First Sunday of Advent, December 3, 2006 at Old Zion
First Sunday in Advent at Old Zion in Philadelphia
December 3rd 2006
Jeremiah 33:14-16 Psalm 25:1-10 1 Thess. 3:9-13 Luke 21:25-36
Lighting the First Advent Candle for the Children:
Today we celebrate our first Advent Sunday of the four, which come before Christmas and we will hear in the sermon that we are to be awake. Just think about the birds that wake up in the morning in the trees and sing God’s praise as if their hearts will burst. If you get up early in the morning before the sun rises and go outside where trees are, you will hear them. We used to say a poem to wake up the children in the morning, which ended:
A bird sat on my windowsill and said:
Ain’t you awake you sleepy head?
Amen.
Living with End-of-the-World Intensity
We have now entered the Advent season where we deal with an apocalyptic sense of time and “apocalyptic” is a word we have trouble understanding. We hear about a time when the sun refuses to shine, when the moon is full of blood, and the stars fall down from their courses in the sky. What is going on? In these words a different kind of time is being pointed to, a time, which the sun, moon, and stars do not measure. We’ll see that in ancient history, time was measured by the birth of a king. To translate that for our day, we would say that we are now in the sixth year in the reign of President Bush II. So time began with the birth of a king and was then measured in the length of his reign. And now we are looking forward to a very special birth in a very special kingdom, in which God reigns through the Son of Man, who is Jesus Christ, our Lord.
Thus how do we measure that kind of time and how do we wake up into that day that the reign of God brings upon us? That day which breaks, not with the rising of the sun, but with the Son of God, who gives us a very special light to live in, the light of God’s love, the light of God’s infinite wisdom, the light of God’s glory as it shines upon this wonderful creation, which God made and pronounced the words: “Behold it is good!” And touches people and called them by moving their hearts and saying, “Come, I want you to be in that kingdom, where I rule, where Jesus Christ is in your heart, directing the course of your life in order to do those things which God is bidding you to do.”
But somehow, the sun rises and the sun sets, and we see the moon going through its different phases, and we all go to sleep in a kind of time that is oblivious to what God is doing amongst us.
Now we have to feel the urgency that these messages before the birth of Christ are trying to give us in the Advent season, so that as Jesus said, we can escape the afflictions to come, so we can pray for the strength to stand up before the Son of Man when he comes, riding to us on the clouds.
Let me tell you several stories that will help you understand what it means to wake up. Now a congregation can go to sleep. Say that it does not function the way God called it to, then it is much like a lifeguard sitting on a beach. A great number of people are drowning and he is not responding. He just remains sitting there. Our churches are commissioned to be those kinds of lifeguards and if they are not functioning, who is going to rescue the people?
Often I hear that our Lutheran churches here were built for all the German immigrants coming into this country and that made us a very prosperous church in the past. I read that in 1759, no less than 25 ships came in and 12,000 German immigrants flooded into the city of Philadelphia. There may have been more Germans here than there were Americans in the city. Thus we had big churches and we were thriving.[1] Now that is no longer the case. But how many people live in Philadelphia? Are there one and a half to two million? What are they, chopped liver? We cannot get to them? What is happening with us? We need to get to the people all around us, whom we are commissioned to call, whom we are commissioned to help rescue, so that God can be with them, that Christ can rule in their hearts and direct their lives as well as ours. Not that we are not sinners. We are. We struggle all the time to wake up to what God is doing, that God might use us and give us a role in God’s plan of salvation, which God is preparing for all people.
What can we do if our churches go to sleep?
Sometimes people are capable of incredible things. A church building can burn down. Zion Lutheran Church burnt down on December 26, 1794 back in Colonial times as well as one of her daughter churches (St. Paulus Church).[2] That has happened to many a church. Then suddenly everyone in the congregation works together. They become capable of epic stands of action. They do things no one would have considered them capable of doing. In the end a miracle takes place and they have built another church more glorious than the one of the past. In the process they have awakened to an increase in love, to the abounding love that pours down from the reign of God, that love which has been such a dynamic from the Christian movement from its very inception.
Now how can we get a congregation to respond like their church has burnt down if their church has not burnt down? That is, if they have not had the fortune of having had their church burn down, if you hear the irony in that statement. The situation of such a complacent and unresponsive church, however, is worse than that of the one that has burnt down, because, really, in a church where everyone has fallen asleep, the church is not even there.
