Dear friends in Christ: Grace to you and peace from God our Father and the Lord Jesus Christ. Amen.
Prepare our hearts, Lord, to receive your Word. Silence in us any voice but your own that in hearing we believe and in believing we obey your will revealed to us in Jesus Christ. Amen.
Today we begin the season of Advent, a time meant for us to focus on God’s call to heed the Word-of-God-made-flesh. We are instructed, incited, inspired to prepare our hearts and souls, our bodies and minds, our wills and our desires, to welcome and serve Christ the Lord, the new-born king.
It is also the time when the world calls all people to prepare for the coming celebration of Christmas…but that focus is on something entirely different. The world wants us to dedicate our hearts and souls, our bodies and minds, our wills and desires to serve the gods of purchases and presents, gadgets and glitter, tinsel and toys. But all of you know this . . .it’s been that way for years.
Still God challenges us to
So our Bible lessons for the next few weeks will lead us on a prophetic path of preparation—one that promises to silence those seductive sales songs and, instead, open our ears to heaven’s wholesome harmonies of love for God, care of our neighbors, and peace on earth, good will toward all.
But first, like in any good building project, the foundation must be solidly set, the footings made straight and sure, the pilings driven dependably deep into the ground. Jesus does not tread lightly in his desire to capture our attention. Consider the Gospel lesson for today: Luke 21:25-26. Says the Lord:
25 There will be signs in the sun, the moon, and the stars,
and on the earth distress among nations
confused by the roaring of the sea and the waves.
26 People will faint from fear and foreboding
of what is coming upon the world,
for the powers of the heavens will be shaken.
Let’s stop there for a moment. How do those words make you feel? What emotions do they stir up in your hearts and minds?
Fear? Anxiety? Uncertainty? Alarm? Worry
While mulling over this lesson for the last couple of weeks, I remembered something from my elementary school days way back in the dark ages. At a critical time in the Cold War—the Cuban Missile Crisis to be exact—our teachers had us practice…air raid drills. Does anyone remember what we were supposed to do? Duck and Cover! Duck under our desks and cover our heads with our arms.
I don’t remember feeling assured by that drill—in fact, I do remember a sense of dis-ease, a low-grade anxiety about what hurtful things might be done to us by those bad people. And as the decade of the sixties progressed, this sense of anxiety only deepened with political assassinations, race riots, Vietnam protests, and the Six-Day Arab-Israeli War—to mention only a few tense topics in the news.
Stir into that boiling pot such emotionally electric books as Hal Lindsey’s The Late, Great Planet Earth, and you have a pretty good recipe for fear and foreboding, anxiety and angst, dread and dis-ease, shock and stress.
Unfortunately, it’s a formula that we know fairly well today—especially since the tragic terrorist attacks of 9/11. Our world changed literally overnight. One thing I recall is the ban on flying any aircraft anywhere in the country—in a state that lives on air travel, do you remember how unnerving it was for our skies to be so silent? And in the eight years since, I can’t remember a single visit to an airport anywhere when the threat level was lower than the color orange—only one step below the highest: red alert.
Add to this all the tensions from two wars, financial struggles, drug addictions—you name it—and the main dish on our daily menu is a big old serving of stress. Now, stress is a fact of life; whenever we’re shoved out of our comfort zone, our brains, that are fearfully and wonderfully made by God, jump into action at a basic survival level. Confronted by a threat, our system kicks into a “fight or flight” assessment. We evaluate the danger to discover if we’re able to defeat the threat—or must flee to survive…all of which happens in the blink of an eye.
At that moment, a cocktail of hormones are released into our system—one to fire us up and feed our need for energy—and at the same time, another to calm us down, to temper our terror, to alleviate our sense of anxiety.
Now, in a strange and wonderful way, our bodies’ double-edged approach to stress is mirrored in Jesus’ double-edged approach to God’s call in today’s Gospel lesson. When the Lord speaks those woe-filled words of warning, our beings are flooded, in a sense, with a spiritual hormone.
Truly, they raise our concern, stimulate our “fight or flight” assessment, and clarify the clash between our worldly sin and God’s heavenly will.
But at the same time, Jesus does not leave us to languish in a limbo of doom and gloom. In fact, he has something much more positive to say than simply “duck-and-cover,” or “you-better-watch-out-you-better-not-cry.”
Immediately, the Lord delivers a counter-balancing spiritual hormone,
one that fills us with faith,
that strengthens our sense of security,
that pulls us into God’s peace that passes all understanding.
Says the Lord in verses 27 and 28,
Then they will see ‘the Son of Man coming in a cloud’
with power and great glory.
Now, when these things begin to take place,
stand up and raise your heads,
because your redemption is drawing near.”
When we are forced to face our fears, we run the risk of being run-over—emotionally, physically, spiritually—by stress. But note how Jesus instructs us, incites us, inspires us to respond in a counter-intuitive, counter-cultural manner. Where everything within us and everyone around us could very well be warning us to duck and cover, the Lord tells us to do the opposite.
Stand up, he says, and raise your heads, because your redemption is drawing near. That is God’s good word of good news for us today—we are called to lift our heads every day as if we are preparing to welcome Christ the Lord, our new-born King. Amen.
Pastor Scott Fuller