Be Alert

The scriptures referred to are 1 Thessalonians 3:9-13 and Luke 21:25-36.

This week a man said “You know you live in South Florida when you hear the ice cream truck in the winter.” He's right. When I was a child in St. Louis the ice cream truck was strictly a summer phenomenon. You would hear the jingly tune and run to your mom and beg her for money. You would hover around her as she retrieved her purse, all the while hopping up and down with combined excitement about getting the treat and anxiety that you might miss it while Mom was digging at the bottom of her purse for stray coins. Then you would race out to the street, join up with the other kids on the block and look for the truck. Though you could hear the music, you couldn't tell if it was 1 or 2 blocks over, or on a cross street. Was it coming your way or moving away from you? And if it was moving away, was it going to loop back? Which end of the block would it appear at? Where along the block would it stop and on which side of the street? Moms would come out to make sure we wouldn't simply run across the street in pursuit of it, heedless of other traffic. One last question was whether it was Mr. Softee, with actual ice cream cones, or the bomb pops truck, with already prepared frozen goodies. Whichever it was, the anticipation was as sweet as the treats themselves.

Anticipation can be almost as pleasurable as the thing you are waiting for. When you are first in love with someone, the closer it gets to the time you can see that person the more exhilarated you feel. The smell of bread being baked or certain favorite foods being cooked can be heavenly. Children can barely contain themselves as Christmas approaches. And we have a whole season of the church year where we anticipate the coming of Jesus.

We are not awaiting the ice cream truck, though. We are awaiting the coming of our King. And there are some things we have to do before he gets here: basically get things ready and keep watch. We can break down getting things ready into 3 general categories: fix up, throw out, and make new. We will deal with those in subsequent Sundays when those themes predominate our lectionary readings. But this week we will look at keeping watch.

From reading the prophesies in the Hebrew Bible you would be forgiven for thinking that the coming of the Messiah was a one-time event. That's how most of Jesus' contemporaries saw it. The Messiah would come, end the present evil age and inaugurate the kingdom of God on earth. As it turns out Jesus came first to reveal the true nature of the Messiah and God's kingdom, secure that by dying for us and rise again to validate what he preached. But then Jesus leaves things in the hands of his disciples. They and subsequently we are to spread the kingdom by proclaiming the good news to all the world. We are to let people know about God's love, grace, forgiveness and transforming power. When everyone has had a chance to accept his offer, he will return. Had Jesus just launched into judgment day back in 30 AD, it would hardly be fair. He wasn't known outside Palestine. He will come when the gospel has reached all the world. (Matthew 24:14)

So while Christmas is exclusively about Jesus becoming one of us, Advent looks at both his first and second coming. Our New Testament and Gospel readings today are all about the next time Jesus appears. And whereas a few weeks ago, we read about Jesus giving his disciples very general signs to watch for, this is less about that than it is about being vigilant. “Be alert,” Jesus says. Stopping looking for specific signs and pay attention to the tenor of things. In the parallel to this passage in Matthew, Jesus says, “Because of the increase of wickedness, the love of most will grow cold...” (Matthew 24:12) And while I have said in a previous sermon that many of the indications Jesus mentions could easily apply to the rise of the Nazis or the Khmer Rouge or the current actions of the Syrian regime, this trend is a sign that a society is unhealthy.

God is love, according to 1 John 4:8. If we are made in the image of God, it means we are most like God when we are acting in love. Jesus is, as it says in Hebrews, “the exact imprint of God's very being.” (Hebrews 1:3)  So it is fair to say that Christ is God's love Incarnate. The more Christlike we are becoming, as either individuals or as a group, like a church or a society, the more godly we growing.

If we are not acting in love, we are going against our true nature and not being the people God intends us to be. Any group that is becoming less loving, especially intentionally, is becoming less godly and, obviously, less Christlike. This is important because a lot of people throw around the term "Anti-Christ" as if it refers only to a single person. But in the first 2 letters of John, the only books in the Bible where the term is used, the writer uses it to describe any who deny or oppose Jesus as Christ. He writes of the “spirit of antichrist.” (1 John 4:3) And this is just a few verses before he says that God is love and that whoever does not love does not know God. So the essence of the spirit of antichrist is not loving others as Christ loves them.

