I’d like to begin with a prayer in the Maori language, the language of the native peoples of New Zealand. The prayer asks for wisdom and courage:

Hei mua koe i a matou e te
Atua, hei tohutohu i o matou mahi katoa.
Tuia matou i o matou mamae, tuia matou i
nga tumanako, tuia matou ki te ora, ko Ihu
Karaiti hoki to tatou Ariki.  Amine.

It is time again to begin a new year in the church's life.  The church as the Body of Christ prepares to relive the life of our Lord on earth, which is the structure of the new liturgical year that begins today, and continues until Advent 1, 2004.  We begin, as always, by looking forward to Christ's birth, but we do it in the special way of the church, the way that is so different from the way of the world.  For the world, the great shopping season has already been under way for almost a month--longer if we recognize that Halloween has become about as big a time as Christmas for decorating and doing other things that cost money.  Of the great days in the church's year, only Pentecost has not been commercialized, secularized, and profaned.  As it now seems, Santa Claus is more important than the Christ Child, the Easter bunny than the resurrected Lord, Jack O'Lantern than all the saints, and eating turkey more than offering thanks to God.

I have a fantasy of having the church start all over again, and this time keeping our own new holy days, leaving the world to celebrate its own.  I haven't taken that fantasy farther than noting that the Incarnation really began at Annunciation.  In other words, that Mary's pregnancy with the Saviour was announced to her nine months before December 25, or about March 25, which would therefore have us begin the church year not on Advent 1, but sometime around the same time as Easter.  But such a change is essentially unrealistic.  The real question is how the church can be "in the world, but not of the world," as John 8:23 says.  We live in a culture, and our consciousness is deeply formed by that culture.  Trying to avoid Santa and all the rest would probably only make our kids grow up resenting the way their parents had made them different from their class-and play-mates.

But Advent observed in church--whether with blue or purple hangings is still going to make us Christians different.  How are the shopping malls going to pump through their sound systems these cheery words: "There shall be signs in the sun, the moon, and the stars, and on earth distress among the nations"?  So the church once again prepares for the real joy of Christmas--the joy to the world in the birth of our Redeemer--by looking forward once again to our Lord's second coming at the end of the world (That's the anomaly: we prepare for the memory of the first coming by looking forward to the second).  And this year we begin it with the way that Luke has reworked the so-called "Little Apocalypse" of Mark 13.  It had to be reworked in Luke because Mark's version is pointed toward the downfall of Jerusalem to the Roman conquerors in 70, shortly before or after Mark wrote.  But Luke is writing fifteen or twenty years later, and it has become obvious that the end of Jerusalem did not spell the end of the world, as Mark thought.  The world has gone on.  Indeed, the purpose of Luke's second volume, the Acts of the Apostles, was to argue that it had been meant all along to go on, at least until Christians had been witnesses to Christ "in Jerusalem, in all Judea and Samaria, and to the ends of the earth" (Acts 1:8).

Thus Luke makes the Little Apocalypse a two-stage timetable, with the fall of Jerusalem first and the end of the world, with the return of the son of man, later.  How much later?  A "generation" later, according to v32.  And how long is a generation?  Well, Luke did not use the term to indicate a certain number of years, but the almost 2,000 years that have passed since then do make the time that Luke delayed the coming of the son of man unduly optimistic or pessimistic, depending on the way you view the outcome.  Anyway, the first stage of Luke's Little Apocalypse is dealt with in the verses before our reading begins, so that we are concerned only with the second stage.  The verses hardly put one in a mood for Christmas shopping.  The end of the world is regarded by most people as the ultimate calamity.  Not long ago the Sunday New York Times (and thanks to the wonders of the internet, yes, I can read the NY Times even while living in Auckland) had a review of yet another book by a prominent scientist who was predicting that life on this planet as we have known it may not last out the twenty-first century.  Since I live in New Zealand, which is just underneath the largest ozone hole in the atmosphere, I get worried.  Of course, someone is always making such predictions, but this author's credentials give some strength to his claims, and the evidence in the review was enough to make me even more nervous.  Luke sensed how scary this could be.  He says that non-Christians will be so distressed and anxious that they will faint with fear.  Thus it is not surprising that Advent has often been regarded as a solemn season.  All this talk about the end of the world makes you wonder whether we are prepared for death.  See!  Hellfire-and-damnation preaching can occur even in an Episcopal church during Advent.

Except that is to miss the point.  That is not the way Luke talks about the event.  No, he says in v28, "Now when these things begin to take place, stand up and raise your heads, because your redemption is drawing near," and in v31 he says, "when you see these things taking place, you know that the kingdom of God is near."  Of course, Luke's time was different from ours.  He lived when it was dangerous to be a Christian, a time not far from when John the seer was writing the Revelation on the island of Patmos.  And we live in an age when being a nominal Christian, at any rate, is still very respectable in some places.  But the Christian still believes that the meaning of this life lies beyond this life, in the God who created the universe and us in it, who came as our redeemer, and who indwells us and the world as our sanctifier.  This is the God who came to save us from the futility of all our petty preoccupations and to transform us gloriously into authentic likenesses of that very God.  The return of the son of man, then, is not the end of hope, but the fulfillment of it.  It is what all the universe has been yearning and straining for all along.  It is the best of things rather than the worst of things.

As Christians we are called to believe that God is still in control of history, and no human action, even the war in Iraq, or cosmic event, even climactic change, can bring it to an end before God's purpose in creation has been accomplished.  Thus the end is the triumph, the climax, the fulfillment.

The world God made, in spite of all the horrors that exist or occur one place and another, is so attractive to all of us that it is easy to forget that God has prepared something infinitely better for us.  But that is the case, and that is the reason that we need to heed Luke's warning:  "Be on guard so that your hearts are not weighted down with dissipation [Luke's word means "binges"] and drunkenness and the worries of this life, and that day catch you unexpectedly, like a trap" (v34).  Too much is at stake for us to lose it all through negligence.

And one final point: truthfully, it doesn't much matter to us as individuals when the world as a whole will end.  We know that it will end for each of us in our own deaths.  "And when these things begin to take place, stand up and raise up your heads, because your redemption is drawing near" (v28).  And that redemption is the real Christmas gift, the one we wouldn't miss for all the world.

In verse 28, Luke commands Christians to stand in courage and hope.  In v36, he commands us to "Keep Praying."  In closing, let us see what it feels like to live out a small part of Luke's Little Apocalypse.  He says, "Now when these things begin to take place, stand up and raise your heads, because your redemption is drawing near."  So let us all stand up, and raise our heads upward, and take a moment to reflect on how it can be, in the midst of this broken world, that our redemption is drawing near.

[Dr. Culbertson then led the congregation in reciting the Nicene Creed.]