Samantha Christopher | December 3, 2023

Drop down, ye heavens, from above, and let the skies pour down righteousness.

We made it, folks. The beginning of a new church year. The church has been decorated for Advent and Christmas, and if your home is anything like mine, your living room is shining with the twinkling brilliance of your Christmas tree. For the past four weeks, we’ve been hearing increasingly apocalyptic Gospel readings, preparing us for the readings in Advent—readings of destruction and woe, of angels and fig trees, of an impoverished peasant woman, of a pregnancy begun out of wedlock.

And yet, this new year feels rather anticlimactic. There’s no ball drop in Times Square, no singing of Auld Lang Syne. It comes quietly, without so much as a whisper. You won’t find Advent sales at your local Toyota dealership or advertisements for an Advent turkey in your Stop ‘n Shop circulator. Instead, you find the dreary chill of a rainy Sunday morning—the stillness that comes from arriving to church in time for a 7:45 service, the roads empty, the soft patter of rain on the roof.

And then everything shifts. In our readings today we hear of a terrifying event—the sun and moon blotted out, stars falling out of the sky, God tearing open the heavens and coming down to earth. “O that you would tear open the heavens and come down, so that the mountains would quake at your presence.” (Isa 64:1) Terror and destruction are the order of the day, beyond our wildest imagination. Unless of course, you’ve seen my problematic favorite film, the 2014 flop Left Behind starring Nicholas Cage. It’s magnificently horrible. 0% on Rotten Tomatoes horrible.

These readings are powerful and evocative. They stir up deep primal fears—I don’t know if any of you have seen a tornado, but I imagine the Isaiah passage to be something like that—the sky turning sickly green as the clouds begin to swirl and the hook of the funnel forms below the cloud. These lessons, the apocalyptic warnings of Jesus can be found throughout the Gospels, and in fact if you listen closely to the Gospel you can hear echoes of some other parables we’ve heard in recent weeks. The apocalypse seems to be at our heels and there is nothing we can do about it. And the apocalypse will only happen after suffering, as Jesus says in Mark.

Advent has traditionally been the time for the church to turn its attention to the end of the world, the Second Coming of Christ, and the general judgement, or to put it more succinctly: Death, Judgement, Heaven, Hell. The four last things. Cheery, aren’t they? Each of the last things, Death, Judgement, Heaven, and Hell align with the four Sundays in Advent. I will leave it up to you to interpret what this year’s serendipitous combination of Advent IV (Hell) and Christmas Eve could possibly mean.

But these four last things, Death, Judgement, Heaven, and Hell are a succinct way to think about what Advent demands of us. In a season marked more by Christmas lights and hot chocolate, it can be bleak to meditate on the end of the world. I’ll be the first to admit that. Advent, however, is not just about a cosmic or historical apocalypse, but about our very lives. While it appears that the end of days has not yet come on Earth, it has certainly come for every human who has lived since Jesus’ death and resurrection, and it will come for everyone who lives before his coming again. We do not know when death will come for us. But neither can we wait until death knocks on our door to be in right relationship with our loved ones, with our neighbors, and with ourselves. Death is too late.

Advent is a time for taking stock, of reconciling ourselves with those who we have harmed throughout the year, and truly recognizing the ways we have harmed ourselves. But the beauty of Advent as our Gospel points out to us today, is that Christ is there. “Jesus said, ‘In those days, after that suffering…they will see ‘the Son of Man coming in clouds’ with great power and glory.” This First Sunday of Advent is not about Christ’s first coming in the manger, but it is about our hope against hope that God is with us. 

God moves in and through difficult situations and encounters us in our grief and pain. It is Jesus who stands at the door of the grave and knocks, knocks us awake when we were dead to sin, knocks and liberates the captives from their prison, knocks and raises us to new life in him. In the darkness and despair of our lives, it is Christ who stands silently with us, bearing our pain and sorrows and sharing in our grief. It is Jesus, the forsaken, abandoned, and crucified in-breaking of God into our world who holds us when we are forsaken and abandoned.  We cling to that hope as a child clings to their parent, putting the fulness of our trust and devotion to God on display as we cry out for his second coming.

And it is on that day of shining radiance and thunderous glory when “God will wipe away every tear from [our] eyes, and death shall be no more, neither shall there be mourning nor crying nor pain any more for the former things have passed away” (Rev. 21:4).

Amen.