I suspect that if you haven’t already, you will end up seeing at some point this coming week, whether you want to or not, at least some of that Christmas favorite on television, It’s a Wonderful Life. You don’t need me to tell you the plot, about how the small-town banker who is about to lose his business sees a vision of how the world would have turned out if he had never lived. Of course, what he finds in this vision of an entirely different future is that without him, not only did his wife end up not marrying him, but his entire family was different, his friends less happy, his whole town was different, turned completely around, it was a far worse place, meaner and uglier, because he hadn’t been there to be who he was.
It’s no accident that so many of the stories we tell one another to get ready for Christmas involve some kind of vision of the future, whether it’s George Bailey or Ebenezer Scrooge and the ghost of Christmas yet to come. This time before Christmas, Advent, is all about imagining the future. Dreams and angels, stars and candles, they are all here to tell us something about not what happened long ago, but what is coming, what might come. Today’s readings tell us about something we don’t think very much about: it’s that in the future, we have people who will come after us, perhaps long after us. We have, in that wonderful biblical word, descendants. Today is really the feast of descendants. We hear that we are descendants, first of all, but not only are we descendants of people we do not know, the important thing is after us, there will be still more.
In this first reading, which parish old-timers may remember was read at the laying of our church’s cornerstone, here is David the king, ready, he thinks, to reach a climax of sorts in his reign. God wandered with Israel through the desert for years, David thinks, led literally a nomadic existence, and surely, now is the time for a house where he can finally settle down. A temple, but perhaps also a retirement home, for both David and God. The story of Israel, after all, must have reached its conclusion. But God is there in the form of the prophet Nathan and his dream to say — not so fast. The real point of your life is not now, not some great final building, but later, with people who will come generations after you.
Then there is Mary, the great fulfillment of what Nathan told David to expect from his descendants. This visit from the angel with “glad tidings” that were not all glad changed her life, her marriage, her future, everything about her, subjected her to danger and sadness and death. Her future, it seems, wasn’t her own, wasn’t what she had planned, she found that it belonged to someone else as well, and that person, her son, has a story that the angel says will go on forever, so that what Mary does now, says today, doesn’t just affect her life, but the lives of generations and generations after her. She would have made a different decision without this brief vision of the future the angel revealed to her.
David, suddenly seeing a line stretching out after him, through all time. And Mary, in that line, seeing it go on even further. Until it reaches here, and now.
The bible is filled with names, our ancestors loved genealogy even more than we do, and sometimes those long lists of who begat whom are part of what makes the bible seem so historically distant. And yet where would we be without someone begetting someone else, without people who believed that the reason we are here on this earth is not just to work out our own salvation, but to be part of God’s preparation for those who will come after us? It seems like a simple message, that we are part a long promise from God to keep the faith in a line unbroken, and that the world that goes on from here needs us to shape it as much as it needed George Bailey. But we must need that message, because that sense of the future, of generations of faith to come, does not always shape the way we actually live.
In practice, what do we think about the future, now that we are here two weeks away from the year 2000? We often see the future, I think, pretty much hurtling ahead without any need for us, since most of what happens is, we think, due to forces beyond our control, most of the world’s ills out there, if we notice them are too big for resolution, smarter people than we are have tried to fix this world, to bring equality, to heal up broken places and people, and a lot of it just can’t change, and won’t change.
So we settle in and, yes, plan for the future, but it’s a private little future. We can spend hours thinking about college planning for our loved ones, or maybe a job change, or whether it would be nice to have a little property somewhere for retirement. All worthy things, and some of our direct descendants may enjoy that retirement property. But the message of the angel points much further into the future than that, and to a much longer line of people in our future, people we will never know, whose faith will live because here and now, we heard the message and took our place.
What do we live like if we believe that not only are we descendants of the house of David, but that we are in a line that does not end with us? We might take a view of the earth that was a little different, we might see it more as a treasure to preserve for someone else than something to be developed and money made from. We might look at the desolate parts of the cities near us and see a future of justice for them, a future that we can call out for and work for, rather than simply some great failure that we ignore. Above all, we might be ready for the message, our message. No one in this great family of which we are a part simply made up what they did to serve the future. They heard something. David, Mary, us. A dream, an angel. In Advent, we listen, we look, we see. We notice. That is how we hear what the future demands of us.
So this family tree isn’t over, even now, that great genealogy of names is still being written. There’s just one more week to prepare for Christmas. This work of the future can’t all be done in a week. What can be done in a week is what Mary did in a moment: picture the future that God is bringing about, and say yes to what is coming.