Love’s Presence Revealed: The Rev. Canon Dana Colley Corsello

I ask your prayers this morning in the name of the Father, the Son, and the Holy Ghost. Amen. Please be seated.  

From Matthew’s gospel, chapter 24: When he was sitting on the Mount of Olives, the disciples came to him privately saying, “tell us when will this be, and what will be the sign of your coming in the end of the age?” 

What is so interesting about Jesus’s admonition in our gospel this morning is how little has changed regarding human anxiety about knowing or predicting the future. If anything, our obsession with weather predictions, economic predictions, and election predictions has, shall I say, gone off the deep end. An industrial complex of prognosticators sits around tables on cable news sets, prophesying about the end times. And I don’t mean about Jesus’ second coming. It’s human nature to want to know what will happen to us and when.  We use omens and portents to try to escape the basic vulnerabilities of being human.  We fancy ourselves planners, pollsters, prophets. Today’s gospel testifies to this paradox of human existence. It would seem that we should be able to read the signs of the times after all these years, but still we fail. Case in point, the red wave that did not materialize after the midterm elections. It’s almost as though we’re trying to replace faith with the false mastery of the future. 

The first century readers of Matthew’s gospel were no different. They lived only one generation after Jesus.  The Jerusalem temple had been destroyed and they wanted guarantees about the future so they could cope with the religious and political instability of their time. This is why they placed their hope in Jesus’s imminent return.  But history was dragging its feet. So Matthew had to remind them of Jesus’ words,  “About that day, and hour, no one knows.  Neither the angels of heaven nor the Son, but only the Father.”  Here Jesus takes us back to the days of Noah, when people went about their everyday lives as the storm clouds gathered, doing the same things that you and I do, eating, drinking, working, marrying. Uncertain about the future, but certain that there was a future.  And what happened? God became so saddened and enraged by the world’s godlessness that he sent the Deluge.  By invoking the story, Jesus seems to be suggesting that his listeners haven’t learned much from the time of Noah. 

So why the gloom and doom this morning? Why must Jesus be so bleak on this beautiful first day of Advent? Should we be worried that some of us may be raptured and others left behind to perish? No. No. But the message is clear. Wake up. Keep watch. As the spiritual writer Debbie Thomas explains, “The call of the season is to recognize that we’re not paying attention to what really matters. To confess that we are alive, yet dangerously asleep.”  Jesus warns us that we cannot afford to walk through life with eyes wide shut, to be asleep at the wheel, to subsist in a fog of lazy unknowing. We do so at great peril. 

Admittedly, it’s hard to get into the spirit of the first Sunday of Advent when it’s bracketed by Black Friday and Cyber Monday. Right. Friends, try to hold on to the fact that while it finally looks like Christmas out there, it is Advent in here, right here.  In our tradition, it’s the anticipation of knowing that something is coming. The word made flesh, love incarnate that we await, not the sales that entice us to consume. During these four weeks before Christmas, we rely on our scripture, liturgy, and music to connect the two horizons. The celebration of Jesus’s past birth and the expectation of his future coming. We anticipate the time when God will finish what he has started and fulfill what he has promised. We’ve slowly, intentionally, become conscious of love’s presence revealed. 

This is why I love the holy season we’ve now entered. I love that the church begins its New Year when the days are getting darker. I love that Advent, rejects shallow sentimentality and false cheer, that it doesn’t celebrate Christmas until it arrives in the manger. And I love that the gospel gets us started with images that startle us out of our complacency. Not jingle bells, twinkly stars or fleecy lambs, but Jesus as relentless pursuer of our souls, Jesus as thief. This morning we acknowledge the inescapable fact of Jesus as judge. We deserve to be judged. We have much for which to repent. And this brings me to Isaiah’s breathtaking prophecy. 

“He shall judge between the nations and shall arbitrate for many peoples. They shall beat their swords into plow shares and their spears into pruning hooks. Nations shall not lift up sword against nation. Neither shall they learn war anymore.” The prophet, the prophet sings of a mountain and of nations streaming up to it to hear holy instruction and be judged by it. These are the same nations willing to make peace with each other. A new community is being gathered into the holy. Isaiah describes it as a multicultural, multiracial, and multilingual convergence. And God as adjudicator will listen to their grievances, disputes and concerns, and they will accept his verdicts. Justice will be their reward. So naturally the ending of inequality or inequity is grounds for the ending of violence. The result? Disarmament. Why? Why? Because the reasons for envy, greed, resentment, retribution, fear, and idolization have been abolished. Weapons are now pointless. Can you imagine? Can you imagine?  This my friends is where we need a come-to-Jesus, or shall I say, to-commit-to embracing Isaiah’s dream as a possibility rather than a fantasy. 

Over the last two weeks, we woke up to a version of the same news on three different mornings.  More high-profile shootings and more senseless death. Three dead on the UVA campus after a field trip.  Five dead last Saturday night inside a nightclub in Colorado Springs. And six on Tuesday at a Walmart in Chesapeake, Virginia. This is a uniquely American affliction that can strike anyone anytime, anywhere, like a thief in the night. And according to the Gun Violence Archive, there have been at least 607 mass shootings through November 22nd of this year. In the past week alone, mass shootings have claimed at least 24 lives and injured 37 others in gun rampages across seven states.  

This is insanity. This is also sin. We must figure this out and make it stop. Otherwise, Noah’s fate will be ours. My friends, Isaiah’s prophecy expresses the deepest of human longings and points to the promises and dreams of God for all of us. This is what Jesus meant by “the reign of God, which is always already present and at work among us.” Though not yet in its fullness, we see it in Jesus, who converted fear to love, lunacy to sanity, enemies to friends. He died surrounded by swords, nails piercing his hands and feet, a spear in his side. “And once and for all,” as the Presbyterian pastor George Arthur Buttrick so eloquently put it, “these weapons entered infinite love, which melted them into light.”  Melted them into light. 

The last verse of Isaiah’s vision on this first Sunday of Advent is this, “O house of Jacob come, let us walk in the light of the Lord”.  O house of Jacob come, let us walk in the light of the Lord.  So let’s enter Advent in hope, even hope against hope. Let us see visions of love and peace and justice. Let us beat our swords into plow shares and our spears into pruning hooks. And let’s leave them down by the river. Let us affirm with humility, with joy, with faith, with courage that when we celebrate the birth of the Christ child with the words “peace on earth, good will towards all people”, we do so with audacious hope and an apocalypse of love.  O house of Jacob, come let us walk in the light of the Lord. Let us walk in the light of the Lord. Amen.