Since we are created in the image of God, and since the nature of God is revealed most clearly in Christ, the farther we are moving away from being loving, the sicker we are becoming spiritually. Just as an increasingly weak or irregular heart beat is a sign of impending physical death, a society that is increasingly cold and indifferent to what happens to people is a society that is dying. So being alert is, at least in part, keeping our finger on the pulse of the world and being sensitive to its spiritual health. As I have said before, as a nurse I have learned that people do not seek help or change their lifestyle until it becomes too painful not to. We are seeing that with climate change. It was first discovered by an Exxon scientist in the 1970s. It was first made public in the 80s. If we had jumped on it then and started making real changes, we would not be where we are today: at a point where if we do now everything we should have done 30 years ago, we will not be able to make things better, just less bad. [Here] We are like the patient who only calls the doctor when it feels like an elephant is sitting on his chest and he is on the verge of cardiac arrest.

Spiritually our society is like that patient. A recent study by the Pew Research Center found that when asked “What makes your life meaningful?” more people mentioned their careers, money and finances than spirituality or religious faith. To be sure, people mentioned family more often than money or careers but the values of their family are what count. The Borgias, the Medicis, the Five Families of New York organized crime, Ma Barker and her boys—all were close families. And one of the things that held those families together was putting money and family finances ahead of other values, like faith or the welfare of other people. You can make money by providing a product or service that helps others, but you can more easily make money by simply ripping people off. Without a value higher than simply what is good for you and your family, you are not going to live an ethical or spiritual life.

Just as we are seeing the results of climate change, we are seeing the results of the unhindered pursuit of wealth and careers. Oil companies, sugar companies, tobacco companies, car companies, financial companies, even pharmaceutical companies apparently have no problems lying to consumers about the negative effects of their products. Rather than God or the greater good, our economy has enshrined Mammon as the ultimate value and goal of life. And we are seeing that in the increasingly psychopathic way these entities behave. Psychopaths are perfectly pragmatic, doing whatever they see as most expedient to get what they want. They will be your friend one moment and knife you in the back the next, depending on which action benefits them the most at the moment.

For instance, amid the news of the closing of GM plants in the US and Canada, there was a story about the history of the Detroit-Hamtramck plant. In 1981 GM wanted to place it on the 465 acres of the Poletown neighborhood. The local Polish American priest and a coalition of residents and business people opposed it. They lost. SWAT teams were dispatched to end a sit-in of elderly Polish ladies at Immaculate Conception Roman Catholic Church. In addition, 1500 homes and hundreds of businesses were razed. 4000 people were uprooted. Those who didn't want to sell were forced to do so by eminent domain. The 59 year old priest who led the fight died of a heart attack 5 months after his church was bulldozed. GM promised a lot more jobs—6000—than it actually delivered. Now that plant is closing, leaving the 1540 people who worked there unemployed, and the neighborhood that once occupied that land obliterated. I know the reasons for car plant closings are many. But this looks a lot like the work of a corporate vampire, draining its victim of all life and leaving behind a corpse.

And this is not an isolated instance of such practices, nor is it limited to this industry. Walmarts are notorious for going into towns, destroying multiple local businesses who can't compete on prices and then later closing the megastore and moving elsewhere, leaving behind a huge empty building, an enormous parking lot and a ruined local economy. As of 2016, 154 Walmarts closed. This year they closed 63 Sam's Clubs, or 10% of their stores. Yet Walmart isn't in bankruptcy like Sears. Recently we saw several major cities fall all over themselves offering Amazon all kinds of tax breaks and freebies if they put their second headquarters in their municipality. Will the cities who won get more out of the deal than the corporation? The history of such deals is not promising.

I am not picking on these businesses. They are symptoms, not causes. The cause is that we are putting money ahead of loving God and other people. Already profitable companies often make moves not because they need to survive but in order to be even more profitable. Such as robots replacing people in jobs primarily because with a one-time investment the company no longer has to pay a person for years or offer benefits. I just saw a documentary in which a heavily-mechanized pizza parlor still needed a person to throw the dough and another to transfer the machine-made pies from the oven to the mobile oven in which they are delivered. The owner explained that those positions would be eliminated as soon as they could get robots to do those jobs. In Japan there is a hotel staffed almost entirely by robots. Creepy! Even the Japanese are worried about losing these jobs. Our society is slowly becoming as soulless as the robots replacing us.

