Luke 21:25-36 (NRSV Updated Edition)
“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 and foreboding of what is coming upon the world, for the powers of the heavens will be shaken. Then they will see ‘the Son of Man coming in a cloud’ with power and great glory. Now when these things begin to take place, stand up and raise your heads, because your redemption is drawing near.”
Then he told them a parable: “Look at the fig tree and all the trees; as soon as they sprout leaves you can see for yourselves and know that summer is already near. So also, when you see these things taking place, you know that the kingdom of God is near. Truly I tell you, this generation will not pass away until all things have taken place. Heaven and earth will pass away, but my words will not pass away.
“Be on guard so that your hearts are not weighed down with dissipation and drunkenness and the worries of this life and that day does not catch you unexpectedly, like a trap. For it will come upon all who live on the face of the whole earth. Be alert at all times, praying that you may have the strength to escape all these things that will take place and to stand before the Son of Man.”
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"One of the things that [Luke is] very keen to bring out, one of the things he downplays, or in fact removes, in his Gospel, time and time again, is any notion of vengeance. It's one of the extraordinary things that wherever you might expect vengeance, Luke takes it out. So here we have a speech [...] which in a more semitic Gospel [...] where those kind of signs of distress and so on will be attributed to God, here they are not. He's talking as if all that is over. If there were a day of vengeance [in Luke], it's already past with Jesus's death, which was actually presented in his Gospel, or will be presented in his Gospel, as the moment of the New Creation, when Jesus breathes out after the sun has gone down. [...] There is complete darkness at noon, and Jesus breathes out the Spirit which is going back therefore outside creation for the whole of creation to start again.
"So Luke does not use the threatening language of the prophets - he uses the images of the prophets but without the threatening language because he knows that there is no vengeance in God, that what he refers to here as “people will faint from fear and foreboding of what is coming upon the world, for the powers of the heavens will be shaken,” he's talking about what we would now call intermediary cosmic forces, the notion of angels - good angels and bad angels toughing it out in heaven - we would talk more about, I guess, shifts in human interaction that have worldwide consequences, how our attitudes towards each other, towards families, towards competition and so on, shifts over time - the in-between is constantly shifting and it produces enormous alterations in how we live together. That kind of thing of course was noticed at that time as well but now it's just noticed on a more global scale, but [Luke] takes out the divine causality of these things, in fact it's quite important that it not be divine causality - the divine causality has already come in terms of Jesus going to his death.
"So Jesus here is telling his disciples what it's going to be like after he's gone to his death, after he's actually made the great change, brought to an end any possible notion of vengeance, fulfilled everything. From that point onwards there is going to be a new time to be opened up and it's going to be a difficult time in which everything is going to be shaken up because what he has done will start to become visible - he will have made visible the innocence of the victim, which is the beginning of the undoing of all our systems of fooling ourselves about how good we are by blaming other people. It's going to become visible that that's what we're doing, we will know that it's wrong, and that actually loosens up all our systems of belonging, makes it more difficult, and that in itself makes us more tense and more inclined to more violent forms of belonging, which don't last for so long because we know they're fake, we know they're wrong. And so on, this constant human violence because we can't accept what the Son of Man has done for us.
"So Luke is very keen on talking about this intermediate time, which is the one in which we're still living and which is therefore what the first Sunday in Advent is about, it's saying this is the time you're living in and of course any of us who follow the news, “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 and foreboding of what is coming upon the world, for the powers of the heavens will be shaken,” Well, it almost doesn't sound as though it was written two thousand years ago, apart from the phrase about the powers of the heavens being shaken, which is signs of an old cosmology, anyone looking around the world has a good deal of those in mind."
- James Alison, from "Homily for the First Sunday of Advent 2021" (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=I19KwYZFlbo)
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"In this period of time, the time in which we live, many things will happen. These things have to happen for us to have any chance at finding our way out of our early Advent darkness toward the light we, as a species, often prefer to avoid. Will we find our way or will we destroy ourselves as a species? Will Jesus come because we have embraced his forgiving and merciful way or will he come to resurrect our destroyed bodies after we have incinerated ourselves? We don’t know. All we know is that “Heaven and earth will pass away, but my words will certainly not pass away.”
"In the meantime, while we wait, Jesus has some advice for us. Focus on the signs of spring, allowing those to energize you and keep you positive. Look for the good things happening in the world and contribute to them. Christmas is a wonderful time to support anything that looks like swelling buds soon to burst into life."
- Thomas L. Truby, from sermon delivered on November 29th, 2018 (https://girardianlectionary.net/wp-content/uploads/2018/12/Truby-Advent1-2018-In-Advent-We-Await-Full-Humanity.pdf)
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"One of the things I love about the liturgical life of the Church is the way that the Holy Spirit, quietly and gently, works on us. Through the texts and prayers set out for us each year in the lectionary the Spirit draws us ever more fully into the Presence. If we read the texts in a literalistic manner, it can sounds as though, week by week it is God who is undergoing change toward us. In fact, however, in the liturgy of the Presence it is we who are worked on through the scriptures and the prayers, we who get to be reconfigured and brought in to the life of the Changeless One.
"At Advent, it begins again: the cycle by which God breaks through the clutter of our lives to announce to us that the Presence is very near, irrupting into our midst, hauling us out of our myths, our half-truths and the ways we have settled for what is “religious” rather than what is holy, alive, and real. So, lest we be tempted to think that “Advent” is merely a religious warm up for “Christmas”, let us see if we can allow ourselves to be brought near the cold-water spigot whose splashes can chasten us into reality.
"Someone wants to speak to us. Someone who is not on the same level as us at all. The “oomph” behind the “isness” of everything that is wants to invite us into the fullness of a project. Can that One get through? Who are they? Will we be able to hear them? How trained are our ears? The assumption at the beginning of each liturgical year is that this is going to be difficult: that we are half asleep, our ears dulled, and the voice of One who loves us is too radiant bright to be picked up on our defensive antennae.
[...]
"And yet, as our imagination of the One who is coming undergoes its inevitable puncturing, so that we can be awakened to One whose criteria are not our criteria, the promise will be fulfilled. The One who is coming will not preside over us, but will teach us to want peace from within, and to learn the habits that make it possible. The One who loves us will come as one we despise, and crucify: The definitive puncturing of our god-fantasies, and yet the Presence of one who is powerfully determined not to let us remain wedded to our self-destruction."
- James Alison, "A Puncturing Fulfilment" (https://www.facebook.com/JesustheForgivingVictim/posts/2266645773387265)
[Source of link to Thomas Truby sermon, and for analysis and discussion on all this week's lectionary texts: https://girardianlectionary.net/reflections/year-c/advent1c/]
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