The First Sunday of Advent, Year C

The Righteous Branch!

Readings: Jeremiah 33:14-16; Psalm 25:1-9; 1 Thessalonians 3:9-13; Luke 21:25-36

On Friday evening we took some members of our Youth Group over to the Tree Lighting ceremony in Streetsville. Although it is very early for me to be celebrating Christmas when Advent is just beginning I have to say that it filled me with hope and anticipation. And those are true Advent feelings. We live in a society that has dropped any Christian connotation from the season. Yet here we were, part of a crowd, singing Christmas carols and Christmas songs and not afraid to use the proper name for the season.

Advent is a season of hope. It is a time of preparation and anticipation as we yearn for the deliverance from the evils of the world and from the oppression that we see around us. We anticipate God's promise for a kingdom of truth and justice and righteousness.

The readings today are filled with those promises. The prophet Jeremiah speaks words of promise to the people of Judah. “The days are surely coming, says the Lord, when I will fulfill the promise I made to the house of Israel and the house of Judah.” They face a threat of invasion that is about to become reality. The Babylonian armies are set to invade their country. Yet illogical as it is to believe, there is still hope. “A righteous Branch will spring up,” Jeremiah proclaims. The prophet of gloom and doom, imprisoned by his own government for his gloomy predictions, offers a word of hope. It is not as if the people of Judah actually have reason to believe that they face anything but total disaster. The Babylonian army is set to pounce. Jeremiah's prophecy is one of tenacious hope spoken to counteract all of the life-sapping evidence to the contrary. He is offering real hope! That is its real power!

How does that same promise speak to us today? The final revelation and the gathering of God`s kingdom is still to come. We are servants of God working towards its fulfillment. We live among fulfilled promises, but the ultimate fulfillment is yet to come. When it comes we will be part of it even as we are now observers and participants in Jeremiah`s proclamations and promises.

That same hope, that same power is available to us as Christians. We read about the righteous Branch and say, aha! That Righteous Branch is Jesus, our hope, our salvation. Yet even as Christians sometimes things seem so terrible that we feel helpless. Hopelessness breeds a sense of helplessness and brings about the very things we dread. It is hope that will help us to bring about change.

Many in our society are without hope. How do we help those in despair? How do we share the presence of God with them? Do we understand, as Judah did, that whatever the future may be, God is within it? We need that conviction. Our culture pressures us into thinking of God as somewhere in the far distant past, as irrelevant to our time and culture. To most, God is a mere memory. Or God has never existed. But we have good news about that. God is alive, present with us. That is our hope. It is that hope that continues to be revealed throughout all of history. The theme of the readings on this First Sunday of Advent are filled with God's promises of hope. And yet there is also within the readings a sense of tension.

The passage from Luke deals with the tension in a very understandable way. There are signs around them of decay and destruction. Luke points to the signs and says, "See, the end is near. Shape up!" They have been witness to cataclysmic events in their lives, events which were predicted to them in Scripture. They have seen the destruction of their city, Jerusalem, its total and utter destruction. They have seen the temple where they worship destroyed. But the fact that the destruction was prophesied helps them to keep their faith in God even in the midst of such terror.

Let's face it! We all wonder what the world is coming to! We witness the harsh realities of our world. It is easy to see echoes of our own situation in the gospel passage. How could we not? 9-11 changed our world. It became and continues to be a place of harsh realties. Old boundaries are breaking down. We are in the middle of tremendous global, political and social upheavals. Globalization means that we are tied to what happens politically and financially all around the world. Ecological problems threaten our very existence. At a time when science is able to control so many of the scourges of the past, society is faced with new and terrifying threats of pandemic diseases. Pervasive violence and abuse have reached seemingly epidemic proportions. Moral decay seems at the root of a society that has abandoned its Judaic\Christian roots. Scenarios of heaven and hell are not only enacted in our dreams and nightmares, but also in our cities and neighbourhoods. Apocalypse in the destructive sense is a real possibility. As revelation it is a present reality.

What righteous branch is God raising up to confront all that is going on in our world? We have been reminded by Archbishop Colin that World AIDS Day takes place this week. Many people in our world live with the harsh realities of life with AIDS. The seven year old in Africa who, since her mother died last year, lives with her aging grandmother and looks after her younger siblings. The woman from Kenya living in a refugee camp who was raped and now lives in fear that she too may carry the virus and pass it on to her unborn child. The man in Cambodia evicted from his home and forced to live in terrible conditions in what has become known as an AIDS colony. The head of the Jamaica AIDS Support, a group working with gays affected by HIV, who was kidnapped and killed when it became known that he was gay. The stories could go on. People living with AIDS around our globe need a righteous branch to be raised up to spare them from shame, to let them live in safety.

What righteous branch is God growing in this congregation, in you as individuals? Our Christian hope is that God is forming the next chapter of human history. How do we live creatively and responsibily in the present age responding to God's call to be God's people? What compassion and hope do we hold out to those who are suffering? Are we instruments of peace in a world of violence?

We may well wonder what the world is coming to. Perhaps as Christians it is more important to keep in mind what is coming to the world. Advent is a time to prepare for that coming. It is a time for us to make preparations, not in fear of what is to come, but in faith in God. Faith in our God who has come, who is here and who will come again.

God has a way of coming. In that comment is terror, for it is unknown. But in that coming is promise and hope, for God has done something that changes the ultimate path of history. No silly optimism can handle what is wrong in our world. We need another kind of assurance. We need a righteous branch. That is the real hope, for that is when the kingdom breaks through. And even when nothing else is left, God is there. What hope that is!