Luke 21:25-36 “Help is On Its Way”
A slight disclaimer: What follows is the basic text (minus the occasional digressions) of a sermon that I preached at Comox United Church, Comox, B.C. on November 28, 2021. It is not an essay. It is written to be spoken and in a manner that reflects my preaching style, which I suspect might be described as “informal.” Nor does it have the full assortment of citations, acknowledgements, and footnotes normally (and quite reasonably) expected in a more formal work. Please forgive the grammatical peculiarities!
Blessings
Phil Spencer
I was asked to speak at a memorial yesterday. It was for a woman who was the daughter of my former congregants and neighbours. Someone whose wedding I’d presided at nearly 20 years ago. She was in her early 40’s and that made it especially sad for me. I was a bit anxious when I was first asked to participate because it wasn’t going to be a church service, but it was outside in a rodeo grounds—her life was very much about horses—and it was styled as a “celebration of life” which is how many non-church services are often currently described. For the record, I believe that celebrating life where we can is not an unimportant part of a church service, too. However, my experience over the years has been that those kinds of public events can sometimes be a bit more complicated, largely because the rules of engagement (for lack of a better term) are not as clear as they might be within a church setting. For example, the role of the person presiding can shift more to the role of MC, and that’s often a bit different than the way a pastor or clergy-person functions in a church. Yes, there is still some opportunity to reach people who are struggling with important spiritual questions, some for the first time, but it’s important to remember that you’re not in a church setting, and therefore to be sensitive to the fact that the language we tend to use in the church is often completely foreign to many of those attending. I’ve found that it’s helpful to have some clarity ahead of the day with the spokesperson for the family that they choose who is speaking, and they get to decide on the order of the gathering. I’ve also found that one should be cautious about an “open mike,” because they can sometimes not end as well as hoped. People mean well, but off-the-cuff speaking can go horribly wrong. I still have cold chills from the funeral I attended where one of the open mike speakers light-heartedly spoke about the deceased’s dodgy driving habits, seemingly having forgotten that the deceased had died in a traffic accident! It’s also helpful to have an agreed-on time limit, and keep the slide show under 6 minutes if you can because that seems to be the top end of people’s attention span for such things, even for the most beloved person. There’s a lot to keep an eye on in a celebration of life and I am cheered to report that I didn’t need to this time round, because a good friend and clergy colleague was given the task of presiding and I just had to do some speaking in remembrance of this lady. Everything went well!1
Now, it’s safe to say that funerals and memorial services are always complicated in some way, be they in church or not. Every one of them requires some customization because we’re all a bit different. But having presided at both public gatherings and the ones we celebrate in the church, I admit that I do have a preference for the services in a church and not just because I’m familiar with the surroundings. A Christian service in a home or at a graveside has a distinctly different feel to me than one that isn’t within our tradition and so here’s my not-so-rhetorical question for us to consider this morning: have you noticed any difference, any distinction between a Christian funeral and the increasingly popular secular “celebration of life?” For me, as just noted, I see a massive difference.
If, when you heard the Gospel reading read this morning you had a sense of déjà vu … well, me too. I have the recollection of having preached on the same Gospel passage a couple of weeks ago and in some ways I did, I suppose. There are some real similarities to the Mark 13 passage, which was our Gospel reading the week before last, and the one we heard this morning. Mark’s 13th chapter and Luke’s 21st chapter are in many ways parallel accounts and I wouldn’t at all be surprised if Luke had seen Mark’s version, or perhaps he might have had the same person tell him this story that Mark did, though Luke does conclude it a bit differently. In my mind I picture this scene of someone saying to Luke, “Oh, you’ve got to record this one, Luke. It was powerful and a bit disturbing. We were finally in Jerusalem, just leaving the Temple—and Jesus had drawn our attention to this poor widow ...” … and so the story was retold. There are some distinctions but there are also lots of similarities between the two passages. Luke writes about persecution and witnessing, about the destruction of Jerusalem, and how the Son of Man, the Human One, “will come in a cloud with power and glory, accompanied by many signs in the heavens.” He records Jesus saying (as Mark does, though in slightly different terms—but both in this dreamy, symbolic, cosmic kind of language) that there are going to be difficult, terrible times and the faithful need to stay alert, to not be fearful, not be overwhelmed, but indeed to “raise their heads,” to actually be encouraged. Why? Because what might seem like judgment and cataclysm are actually signs that “your redemption is drawing near.” Yes, this is another example of apocalyptic literature, apocalypse meaning “a revealing,” a revealing of something that was previously hidden from view. It has to do with the conclusion of things, that we’re not on some never-ending road of progress, perpetually evolving into something better, but rather this existence we’re experiencing actually has a goal, a telos, an end, that it’s not all random, but there’s a destination to which God is leading us. So, pay attention! Be alert for the signs of the times!
You know, the Church is an odd organization in some ways (arguably a lot of ways!). We’re both “in the world and not of the world,” to use that expression of Jesus in John chapter 17. But while we have some significant differences from our surrounding culture, Jesus also sends us into the world, because that’s where our mission lies. And so, there are some ways we are very much a part of the world’s way of doing things. For example, the church Council met last week and we set a budget for the next year, using accepted accounting practices and trying to function in some way like a business, but then in other ways we’re not like a business at all. To try and do so can subvert the mission God’s given us. As such, churches make at least some of our decisions in different ways than other organizations might.
