Get Ready

The scriptures referred to are Luke 21:25-36.

One disadvantage to being a nurse is that you know enough about diseases and their symptoms that you have to guard against jumping to negative conclusions. You can't be a hypochondriac. That cough could be a warning sign of lung disease but you need to check that it isn't just a side effect of your blood pressure medicine. One advantage of being a nurse, however, is that if you suffer a fairly common injury, even if it is serious, you realize that getting better is a simply matter of obeying doctor's orders and doing your therapy. Such was my state after my accident nearly 6 years ago. Mostly what I did was break a lot of bones and tear up some internal organs. The surgeons fixed most of that in 6 operations. The rest was up to my body's ability to recover and my physical and occupational therapy. So I had hope that I would walk again, even if I didn't know precisely when.

And I knew that I would also be able to return to ministering at my churches one day. I just needed to get a doctor's permission. Again, I had hope. It was a matter of time.

Advent is about hope. Someone has called hope the future tense of faith. Faith is simply trust in someone or something in the present based on past experience. That's why people growing up in chaotic homes often have trouble trusting others. In my marriage preparation classes, I tell the couple to build up a good amount of trust by being reliable. It will help during times when things get difficult and you're going to have to trust the other person.

Hope is based on promises. Again this is rooted in one's past experience with the source of the promise. Whether it is a person or a group or a business, if they have made good on promises in the past, we can trust them to fulfill promises about the future. It's like a paycheck. Until you cash or deposit it, you don't actually have the money. It is merely a promise. But if your company has never given you a bad check, you have good reason to treat your current paycheck as fully backed by their funds and to make your plans and pay your bills accordingly.

The church year, especially from Christmas through Easter, is based on what Jesus said and did. In Advent we are largely looking at periods before certain things happened, like Jesus' birth or his baptism, or things that haven't happened yet, like Jesus' return. And the first set of promises that God delivered on secures our hope that he will fulfill the second set as well.

After my accident, I was in the hospital for 40 days. Then I had to wait for 12 weeks in the nursing home for my legs to heal enough that I could put weight on them. So I did strength and flexibility exercises to prepare for that day. And after that it was another two months before I could resume my position at the churches part-time. In all it took a full eight months to go from patient to pastor again. It took patience and preparation.

The Israelites had been promised another prophet like Moses before they actually entered the land of Canaan. (Deuteronomy 18:15) And while God did send them prophets, they were not lawgivers like Moses. Rather these prophets pointed out how people were not being faithful to the law they already had. They urged them to love God and show it by worshiping and obeying him, not just with their lips but with their lives (1 Samuel 15:22). They also reminded them to love their neighbors as they did themselves (Isaiah 1:14-19). In the meantime the people had to wait for THE Prophet Moses promised.

That prophet comes in Jesus. Why didn't he come sooner? Well, I can't speak for God on the timing but it looks like the world had to be prepared for the spread of the gospel. At the time Jesus arrived, almost the entire land around the Mediterranean was united under the Roman Empire. The Romans built roads, facilitating travel through the empire. They made the sea safe from piracy. Almost everyone spoke a common language, Greek, at least as their second language. And the Jewish diaspora meant there were synagogues in every major city, filled with Jews who were looking for the Messiah, as well as Godfearers, Gentiles attracted to features of Judaism, though they hadn't actually converted. All this meant that the teachings and the news of the death and resurrection of one man in tiny Judea could be spread throughout the empire.

By the end of the first century there were an estimated 7,500 Christians in about 40 cities in Libya, Egypt, Asia Minor, Greece, and Rome, the capitol itself. In the second century there are around 200,000 Christians in nearly 100 cities with some now in North Africa, Mesopotamia, Gaul, and in what eventually became Germany. By the third century, there are 3 times that many churches and some were located on the Black Sea, in the Slavic countries, in Spain and in Britain. By 300 AD, there are an estimated 6 million Christians and perhaps 30 million by the middle of that century.

So two keys to Jesus' first coming were patience and preparation. The third was persistence. Christians did not keep the good news of Jesus to themselves. They went out and told others even if it could spell death. Whenever an emperor took it upon himself to persecute Christians, citizens were required to denounce Christ and make a sacrifice to the emperor. If not, they could be executed and, like Jesus, in a very public way to discourage others. In 300 AD, Christianity was still an illegal religion. And yet, as we said, around 6 million people believed in Jesus. And that was enough for Constantine to feel it politically safe to make Christianity legal shortly after he became emperor in 312 AD.

But how did the number of Christians grow so much after the death of the apostles? We no longer hear of missionaries like Paul spreading the word until after Christianity becomes legal. We must conclude it spread by word of mouth. By ordinary Christians telling others and inviting them to worship with them. And this worship would have been held in secret. During times of persecution, Christians met and worshiped in catacombs, underground tombs. Imagine inviting someone to join you for a church service held in a subterranean maze of tunnels with dead bodies all around, lying on shelves. By comparison, evangelism today is much easier.

But Christians persevered, despite the dangers and difficulties. When it became safe to be a Christian within the empire, missionaries went outside its borders bringing the gospel to warlike tribes. And the Church in the East spread through Persia into Asia. It reached India in the 6^th century and China and the Mongols by the 7^th century.

