Sermon for the First Sunday of Advent

Preached at Canadochly Lutheran Church on December 1, 2013
Scripture texts: Romans 13:11-14, Matthew 24:36-44

"Those who see God as angry, do not see him rightly." - Martin Luther, Luther (2003)

When I was a teenager, my church youth group would take a trip each year from WV to the mountains of central PA to the Creation festival. Three days of Christian music, preaching, and camping out under the stars. Some of my best memories of those years of my life took place at that festival, not the least of which is that is where I met my first love.

One night, as my friend Doug and I were walking back from a concert, we were spontaneously invited by another group of youth. Among them was this girl, Jen. She was funny, cute, and for this oft-bullied nerd,  a girl that actually seemed to WANT to talk to me. I fell head over heels almost immediately.

Over the next several years or so, I pursued her like a man obsessed. She was the one I wanted more than anything else. But she was not quite as enthusiastic in her affections for me as I was for her. I remember very clearly one conversation we had many years ago now. She told me that she felt I was more in love with the person I thought she was than who she really was.

She walked out of my life not long after that conversation.

Truth is, she was right. I wanted so badly for Jen to be what mind and heart imagined her to be that I never really got to know the real person that she was. That didn’t really happen until just recently in my life. Through the wonders of Facebook, I’ve reconnected with her. Obviously circumstances are much changed now from those halcyon days of my youth. I am a happily married man; she has a wonderful boyfriend who loves her. But as we’ve gotten to know each other again, I’ve started to realize who she really is; I’m getting to know the real person and I’ve truly learned just how off-base everything I believed about her was.

I have woken up. The dream is over. Reality is now what I see.

I can’t help but wonder if it wasn’t something like what I just described that motivated and inspired St. Paul to write what he did in Romans 13, our second lesson today. How many people in his audience thought they knew who this Jesus guy was really about by projecting on to him what they wanted to be true about him? How many of us think we know Jesus by projecting our wishes, our desires, and our delusions onto him?

Wake up! Time to stop dreaming! Snap out of it! Things are not as they seem. It is past time we stopped seeing things as we wish they were, and instead see them for what they truly are.

Nowhere in the Scriptures is a better test to help us see the real Jesus than in those apocalyptic texts that so popular in the lectionary around this time of year.

When I was last with you, I expressed my distaste for these texts, precisely because we project so much of our own anxieties and misunderstandings onto them, and by extension, onto Jesus himself. The end result is the person of Jesus in our minds becomes distorted into something utterly unlike who he really is.

I’ll prove it to you. Let me read again what Jesus says in our Gospel lesson today: “They knew nothing until the flood came and swept them all away, so too will be the coming of the Son of Man. Then two will be in the field; one will be taken and one will be left. Two women will be grinding meal together; one will be taken and one will be left. Keep awake therefore, for you do not know on what day your Lord is coming.”

What emotion do you feel when hearing that? Are you frightened? Does this scare you? Do you wonder if you will be the one taken or the one left? A lot of Christians do. Maybe some of us are among them.

Jesus isn’t telling us this to frighten us, but that’s what we hear. We wonder

• “Have I done enough?”
• “Am I good enough?”
• “Maybe if I give a few extra dollars today in the plate, that’ll do it.”
• “Maybe if I go volunteer at a soup kitchen tomorrow, then Jesus will really love me.”
• “I should probably share that picture of Jesus on Facebook again. Prove to him that I really do believe.”

That’s what we do. We hear a text like this, or pretty much any about the end times, and we wonder what will happen to us. And we try to calm those anxieties by doing something, anything that we think will appease this monstrous judgmental God we know is coming to damn us.

Wake up! That nightmare is false. It is a lie. Our God is nothing like that. If this is what any of us believe Christ to be, I’m here to tell you we’ve got it wrong.

This story is not here to frighten us. It is here to remind us of the unexpectedness of Christ’s appearance. God became incarnate of a virgin and was born as Jesus and almost no one in the world knew it had happened. His mother and father, a few shepherds, and a handful of foreign magicians. That’s it. His return will be no different. Christ himself has told us no one will see it coming.

But why does that frighten us? Have I done enough? Am I good enough? No, we haven’t, but that also doesn’t matter. Because Christ has come to each of us, marked us with his seal in baptism. Told us that he loves us without condition.

That’s the Jesus I want to know, the real one. The one that loved you and me so much that he died for us and for our salvation. The one who is coming back to welcome us and embrace us, not to punish us or to judge us unworthy. That’s who our Lord really is. We keep wanting to turn him into some sort of boogeyman. Straighten up or Jesus is gonna get ya!

But when I look to the cross and the person I see there is not some monster lurking the shadows waiting to snatch me up and devour me. No, he is the one who sees me truly, warts and all, and loves me anyway. Loves me beyond words. One who died to save me and rose again to give me life. And he does for me, so too for all of you. That’s who Jesus really is. Wake up, my friends. Wake up and see him. Amen.