Advent 1, Year C | Luke 21:25-36
St. Andrew’s Episcopal Church
December 1, 2024
the Rev. Jonathan Hanneman
To watch the full service, please visit this page.
“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.” – Luke 21:36[1]
Most people in the United States don’t really distinguish Advent from Christmas. Growing up, my sister and I had Advent calendars, but all those really did was provide a visual countdown until the big day. And once Christmas itself hit, everything was just sort of a slow drift toward New Year’s Day.
Even within Church traditions like ours that recognize a formal difference, we still tend to look at the season through American eyes, with everything simply building toward special services on Christmas Eve. Advent itself is kind of filler, as is the Season of Christmas, which extends from December 25 through January 5. The Season after Epiphany becomes filler for Lent, which itself is mostly filler to Easter Day. Easter Season is filler for the day of Pentecost, and the months after Pentecost are filler for the following Advent. We spend all our time looking ahead to one special day or event, rarely appreciating the differences the intervening weeks could supply. But Advent is its own thing, and the Season we’ve just entered has much to teach us, if only we’re willing to set aside our impulses for the next big thing and focus our attention on the present.
Generation upon generation has understood Advent as the time we prepare for Jesus’ birth, but that’s not really what we’re supposed to be doing right now. Look at our Bible readings. Each year people complain that the Sundays leading up to Christmas are all filled with doom and gloom—Jesus droning on about “the end of the world” and then John the Baptist warning about vipers and axes and flames.
We don’t actually hit the kind of Advent we want until we reach Mary’s Magnificat the week or so before Christmas. But even there we miss her point. As she sings her threats against those with any semblance of wealth or power or self-determination, our thoughts wander ahead to mangers and feasting and presents. But Mary’s words—along with those of John and Jesus—are dangerous. They’re full of warning and fear for a reason.
The truth is, we have Advent backwards. We read the story from the end and think we know what’s coming. But Advent isn’t a time set aside to prepare for Christmas. Like resurrection at Easter, Christmas should be seen as a merciful disruption of our proper expectations. The truth is, we’ve distracted ourselves from the reality of the impending arrival, focusing instead on nesting and tidying up and putting together nursery furniture so we don’t have to consider the reality of our situation. But Advent, properly understood, has nothing to do with birth or a cooing baby Jesus. Advent is when we prepare for the Day of the Lord.
But we Modern American Christians are even confused about what Day of the Lord is! We assume a movie-style deliverance when the bad guys finally get theirs while we good people move on to eternal bliss and self-indulgence. Deluded by our own hubris, we cheer its coming. But we do so as fools.
The Hebrew prophets explicitly reference the Day of the Lord in seventeen different verses, only two of which might, out of context, be interpreted as positive.[2] Isaiah describes it coming “like destruction from the Almighty,”[3] as “cruel, with wrath and fierce anger, to make the earth a desolation, and to destroy its sinners from it.”[4] Jeremiah pronounces “a day of retribution” when “the sword shall devour and be sated, and drink its fill of [the] blood” of God’s foes.[5] Ezekiel proclaims “a day of clouds, a time of doom for the nations.”[6] Both Joel and Malachi refer to it as “terrible.”[7] Amos wails, “Alas for you who desire the day of the Lord!...Is not the day of the Lord darkness, not light, and gloom with no brightness in it?”[8] And Obadiah’s message ought to rattle us like thunder: “As you have done, it shall be done to you; your deeds shall return on your own head.”[9] As Jesus warned us today, “it will come upon all who live on the face of the whole earth.”[10]
That is what Advent is truly about: dread and retribution and the panicked preparations we should be making as we attempt to alleviate the worst of this impending doom. Wrath like the world has never even dreamt is coming, and we are squarely in its path. In Advent, we ready ourselves not for childbirth but for the day the true King once again marches against our land to crush our collective uprising and reassert his reign.
I’m not sure if this is quite possible for us to understand. As Americans, we celebrate revolution and conflate rebellion with patriotism. Can we, a culture that daily clamors for Barabbas, ever grasp what it is to live under occupation, where one’s daily existence stands solely at the whim of those infinitely more powerful than ourselves? Is it even possible for a nation of self-determined Rugged Individuals, each a paragon of martyrdom in our own minds, to catch a glimmer of the kind of fear that God’s coming, God’s unmitigated presence, ought to invoke? Even if we could, chances are we’d immediately rush to remind ourselves that God is Love, forgetting that the blind and permissive Deity we imagine—a sort of affable dementia patient happily wandering the corridors of their own memory—only exists inside our heads.
Perhaps we need to remember that Love also involves desire and passion and jealousy.
Love has a keen eye and a strong arm. Love is sensitive and attentive and tolerates no rivals. Love is terrible in its fury. Love will smelt indifference and purge impurity and forge the object of its affection anew, no matter the cost. Love is action. Love takes action. And Love will, in the end, overwhelm us all.
Love is coming. Love will have its day. And Love will have its way. So
“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.”
[1] All Bible quotations are from the NRSV unless otherwise noted.
[2] Isaiah 58:13 | Ezekiel 13:5
[3] Isaiah 13:6
[4] Isiah 13:9
[5] Jeremiah 46:10
[6] Ezekiel 30:3
[7] Joel 2:11, 31; Malachi 4:5
[8] Amos 5:18, 20
[9] Obadiah 15
[10] Luke 21:35