This is the result not merely of patience, preparation and perseverance, however, but of Christians responding to the prompting of the Holy Spirit. Whereas most religions did not seek to include others, seeing as they were associated with their specific nations, Christians, out of love, preached the good news of what God has done in Jesus for the whole world, inviting people to join his kingdom. Whereas other religions tend to bless the status quo, Christianity said that this world's values were inverted, putting power, wealth and fame at the top, rather than love, justice and peace. Whereas in pagan religions the gods were cruel and capricious and had no love for humanity, Christianity proclaimed that God is just and loved all people, including slaves and women and the poor. That was a very attractive message.

But what really changed minds was that Christians acted on their beliefs, helping the sick, the hungry, the imprisoned, and outcasts. When the rich fled the cities during plagues, Christians stayed and nursed the sick and dying at the risk of their own lives. This made pagans doubt the official line that Christians hated humanity, and held cannibalistic orgies. (Which as we've seen is still the standard propaganda for demonizing a group.) It was how Christians really acted that convinced pagans to rethink what they believed about this illegal religion, and led more and more to follow Jesus.

In Advent we are waiting in a sense for both Jesus' birth and his return to earth. Today's gospel focuses on the latter. And in it, and its parallel passages in Matthew 24 and Mark 13, Jesus also urges us to be patient, to be prepared, and to persevere. And to be responsive to the prompting of the Holy Spirit, especially when it comes to testifying to the good news. In Mark Jesus says, “The gospel must first be preached to all nations.” (Mark 13:10) Everyone must be given the opportunity to hear and accept God's offer of love, forgiveness, reconciliation and transformation.

I am not saying Jesus is coming tomorrow, but, like the era of his first appearance, the time is ripe to spread the word. We have communications that can be accessed by people all over the world. My blog audience, while small, is global. Our worship services likewise can be seen anywhere there is Facebook and are watched by many more people online than we have in the building. Paul would be astounded by the number of people we can reach at once.

But remember that after the apostles were martyred, the faith still spread, primarily shared by ordinary Christians. And as someone who used to write and record commercials for radio, let me tell you, the slickest ad cannot compare to word of mouth. If you lie about what a sponsor is offering, or the quality of their goods or services, or how affordable they are, the word of mouth backlash will negate the lasting impact of your ad.

And I'm afraid that slick prepackaged formulas for evangelizing people, like reading tracts to them, as well as the hard sell approached used by some denominations, have scared off mainstream Protestants from sharing the gospel with others. But it can be as simple as sharing what God has done for you personally, when the time and conversation are appropriate. People are more reluctant to reject someone's personal experience.

And we need to back up our words by showing how our experience of God's love results in loving actions. We have seen how prominent “Christians” have damaged the witness of the church by speaking and acting in ways that contradict the idea that we represent a God who loves and forgives and reconciles. Jesus said, “By this all people will know you are my disciples, if you love one another.” (John 13:35) Not by our doctrinal purity on all matters, nor our agreement on all things, nor by whom we exclude or denounce, but by our love for one another. Yet some “Christians,” who pride themselves on knowing the Bible, seem to be unable to recall this essential verse that comes from the very lips of our Lord.

If the world needs anything, it is love. Not the narrow or toxic forms that are rampant in our society—love as possession or obsession—but God's self-sacrificial love, seen in what Jesus has done for us. We need to start putting the interests of others ahead of ourselves. (Philippians 2:4) And not in a co-dependent way but the way you would if you were climbing a mountain, tethered together with others, helping each other up. Because we really cannot get over all the obstacles of life by ourselves. We get help from parents and grandparents and friends and coworkers and folks in our church and the people who provide the basic support services that keep society going. Even survival experts admit they would have trouble surviving in the wilderness for as little as a month if they were alone. And they wouldn't even attempt it without preparation—which, of course, includes getting tools and materials made by others and bought from others.

God made us as social animals. (Genesis 2:18) Part of being made in his image is not simply existing as solitary souls. (Genesis 1:28) For God is love. (1 John 4:8) Which is why Jesus handed off his continuing mission not a single person but a body of people, the body of Christ. (1 Corinthians 12:27) Calling Christ the head of the body, Paul says, “From him the whole body grows, fitted and held together through every supporting ligament. As each one does its part, the body grows in love.” (Ephesians 4:16)

A community that works together and grows in love is precisely what the world needs to see. It's also Jesus wants to see when he returns: his bride, the church. (Ephesians 5:25-27; Romans 7:4) This is why Jesus is called the bridegroom (John 3:29) and why his second coming is compared to a groom coming to claim his bride, as in the parable of the ten virgins (Matthew 25:1-13). So part of the preparation we are to be making is this: getting ourselves cleaned up to meet our spouse on our wedding day. In Jesus' time, the groom and his entourage would traverse all the streets of the village on his way to pick up his bride at her parents' home. That way everyone could see him and join in the procession with music and dancing. Which meant the bride had to be patient and prepared to welcome him at any time, even if he got there after dark. And then she would join him in parading back through the streets to his home (or his parents') to start the wedding feast, which would last for days. And everyone was invited.

As Jesus' first coming was promised, so is his return to us and for us. During Advent let us prepare ourselves to welcome Jesus with clean hearts, minds and souls. Let us wait patiently for him. Let us persevere in the tasks at hand. Let us be ready always to respond to the prompting of his Spirit. And let us invite everyone to join us for what will ultimately be a joyful celebration, the biggest one you could ever hope for. Jesus' wedding feast promises to be the party, not of the century, or of the millennium but of all time. And beyond.