Sermon for 12/1/24
Sermon 12-1-24 Luke 21: 25-36 1 Advent
While I was researching the gospel reading we have today, for the first Sunday of Advent, cycle C, I pulled out some notes from our Adult Sunday School class back in 2012.
I had forgotten that 2012 was a big deal in some circles. There was a theory that on December 21st of that year, according to the ancient Mayan calendar, the world would come to an end. Remember that? Oh yeah. The hype had even started a few years earlier when a big box office science fiction movie came out. The movie coincidentally was called “2012”.
The movie had twenty-one nominations for awards in a bunch of movie industry associations. One was for the best destruction of Los Angeles. I thought that was pretty funny.
I have three full pages of notes for that Sunday, December 2nd, 2012, about this same reading. The last paragraph of my notes says: “There is a possibility that the Mayan calendar could be correct. You should all send me your money so I can spend the next two and a half weeks in dissipation and drunkenness while you prepare for the great catastrophe on the 21st. I'll take my chances.”
If I remember correctly nobody gave me a dime.
The reading we have today from Luke's Gospel takes place during the last week of Jesus' earthly life, the passion week, during the festival of the Passover. It is in all three of the Synoptic Gospels, Matthew, Mark and Luke. All three are also very similar in nature.
This passage is a continuation of Jesus' prophecy of the destruction of Jerusalem, the Temple and the world as we know it. All three of the Synoptic Gospels were written about the same time, around the time the Roman army sacked the city and destroyed the Temple. There is no way of telling for sure in which order the three were written, but there is a good possibility Luke was writing after the destruction of the Temple.
Jesus had predicted, correctly, that destruction. We are much more likely to believe someone's words about the future when what they have predicted in the past has come true.
In this reading Luke is concentrating on what will happen when Jesus returns. The judgment that will take place at the “coming” will be far more important than when the Temple was destroyed. Take into consideration that after the sacking of Jerusalem and the destruction of the Temple, the Christian religion flourished and became the largest religion in the world.
Luke is saying that when the sun, moon and stars begin to fall you will see Jesus coming with “power and great glory”. This is a time to look forward to and the faithful believers will have nothing to fear. “Look up and raise your heads, because your redemption is drawing near”.
Redemption, in English, means “rescue from impending distress” or “the act of being saved from sin”. The Greek noun also means “a releasing for a ransom”. This is the only time in the Gospels that this particular word, Greek or English is used.
Luke's idea is that redemption is granted, not through the death of Christ, but through His return.
He omits the idea that Jesus does not know the day or the hour of the end of time. Luke's Jesus may or may not know when the end of the age will be, but He is just not saying. The Mayans knew for sure it would be December 21st, 2012 and unlike Jesus they told us.
In verse 32 of this reading, Jesus says in our English translated version that “this generation will not pass away.....”. In the original Greek it is written “truly I say to you that may not pass away this generation until all may occur”. Which actually means: “maybe you here will see the end of time, maybe not, I don't know”.
Back in chapter 17, verse 20 of Luke's Gospel, Jesus tells the Pharisees: “The Kingdom of God is not coming with signs to be observed; the Kingdom of God is within you”.
The early believers, especially Paul and Mark believed they would be around for the end of time. We see today that it was not the case. Paul started his letters with: get ready Jesus will be here any day. Then as those days passed he got a little more vague about when the second coming would actually happen.
Lots of the Old Testament prophets wrote about the end of time. Isaiah, Joel Zephaniah, Daniel. They called it the Day of the Lord. Surely when the Roman armies stormed Jerusalem and destroyed the Temple the Jewish people thought the Day of the Lord had arrived.
They probably fainted from fear and foreboding and thought the powers of the heavens had been shaken.
Luke is alive and writing after that time. He knows and we know that was not the end of time. That probably influenced the wording of his gospel as he better understood what Jesus was trying to say.
The vast majority of the people of that time and place, probably 95%, or more, worried about their subsistence living conditions, hand to mouth. Give us today our daily bread. They didn't have the means, the time or the opportunity to live a life of dissipation or drunkenness.
Luke's Jesus is not talking in this reading to them. He's talking to upper echelon, the wealthy, the 5% who He spent a great deal of His time with, not the poor.
The vast majority of our ancestors in the faith were concerned with their present problems, feeding and housing themselves and their families. Peasants fought to survive. The elite fought to make their lives more elite.
Whether rich or poor, Jesus' message is the same: “for it will come upon all who live on the face of the whole earth. Be alert at all times, praying that you may have the strength to escape all these things that will take place, and to stand before the Son of Man”.
Jesus, through Luke, tells us to keep awake and pray for strength. The second coming may very well be frightful, but it is something for we who believe to look forward to. No one, neither Jesus nor the Mayans know when that day will be.
Dear God, help us to live our lives in preparation. Amen.