Another way things are different here is in the way we keep time. We keep time in the church in a way distinct from the rest of the world. For example, Sunday’s not the last day of the weekend, not the end of our week. It’s the first day of the week for us. Today isn’t simply the last Sunday in November to the Church—it’s the start of season of Advent, the first of the four Sundays before December 25th, our celebration of Christmas, hence it serves as our New Year’s Day. We’re observing an annual cycle, and so here we are again on the 1st Sunday of Advent which starts in the same thematic place every year on the liturgical calendar. One enterprising congregation in Vancouver some years ago decided to start producing calendars that are based on the church calendar—they look rather different than the other ones we normally get. If anyone wants one, check out the University Hill United Church congregation’s webpage for the “Salt of the Earth” calendar (It’s quite cool). If you look at the Gospel readings for each year on this first Sunday of Advent you’ll see that it’s always the same kind of cosmic apocalyptic Scripture. The Gospel writer’s always banging on about staying alert, that tough times are coming, that things are going to get nasty in some way. That’s always how the Church begins Advent and the reasonable question is: what’s up with that? Honestly? “Pay attention! The world’s ending!” doesn’t exactly move us into Christmas cheer does it? It doesn’t quite get us into “silent night,” snow that’s “deep and crisp and even,” or take us to roasting chestnuts on an open fire, does it? Not in the slightest. There’s precisely nothing sentimental about the Church in Advent.
Not that we’re opposed to enjoying this season—far from it. I’m quite taken with Advent! I really hope that we’re always known as those who “[know] how to keep Christmas well, if [anyone] alive possessed the knowledge,” to borrow Dicken’s description of Scrooge from the conclusion of that wonderful story, A Christmas Carol. This season is all the more wonderful for us because—while we celebrate with the best of them—we’re hopelessly realistic, or perhaps I should say, hope-fully realistic. Advent is a time when we prepare, we prepare for the coming of Jesus.
It’s a fair thing to describe us “play acting” in the church, because we try to enter into and participate in the story of Christ’s life through our observance of the yearly cycle of seasons and events. We do a walk-through of the story every year. In Advent we prepare for Jesus coming at Christmas, as if he’s coming for the first time. We try to get our internal house in order for his arrival as one of us (Advent’s traditionally been a penitential time, like Lent), as a human being who was born as we were, who had family and friends and who grew and experienced life in most of the ways that we still do. We marvel that God would choose to come and live amongst us, as one of us, with all the limitations and the challenges that we have.
We also begin this season of preparation clear-headed about at least two things. First, this world we live in is hard, is really hard. To live in our world is to experience constant challenge and disruption, and some of that’s external and some of it's internal. Some of it's thrust at us from the world around us—violence, bad marriages, want, betrayals (“distress among nations,” is the opening line in our Gospel this morning), and some of it just bubbles up in us. It’s here in every one of our hearts. When we dare to look inside … well, if we’re being honest, some of what we find isn’t so pretty. Yes, there’s much joy in living, much to be celebrated, there are times of peace, but we disciples are painfully aware that things aren’t “okay.” We need help and we wonder if our redemption is drawing near. If you occasionally get the sense that things are falling apart, I dare say you’re just paying attention, because, as I was saying two weeks ago in the sermon on the Mark passage, worlds are falling apart, personal worlds and larger cultural worlds.
Christians know that we can’t do this on our own and so this is the first thing we know: we need help.
The second thing is we’re also clear that we’re preparing for an end, the end. I asked at the beginning of the sermon what you sensed might be the difference between a Christian funeral and the secular “celebration of life?” Both mark the end of life but the hallmark of the Christian service has always been this: hope. From the very first, Christians have seen death much differently. From the very first, we’ve had a different viewpoint than many. Remember what the Apostle Paul said to the Thessalonian church: “But we do not want you to be uninformed, brothers and sisters, about those who have died, so that you may not grieve as others do who have no hope.”2 We don’t live or die desperately, because we have hope. We hear that hope in our reading from Jeremiah this morning.3
Jeremiah prophesied in a time in Israel’s life when they were about to crash and burn in a spectacular way—the country was about to be overrun and many, if not most people, were about to enter into slavery in exile in Babylon. He told them this was what was going to happen if they didn’t change their ways (and, sure enough, they didn’t), but amidst all that he offered a word of hope, that out of the death of the nation there would be life. They had reason to hope because help was on its way.
Perhaps it's my age and stage, or maybe I’ve only woken up to what the rest of you’ve seen all along, but my observation is that this is a time when there is so much death around us, and you could be forgiven getting the impression that death wins. But on this the first Sunday of Advent we proclaim that this is a lie. On a hill outside of Jerusalem 2000 years ago, something happened that changed that for everyone. This is why when Christians gather to say farewell to a friend, we say our goodbyes with hope, with the assurance that all isn’t quite as it seems. That’s why we lit the candle of hope on our Advent wreath this morning, for we celebrate that—as the Little River Band sang some 47 years ago—help is on its way. J Help is on its way. Friends, it’s Advent. Raise your heads. Amen.