Sometimes we tend to think we have a religion that’s about the past. People come up here to this lectern and read from scriptures that are thousands of years old, so we could be forgiven if we conclude that the primary focus of our faith is believing what happened back then. But today we find out that we also have a religion of the future. Our gospel has something just as important to say about what God will do in the future as it does about the things God did long ago.
I think for many of us, this looking towards the future is harder for us. There are a couple of reasons for this. First, we know that our early Christian ancestors were certain that this second coming of Jesus was imminent, in their lifetimes, and we also know that their expectation was mistaken. We’ve all been waiting ever since for the signs they were looking for, but maybe if we’re honest it’s more correct to say that we’ve stopped waiting. We might think about the end of this world now and then as sort of a scientific thing that’s bound to happen, but the cosmic drama in today’s gospel isn’t part of what we’re expecting. So we’ve become cynical about these urgent hopes they had for a second coming that would settle everything, and bring on a time of justice once and for all.
But the other problem is simply that we don’t live in a time where hope in the future is easy to have. We might feel reasonably positive about our own future, especially if we’ve been fortunate in life. We might feel safe and well off and protected as well as we could expect. But where’s the sign that the world as a whole is on a long trajectory where God is the ultimate victor? That’s hard to believe. Around us, on a good day, the world seems chaotic at best, and at worst, it’s as though much of the world is still in the hands of an enemy power, where the best we can hope for is a personal fortress of some sort that keeps us sheltered from what too many other people in this world have to face. You don’t need too many examples of what subconsciously shapes how people in the year 2018 see the future. Whether it’s the environment, the future of our climate and food, the treatment of the displaced and the powerless in this world, or even the future of our church, in such a period of discouragement, it’s hard to see a future where we can picture the arrows heading anywhere but further down.
So it’s very human just to find a way to take shelter from a world that seems beyond our control, keep ourselves as safe as we can, and maybe wonder what God is trying to tell us with the discouraging shape of this world.
But what God wants to tell us is what God has always told us, it’s that we live in a world where one day things will be put right, once and for all. Not somewhere else, but on this earth, which one day will be made new. Stand erect and raise your heads, the gospel says, you will one day see what you’ve been waiting for. Some people will be petrified. But for those who know what God is up to, it will be a time when everyone’s liberation will come.
We’ve changed our minds over the years about when we’ll see this, and maybe we’ve given up believing it completely. But what hasn’t changed and never changes is that our world is in desperate need of this final turning upside down. We really are still in a battle between light and darkness, but our job here is to live as if we know who will win — that is how we define hope, hope us living in this world as if we believe Christ has already won. This season of Advent is the time for us to let hope take us over, eager for this world to be transformed. Because Christ is already in this world, present wherever people take care of the people who are the most powerless, because those are the lives that God tells us most need to be made right. There are plenty of people in this world who need that justice that God says is coming, there are plenty of people who if they sang Come, Lord Jesus the way we just did at the beginning of this mass, you’d hear and see that they really mean it. They need a power from the outside to change things, that same power that is able to make a new creation out of people like us. We can’t save this world on our own, but we can be soldiers in a battle we believe is already won.
It isn’t easy living in this in-between time between Jesus’s first coming and his second. By definition, there are signs that things are not going the way God told us it would. What we can’t be is neutral, withdrawing from the mess of this world, waiting for whatever’s going to happen to work itself out without us. If you’re neutral, you’re not doing the work of Advent which is after all preparation, making the world ready, living out the desire God has to bring life to the dark places and forgotten people of this world. If we’re people of hope, the fact that the world isn’t anywhere ready yet should only make us more eager to be at work, pushing the future God promised us to get here faster.