Another symptom of our sick society is the falling life expectancy in this country. [Here] This is caused mainly by what have been called “diseases of despair”: the opioid crisis and suicides. We had 72,000 overdose deaths in 2017, up from 17,000 in 1999. That's 197 a day. Most of those people took drugs initially for pain, and only later got addicted. And this is largely because a drug manufacturer lied about its new class of painkillers being addictive.

Not far behind overdoses as a cause of our dropping life expectancy is the increase in suicides, at 44,895 a year or 123 a day. That's 1 every 12 minutes. Suicide is the 10^th leading cause of death in the US and the 2^nd leading cause of death for those aged 10 to 34. It is also the leading cause of the death of inmates. Contrary to popular belief, 2/3s of the gun deaths in this country are not homicides but suicides.

Since chronic pain leads to opioid and heroin overdoses and depression, psychosis and/or substance abuse often lead to suicides, professional help is absolutely vital to treating people. But in addition, a 2006 study of 353 inner-city minority recovering addicts showed that “spirituality, religion and life meaning directly increased and enhanced a person's recovery.” Multiple studies have also found that those who say that religion is very important in their life are less likely to use drugs. Another recent study showed that teens whose parents are religious are less likely to die from suicide, however the teens feel about religion themselves. This is especially true of teenage girls. The chairwoman of the clinical division of the American Association of Suicidology, Melinda Moore, says, “We know what places people at risk for suicide—it's a sense of not feeling connected to a community and feeling you are a burden and your life doesn't matter....[Faith communities] provide connection, making them feel they belong, that they are not a burden, and that their life is important—that's very protective.” It's not that Christians never commit suicide or get caught up in substance abuse but having a strong faith and a loving faith community reduces the risk and increases the odds that the person will recover. Like vaccinations and a healthy lifestyle protect a person against physical disease, following Jesus has a protective effect against “diseases of despair.”

And that's another thing we are to be alert to. Jesus said, “Be on guard so that your hearts are not weighed down with dissipation and drunkenness and the worries of this life...” We are called to be in the world but there is a danger of world weariness getting into us. The trick is, as someone said, to get the boat into the water without getting too much water in the boat. We need to be alert lest we sink into the despair of an increasingly cold and soulless world. So we need to take our own pulse as well.

Most of us are not going to get rich; most of us are not going to become very powerful or famous. If the whole point of existence is to climb the corporate ladder, and to get more money and more stuff, that isn't a very healthy way to approach life, either spiritually or psychologically. If the meaning of your life, if your value as a person is tied up with achieving those things, then when they fail to materialize, or if they are taken away from you, how will you survive? If, however, you have intrinsic worth, because you were created in God's image and loved by him enough that he sent Jesus to die for you and sent his Spirit to dwell in you, those other things cannot change that. Your worth is not based on how wealthy or how popular or how healthy or how useful or how attractive or how smart or how articulate or how highly skilled or how funny or how talented you are. It is not based on what you did or do. It is based on what Jesus did for you. It is not based on who you are. It is based on the gracious nature of God.

But, as Anne Lamott said, “God loves you just as you are but he loves you too much to let you stay that way.” We are not like a toy or a teddy bear; loved but without any agency ourselves. We are not merely an audience for God's mighty acts. We are his beloved children. God loves us enough to include us in what he is doing, to give us roles in carrying out his plan. And he loves us enough to empower us to do our part. Through his Spirit, he changes us from people who cannot possibly do marvelous and godly things into people who can because day by day they are becoming more loving, joyful, peaceful, patient, kind, generous, faithful, gentle and self-controled. In short, he is making us more Christlike. And since Christ, as God the Son, is infinite, that means the process is eternal. We will be forever growing into the image of God, becoming more than we were, more than we are, more than we can imagine being. That is the hope we are offering this dying and despairing world. And the knowledge that each day we will be continuing that process should make us giddy with anticipation.