and the fragility of the web that holds it all together. Only last year, we learned that one person can eat some bad meat, and the whole world is brought to its knees. We were recently reminded that an increase of a degree or two above industrial temperatures will drown millions, destroy livelihood, wipe out entire cities. Our parents and grandparents told us about “world war” and how it makes the whole world tremble and touches everyone. The poet wrote, “Send not to know for whom the bell tolls/ it tolls for thee.” Less elegantly, Dorothy Day, wrote in 1945, ‘That gritty taste in your mouth; could it be the ashes of Hiroshima? Yes, Apocalypse is our chosen genre.
We have another sort of apocalypse going on these days, and it too covers the entire earth like a plague. There are many names we could give to it. Let’s call it an apocalypse of hate. Our crisis of hate touches virtually every human category: race, gender, politics, education, and religion. It can be found in formerly sedate school board meetings, on airplanes, and in the halls of Congress. In a nutshell, here’s how it works. Whatever moral center you once possessed has been invaded by something alien to God’s intention for humanity, with the result that something once hidden in all of us has been laid bare. So, instead of drawing on what is best in us, which is the image of God, we can only define ourself by who and what we hate.
The ancient prophet Isaiah seems to have seen it coming:
The earth is utterly broken
The earth is torn asunder. . .
The earth staggers like a drunkard,
It sways like a hut. (Isa. 24)
The apocalypse is as global as pandemic and as personal as death. Thirty years ago, at the beginning of Advent, I was standing right here, doing what I’m doing this morning, preaching a sermon. As I recall, the text that Sunday was from the Book of Revelation, also known as the Apocalypse. The text was about the crisis moment and the end of things. My sermon was not about the climate or war, but about a dear person, a Duke student and member of our choir, who, inexplicably, had lost her life earlier that week on campus. If there is such a thing as a mood in a congregation, you could feel it that morning. Something we didn’t know about life had been “uncovered.” A curtain had been torn apart. Then, as today, whatever we dared to hope and whatever we dared to say about the promises of God or the goodness of God, we were forced to say in the face of the worst, this personal apocalypse. That morning we cried out with the most heartfelt of Advent prayers, again with the prophet Isaiah, “Oh, that you would rend the heavens and come down!”
God will come. So say the prophets, so says Jesus. But not as a baby ever again, but as the Lord. Now, we are waiting for that “rebirth of wonder.” We are waiting for the true God to step through the curtain and to be uncovered in the world. Jesus calls that uncovering the kingdom of God. And he is its agent. Jesus is what the whole world would look like if God were uncovered in it and among us.
His final sermon is not a text of terror but a word of assurance: “One day all will be uncovered, and it will be me.” You never have to be afraid of “redemption.”
God’s redemption will be there after the unthinkable, after the unbearable, after the worst. Redemption will be there the day after Christmas when everyone has gone home, or, worse, when those we love have failed to show up. When you are on a dark road that seems to be going nowhere, look up to get your bearings, and see how God wants to help you through.
Our generation has spawned apocalyptic men, whose wealth rivals that of nations, whose power spans the world. But God’s apocalypse is not another ten-minute rocket ride. It is not a demonstration of obscene wealth. Jesus in the heavens is the mirror image of the Jesus we have known all along. The one who was filled with compassion for sick, the outcast, the prisoner. The one who earlier sermon in this gospel said, “The Lord has anointed me to bring good news to poor people.”
Thirty Advents ago, in this church, the apocalypse was made real for us in the devastating loss of one person. That morning, the only hope we could grasp was also in one person. God takes all the shock and awe of all the apocalypses there are and condenses them into one person. God lays on him a whole world’s-worth of sorrow.
He will suffer the ultimate apocalypse on the cross, when in the darkness he cries out, My God, why have you forsaken me? so that we never have to say such a thing. And on Easter he will be the Christ whose glory fills the sky and the cemeteries of our world.
There is no formula for integrating that redemption into the crisis moments of our lives. Each of us walks out of this church into a world in which God’s kingdom is hidden. Some of us will return to difficult challenges, demanding relationships, uncertain outcomes. Many will return to the economic, emotional, and physical legacy of Covid. Some have stood on the sidewalk while loved ones died in the building Is it over or not? Some of us (I wish none of us) will return to situations in which we are the recipients of hate. We may even be tempted to join the apocalypse of hate. After all, we have people in mind who are absolutely ripe for hating! But there’s a catch: even when you hate the haters, hate wins.
Advent offers alternatives, great and small. Mostly small. When our children were small, we gave them an Advent calendar every year, the kind in which each day is covered by a flap. With the parents’ guidance, the child uncovers each day to see the blessing underneath. It is nice. But this year Advent seems to be something other than nice, something other than a brimming punch bowl or a child’s devotional. This year Advent feels like a battlefield between hate and hope, between hope and hopelessness. And in the battle, it is every Christian’s calling to let some corner of God be uncovered. Our job is not to be first in our class; to please everybody, or to win every time, but to do the humbler work of uncovering a little corner of God in our world.
And when we do, we find that it has not really been us, but God working through us. In a neighborhood near here, not more than a half-mile from this church, new neighbors are moving in. Like all newcomers, they are learning the routines of a new neighborhood, about the nearest school and grocery store, the day for trash pick-up. Just three months ago the new neighbors were living in the apocalypse in Kabul, Afghanistan. They were living the end times. I’m told it takes a whole team of people to bring one family back from the abyss. I wonder if the social workers, agency workers, church workers, and neighbors understand their work as a work of God. Do they see themselves as participants in something as grand and glorious as the Kingdom of God? I doubt it. I suspect it’s more like uncovering a series of days on God’s calendar to see the hope that’s hidden beneath. They, like so many others, are doing the painstaking work of repairing an earth that, as Isaiah says, is utterly broken.
Of all God’s creatures, we humans are the only ones burdened with facing the future—to imagine it, plan it, or wait for it. And that is reason enough for God to give us hope. Of course, we have no lack of economic and political forecasts, especially in a university community where so many know so much. But hope has its own way of knowing. Its strength goes beyond the numbers. Somewhere in Romans Paul says, “Hope does not disappoint,” or in the King James translation, “Hope maketh not ashamed.” Hope knows things, and we are not ashamed to trust them. What do we know? We know that Christ has died. Christ has risen. Christ will come again. And that is enough. Hope is the Christmas gift that arrives as early as you need it every year.
But don’t wait for the heavens to open. They already have. The apocalypse is now. We call it Advent.