Let me bring up another example. When we lived on the West Coast, my wife, Nora, and I used to take long walks. I think she thinks that it is good for my constitution. When I visited her last time, we must have walked five or ten miles. We walked through a park in Richmond where we discovered a museum for “Rosie the Riveter.” You may have seen pictures of her: a woman in a red bandana flexing her muscles. After reading all the signs and looking at the pictures there, we realized that a huge shipyard, a shipbuilding factory, had existed there through World War II and Rosie the Riveter represented 80,000 women who worked there while all the soldiers were fighting overseas. The women along with 20,000 African American workers were building the ships that would sink the German and Japanese ships along with their ships of state. To a large extent World War II was an industrial war and we defeated Germany and Japan by out producing them. These women were electricians, carpenters, welders and they knew that every rivet they welded had to be done right because it meant the safety of their men fighting at sea.
This interlude represented a time when the country was mobilized, when together we had a purpose, and we were capable of doing great things.
When the men came home, the women were told to go back to their kitchens, kids, and bedrooms and the Black workers were mostly laid off as well and it was back to the status quo ante.
Why does it take a war to bring about such a response? Why does it take a war to bring out the best in us? From these social changes our country went right back to the old grind. But do we really think the crisis in the world is over? Can we afford to go back to sleep in our sleepy ways, everyone out for him and herself, the devil take the hindmost?
Look at Nine-Eleven. After it we said, “Now the world is a completely different place.” It is. But it brought the worst out of us, I submit. Evil must have been lurking inside our hearts. The kind of innocence that we pretend to have is no more than a cover-up of what we should have confessed as our sins. Our country has not escaped its wickedness. We have again unleashed it, because we have not faced it, confessed it, taken responsibility for it, been forgiven for it, and attempted a moral course of action.
Do you really think our present crisis has passed and now we can lullaby ourselves to sleep in the regularity of the rising of the sun, the setting of the same, the romantic light of the moon, in which we croon love songs as we look at astrological charts to see what the stars tell will befall us?
Just look at our society. How many murders take place amongst us on a daily basis? Why in all the world, are we such a violent society? How many serial killers are there? Look at the school killings! Sometimes there are sixteen to twenty people at a time. Sometimes even children are the murderers. We will not even mention all the people being killed at our hands in places like Iraq and Afghanistan, or the way they are killing each other after we attempted the regime change in their society.
Let’s just look at the Christmas Tsunami that took hundreds of thousands of lives or Hurricane Katrina that sank the whole city of New Orleans. We have to wake up and listen to Jesus: “When these things take place, stand up and raise your heads because your redemption is drawing nigh” (21:28).
This old world is beginning to shake and the stars are beginning to fall. The moon is full of blood, and the sun is refusing to shine and a night can fall upon us in which no one can work. The day of the Lord is at hand.
We have to wake up and be alert and pray for the strength to escape these afflictions. We pray that God can use us and call us by his word to play a role in God’s coming redemption.
At Pacific Lutheran Theological Seminary at Berkeley, California, I worked with the late Professor Robert Goeser. I was his teaching assistant for many years. He would sometimes say, “We have to work and live with an end-of-the-world intensity.” He was trying to prepare us and wake us up, because the old world is coming to an end and a new one is being marked by the birth of her King, the Righteous Branch, who is coming to be with us.
Therefore we have to rub the sleep out of our eyes, clean the dross out of our hearts, and live toward the day of the Lord with righteous love. Let the Word of God ring in every corner of our world, especially in our own country, so that the voice of God stirs us and moves us and shows us the divine urgency in which we need to respond to God’s saving will on earth.
Scholars usually say Jesus was wrong about the world ending in his generation. If we check out that history, however, we know that a mere 37 years later, in 70 A.D. the Roman legions besieged Jerusalem, destroyed the temple and erased Israel’s existence for almost 2,000 years. Does that not spell the end of the world as they knew it? Each of us individually does not know when our last day will arrive and that will be the end of the world for us. But we raise up our heads because our redemption is drawing near and we live out the Gospel of Jesus’ love with an end-of-the-world intensity, because we are about to set foot in another more holy one, the commonwealth that is proclaimed by Christ and we receive from heaven. Amen.
[1] St. Michael’s was built to seat 800 on Fifth and Cherry Street in Colonial Philadelphia. It quickly grew too small and thus Zion Lutheran Church was built on the corner of Cherry and Fourth Street to seat 3,000. St. Michael’s and Zion’s congregation used both buildings for worship.
[2] Pastor J. E. Nidecker, Deutsch Evangelisch Lutherische St. Michaelis=und Zions=Gemeinde in Philadelphia zum Jubilaeum 1892, p. 9 and 13.
