Sermon — November 13, 2022
The Rev. Greg Johnston
When I walked here last Sunday morning for church, I saw a flatbed truck and a crane being operated by the Department of Public Works right over in Thompson Square. (Did anyone else see them?) Do you know what they were doing?)
If you walk by on your way home you’ll see a new tree. A tall, slender, evergreen tree. One might even call it… a Christmas tree.
And this was on November 6.
But I am not a Scrooge, and the reality is, even if Christmas is still six weeks away, even around church it’s “beginning to look a lot like…” Advent, at least.
Look no further than our readings this morning. If you don’t know much about how churches traditionally observed the season of Advent, they may not seem like they really capture the spirit of “the holiday season” that’s being celebrated in our lovely November Christmas tree. To be fair, our first reading from Isaiah gives you a certain kind of Christmassy feel: peace and joy, eternal life and new creation, the wolf and the lamb feeding together. In this reading from Isaiah you may already start to feel the joy of Christmas: the sweetness of the Prince of Peace lying in the manger, and angels bringing glad tidings of great joy.
Luke, today, gives us something else entirely: destruction and deception, famines and plagues, hatred and betrayal and portents from the heavens: the end is drawing nigh. And this, in fact, a traditional theme of theme, of the season leading up to Christmas. We sometimes associate the four Sundays of Advent and their candles in the wreath with the four themes of hope, peace, joy, and love. But the readings we get during Advent tend more toward the four traditional themes of Advent: death, judgment, heaven, and hell. They prophesy calamity and destruction, peril and alarm. They tell the story of a world being turned upside down. Advent doesn’t begin for another few weeks, but you can already feel the mood start to shift: The long summer where we listened to Jesus healing people and telling parables as he traveled toward Jerusalem is over. Jesus has arrived in the city where he will die, and he’s starting to predict some pretty scary stuff.
The Temple, Jesus says, is going to be destroyed. The center of his people’s religious life, the place where the people come to worship God, where heaven and earth intersect, is going to be dismantled stone by beautiful stone. When the disciples ask him when this will be, he warns them against trying to predict it. And he tells them that first they’ll have to go through trials and tribulations, to endure great suffering, not only the shared social suffering of natural disasters and political upheaval, not only the collective grief of losing the Temple that’s at the heart of their spiritual lives, but a specific and personal process of persecution and arrest. Everything will fall apart, in their lives, in their nation, in their whole world.
And in fact, it would and it did. But not quite yet. Everything Jesus said would in fact come true. There would be wars and insurrections, earthquakes, famines, plagues; his followers would be arrested and stand on trial because of his name. It would take months before his followers were arrested; years before the famines and the plagues. The Temple would survive for decades before it was destroyed at the end of a long war.
But it’s at this very moment—when the disciples are admiring the beauty of the Temple on their trip together to the big city—that Jesus tells them it will one day be destroyed.
And interestingly enough, that same paradox applies to the reading from Isaiah as well. It’s sometimes helpful to remember, when reading the Bible, that most authors don’t say things that go without saying. This beautiful prophecy comes from the very end of the book of Isaiah. It’s likely that it was written a few decades after the destruction of the first Temple, at the end of the people’s long years spent in exile, and maybe even after some of them had begun to return to Jerusalem. When the people began to return, many of them felt joy. They’d been refugees for fifty-something years. But it was mixed with sadness, because the city was not the same. The Temple had been destroyed. The population had been scattered.
And so when Isaiah offers this prophecy of hope, it’s not because the people are feeling hopeful, it’s because they’re disappointed. When he shares these words of eternal peace, it’s because they’re just recovering from the trauma of war. When he promises that he is about to “create new heavens and a new earth,” about to “create Jerusalem as a joy, and its people as a delight,” it’s because they’re sorely missing the old Jerusalem and they’re not feeling much joy or delight.
And so just as Jesus delivers his word of warning and woe at the very moment the disciples are feeling most comfortable, Isaiah delivers a prophecy of comfort when the people are feeling their most uncomfortable.
And there’s some wisdom in that. There may be times when you are feeling pretty good. You’re proud of what you’ve accomplished. You’re proud of what you’ve built. You want to stop and admire the beautiful stones and gifts that decorate your life. And it can be tempting to think that it will last forever. But the inconvenient truth is that it won’t. None of it will. Everything we have, and everything we’ve built, will one day be dismantled stone by precious stone. And we might find ourselves in the situation of the people in Isaiah’s day, people cast away in exile, grief, and loss.
But when we find ourselves living among the ruins, wondering where God could possibly be in all of this, that’s when Isaiah’s prophecy is there, promising new things, joyful things, a world without weeping or distress, violence or pain.
This kind of cyclical pattern is common in life, and of course recognizing it can give us a good perspective on things. It’s good to remember, when times are hard, that a better future lies ahead. It’s good to remember, when things are good, that they are not permanent, so we should appreciate and enjoy them while we can.
But the same pattern applies beyond just the scope of this life and extends past our deaths. For many of us, myself included, it’s a difficult truth to accept: nothing that we have can be held onto forever. And this is true whether you believe in Jesus or not. Every human being, of every faith and none, will one day die. Every building, no matter how beautiful or beloved, will one day crumble into dust. Nothing, however good, will last forever.
And yet God makes us a promise, which is a second and perhaps-even-more-difficult truth: that nothing we lose will be lost forever. That God is preparing a new heavens and new earth, like the old ones in many ways but much improved. That when it feels like our lives are being torn down around us, a new home is already being prepared for us, and we will one day reach that land of everlasting peace.