It's the End of the World As We Know It

Scripture Readings

In his novel The Corrections, Jonathan Franzen tells the story of a typical Midwestern family that is falling apart at the seams as Christmas approaches. At one point, the story focuses in on the family matriarch – Enid Lambert - as she begins to prepare for the holiday:

“For as long as anyone could remember, the Tuesday ladies’ group at the church had raised money by manufacturing Advent calendars. They were beautifully hand-sewn and reusable. A green felt Christmas tree was stitched to a square of bleached canvas with twelve numbered pockets across the top and another twelve across the bottom. On each morning of Advent your children took an ornament from a pocket – a tiny rocking horse of felt and sequins, or a yellow felt turtledove, or a sequin-encrusted toy soldier – and pinned it to the tree. Even now, with her children all grown, Enid continued to shuffle and distribute the ornaments in their pockets every November 30. Only the ornament in the twenty-fourth pocket was the same every year: a tiny plastic Christ child in a walnut shell spray-painted gold. Although Enid generally fell far short of fervor in her Christian beliefs, she was devout about this ornament. To her it was an icon not merely of the Lord but of her own three babies and of all the sweet baby-smelling babies of the world. She’d filled the twenty-fourth pocket for thirty years, she knew very well what it contained, and still the anticipation of opening it could take her breath away.”

Though we still have a couple more days to prepare our Advent calendars, today is the first Sunday of Advent in the church calendar and the beginning of a new church year. For most of us, Advent represents the go-ahead that we can start getting ready for Christmas. It’s time to dig ornaments out of the attic and get serious about our shopping lists. Like Enid, we are anticipating the birth of the baby Jesus and the joy of the Christmas season as the ultimate reward for this season of frenzied preparation.

BUT today’s gospel lesson doesn’t sound at all like this warm holiday vision. Truthfully, I have my doubts that all of us even listened to the entire reading today, because it is so far from our normal frames of reference that we tend to almost automatically tune it out. So I’ll give you a quick recap of what Jesus predicts: distress, confusion, fainting from fear and foreboding, the powers of heaven being shaken, signs in the heavens, and the roaring of sea and waves. The Son of Man will come and heaven and earth will pass away. The writer of this gospel and almost all early Christians genuinely expected Jesus to return at any time, but as for us – well, this story was written 2,000 years ago and none of this stuff has happened yet, so why should we start to worry now? Very few of us these days walk around with a palpable fear that the world will end tomorrow.

And yet while we may not expect the powers of heaven to be shaken tomorrow, I daresay that we have all experienced moments when it felt like our world was ending: losing a job, ending a relationship, sitting in a hospital waiting room expecting the worst. This gospel lesson was written out of the Jews’ deep pain at seeing their temple in Jerusalem destroyed, their holy of holies razed to the ground, the unimaginable coming true. One commentary I read explained that Apocalyptic literature is about “the end of the world as we now experience it and the beginning of a new world.” First-century Jewish Christians were trying to figure out how to reconstruct their world, and this lesson is an insight into how they were able to do that in the midst of their pain. It encouraged them to remember that every day could be their last day, to remember that the world as they knew it could pass away before their eyes.

This fall I received devastating news from the school where I worked for several years before coming to seminary. One of our recent graduates – a smart, friendly young man - had reached a point in his four-year battle with cancer where nothing more could be done. At the age of 19, he has entered hospice care at home, knowing that he has only a short time left to live. His family’s worst nightmare, coming true. But over these last few weeks of Joe’s life, his mother has offered up a beautiful gift. She has posted regular updates on a website for friends and family, giving testament to how she and her family are looking into the eyes of this apocalypse in their lives and how they have learned to live in the face of this destruction. 

Here are a few of the things she has shared:

• On October 10: We have had another day with our family. Off and on, when Joe has the energy we are choosing pictures for his slide show. He rests most of the day. The bedtime routine is now all of us gathering in his room until his medicine takes him off to sleep. Every day is a blessing now and we hold on tight through the night hoping for another day.

• On October 16: We never know what the next day will bring, but our first wish is that Joe will wake up. It is ironic we all speak of living each day to the fullest, and in reflection we always think we do, but in reality we don't. Our family has had the best and fullest days this past week. I can't think of another time, trip or gathering that has been better. Each of us will remember these past few days forever and I am pretty sure it will not be with sadness.

• Or just last week: There are so many times I watch Joe sleep wondering what could have been without this horrible cancer. I ask why he was not one of the survivors, giving him the chance to live his life, fulfill his dreams, fall in love and have a family of his own. Since the onset of his cancer I have searched for an answer but have never discovered why it is Joe, why our days have been filled with this heartbreak. So after almost four years I have given up searching for the answer since it will elude me. Instead I strive to focus my energy toward enjoying every day, not what the future will bring nor dwell on time that has past. Ironically, I have found over these past weeks that living in the present is comforting, and I think this is a peaceful way to live.

Joe’s parents and younger brothers have spent nearly two months together in that room doing everything in their power to savor their time together: sleeping on the floor at Joe’s bedside to catch every waking moment, recounting favorite memories, re-reading beloved books, planning Joe’s memorial service with him, saying their goodbyes over and over.

The truth is that for each of us, every day is a gift from God, but we so easily forget this. Unlike those early Christians, we go through our days expecting many more. But Advent is not about complacent expectation of more days to come that will be even better than these ones: Advent seeks to jolt us back into remembrance that all time is holy time. If we can live our lives in expectation that everything we know and love could pass away, we can start to live free from what Jesus called “dissipation, drunkenness, and all the worries of this life.” When we can look at the world with this Advent perspective, we can put on the armor of light; we can see and do what matters most. We can stand up and raise our heads, for our redemption comes near in that awareness of how precious our time is.

So yes, in Advent we anticipate Christ, but not just the little baby in a walnut shell. We anticipate Christ in his second coming, the Christ who can shake the powers of the heavens, and we learn to face this possibility and guard our hearts from the things that distract us from living our lives fully until then. What if your anticipation of Christ’s coming was as palpable as that of Enid Lambert, who knew full well what was in that tiny pocket but still found the wind knocked out of her every Christmas Eve? What if you made New Year’s resolutions now, at the beginning of this church year, instead of waiting for January 1st? What if you filled the pockets of your Advent calendar with ways to embrace this season as holy time, things that look something like what Joe’s family is doing to make sacred their last days together, things like being more patient with your kids or your spouse, honking less in the parking lot at the mall, trying to see the best in your crazy relatives, spending less but giving more? Living our lives this way is our prayer for strength to stand before the Son of Man, to stand in the face of knowledge that the world can and will end.

Today’s gospel challenges us to live with clarity, to live with alertness, to live with kindness, to live like it really means something. Do you accept the challenge?