1 Advent C
Text: Luke 21:25-36
sermon by Rev. Robert Klonowski
Faith Lutheran Church, Homewood, IL
November 28, 2021
Stand Up, and Raise Your Heads
Years ago at Sox Park, whenever a hot foul ball was lined into the dugout and the players scattered to avoid getting hit, they used to play on the big video board a clip from a black-and-white US government film from the early 1960’s in which people were trained to survive nuclear attack. In case of nuclear bombing, that film taught us, what you do is – anybody remember what you do? Duck and cover. In those days I had young sons I used to take to the ballpark and they thought that film clip was hilarious; for days they would chase each other around the house, yelling “duck and cover!”
Now if you’re old enough maybe you remember that duck and cover film from when it was, shall we say, first-run. I remember it. It was during the Cuban missile crisis, and the nuns at my elementary school put us through those drills. At the sound of the air raid siren we would all move quickly into the hallway and, yep, we would duck and cover. We weren’t laughing.
Jesus in the gospel lesson for today is not talking about nuclear attack, maybe, but he is talking about worlds coming to an end. “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. People will faint from fear … the powers will be shaken.”
And what are we to do then, when worlds come to an end, when we experience things we’ve always known and trusted shaken down to their very foundations? Are we to duck and cover? You would think. Our first instinct is always to keep ourselves safe, isn’t it?
But Jesus says we are to do exactly the opposite. “When these things begin to take place,” Jesus says, “stand up. And raise your heads.”
When these things happen, Jesus then adds: pray then “that you may have the strength.” The strength to stand – there’s that word again: stand – stand before the Son of Man.
Two things strike me here. First, it strikes me that what Jesus calls us to is not our natural reaction, but rather what I am gonna call an inspired response. It’s natural for us to duck and cover; natural for us to hide and make ourselves small and keep ourselves safe. But Jesus calls us not to natural reaction, but to inspired response. If we’re going to stand up and raise our heads under circumstances as trying as described here, it will only be by the power of the Holy Spirit. Inspired.
Second, it strikes me that what Jesus calls us to here is a stance that is fundamentally filled with so much hope. Hope.
It’s counter-intuitive. When your world comes crashing down around you, in some terrifying way you never expected, hope might not be the first thing that comes to you. The sun and the moon and the stars fall, pandemic strikes, the infection rate is again on the rise and in the last 48 hours we’ve all learned about the words “omicron variant,” and the first word that comes is not hope but maybe apocalypse. Or maybe rubble. Or maybe wasteland.
But I was affected this week by something written about apocalyptic literature by the Scripture scholar Walter Wink. This kind of apocalyptic writing in the Bible, says Wink – the stuff like Jesus is offering here with the sun and the moon and people fainting and the powers shaken – you’ve got to remember that this kind of writing regards the future as open. As not yet determined. As capable of being changed if people alter their behavior in time. Can you hear the hope, the good possibility, that is offered there? It’s easy to see the negative in apocalyptic Scripture writing; it’s right there for you: – the threats we live under, like my childhood memory of the nuclear threat, like the Covid pandemic, are pretty grim – but there is that positive, open-futured role played by such writing as well. Its positive power is to force us, Wink writes, “to face threats of unimaginable proportions in order to galvanize efforts at self- and social transcendence.” Self- and social transcendence; what is that if not standing up, and raising our heads? “Only such Herculean responses,” Wink writes (and here I disagree with him: I don’t understand such responses to be Herculean, but Holy Spirit-inspired; that’s what they are!) – “only such … responses can actually rescue people from the threat and make possible the continuation of our humanity on the other side.”
Old worlds that we’ve known and old ways of life break apart and fall; we will know challenge and pain, says Jesus; but that is when you stand up. Old times come to an end, but then now is the time for self- and social transcendence; now is the time to raise your head and rise above, transcend, your old self and those old systems and those broken old ways of doing things. Now is the time to stand up, raise your head, and proclaim that those old things have no power over you. They have no power over you. This apocalyptic stuff is not written in stone; it is not pre-ordained. That’s not your future. Your future is inspired and given by God.
You know how this works because you’ve seen it in others sometimes. Others have come to you at times in their lives so difficult you can’t imagine how they’re getting through it. And sometimes someone will say, “It’s hard, and I would never wish this on anyone, but I’m going to tell you too that I wouldn’t have it any other way. Hard as it’s been, it has brought me to the right place.” Hear the hope there, the possibility of a better future? The possibility of renewed humanity, as Wink says, on the other side?
I don’t know what about your old world, what things you’ve known all your life maybe, that may be falling now like sun and moon and stars from their once-trusted places in your universe. But I do know the truth and the strength of the response to which Jesus calls us here. You stand up. You pick up your head and look. Hard as things are, there is hope. God will bless us, inspire us, and we will rise. You are not offered a future that is some kind of determined. You are offered an open future, and a renewed humanity.
Raise your head, then, and look ahead. Jesus, Immanuel, God-with-us, is on his way. Therein lies your hope.