Preparing for the Coming of Jesus

The Rev. Sara Warfield

Scripture: Matthew 3:1-12

Happy New Year! Yes, it’s the beginning of the new church year—the new liturgical year. When we move from the long stretch of Ordinary Time into Advent, when our schedule of scripture readings sets down the gospel Luke, which we’ve been hearing over the past year, and picks up the gospel of Matthew. When the journey from Jesus’ birth to death to resurrection to the founding and continued life of the Church begins.

But this new year doesn’t start with champagne and kisses and fireworks. This new year starts in darkness. In fact, we are approaching the darkest time of the year—when our part of the planet is tipped furthest away from the sun, when we’re eating our breakfast before the sun rises and we’re still at work when it’s setting, when the trees are skeletons and the cold rain hangs in the air all day.

Darkness is how we started this worship—these five candles silent until we lit just one of them.

The word Advent means “coming,” so it is a season spent waiting for an arrival. Now there are different kinds of waiting. There’s the waiting my sister and I did when we were kids, propped up on the couch looking out the front window, waiting for Grandma to arrive from Cheyenne to spend Christmas with us. We knew she left her house around 8 so we posted up around 11, craning our necks to see if her Subaru was coming down the street.

There’s also the waiting you do when you’ve had an interview for a job you really want, and it seems like it went pretty well, but now you’re picking up your phone every 20 seconds just in case you missed it ringing.

And then there’s the waiting you do at the bedside of a dying loved one. The confusing mix of despair with the relief that soon their long suffering will soon be over.

This season of Advent, we are invited into all those different kinds of waiting. To stave off our need for knowing, our need for certainty, and to embrace the in-between time, the liminal space, the darkness through which we so far only have one candle to navigate. The candle of hope.

Matthew was likely navigating a similar darkness when he wrote his gospel. In 69 CE, the Romans had laid siege to Jerusalem where the Jewish people had been rebelling against Roman rule for three years. The people inside the city starved and succumbed to spreading illness. Eventually, the Romans broke through and, though they spared much of the city, they made it a point to raze the temple, the beating heart of the Jewish faith.

Now Matthew was a Jew. Also a follower of Jesus but still very anchored to his Jewish faith and culture—just as Jesus was. So it’s likely that Matthew would have been devastated by the destruction of the temple, by the violence and cruelty of the Romans against his people. It is likely that he wrote his account of Jesus not long after that destruction—but before he knew what would come next for his people, Jewish and Christian. He was writing in the in-between time, the liminal space, the darkness.

Do you know what genre of writing tends to pop up during such times? Times of destruction and crisis and uncertainty. Apocalyptic stories. The book of Daniel was written when the Greek king was threatening to pervert Jewish worship for the sake of power, all while the Jewish leadership were themselves fighting against each other, vying more for power than for faithfulness—making Daniel’s people and their faith vulnerable. The book of Revelation was written by a teacher/prophet named John who had been exiled to the island of Patmos for proclaiming he was a follower of Jesus. He had witnessed his Christian community being cruelly oppressed by the Roman Empire and he was, well, angry about it. And here we have Matthew. Who had just bore witness to the destruction of the temple and much of the holy city.

Daniel imagines a great war between kings that will rescue his faith and people. John of Patmos imagines the destruction of the world ending with the coming of a new Jerusalem where God comes to dwell among God’s people and wipe every tear from their eyes. And Matthew today has Jesus predicting his return, his arrival, his Advent.

What do they all have in common? Hope.

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Bernard of Clairvaux, the twelfth-century abbot and theologian, described “three Advents.” The first is the Incarnation, the coming of Jesus as a baby into the world. The second I’ll save for a little later. And the third is, and let me teach you a new fancy seminary word: the Parousia, Greek for presence. But we mostly know it as the Second Coming. This is what we hear Jesus describe in today’s gospel:

Then two will be in the field; one will be taken and one will be left. Two women will be grinding meal together; one will be taken and one will be left. Keep awake therefore, for you do not know on what day your Lord is coming.

My fellow former conservative Baptists and evangelicals know the name for what’s happening here: the rapture. The literal taking of people into the sky to be with Jesus. That’s one to anticipate the Second Coming. Oh, and it’s a powerful motivator. Will you be ready when Jesus returns? Will you be one of the chosen?

Honestly, the prospect of not being taken in the rapture terrified me when I was a kid. Up until I went to college, I used to pray to God every night to forgive all of my sins even if I didn’t have any specific sins in mind. I just said “all” to cover my bases. And then I prayed that God put off the rapture until after I graduated high school.

It was like living in a permanent in-between time, a permanent state of anxious waiting. My nightly prayer was a tiny candle of desperate and fearful hope against the prospect of being left behind. Which begs the question: if hope is desperate and fearful, is it really hope?

For some people, the prospect of a literal rapture is genuinely hopeful. They see a broken, cruel world and they await that day when the clouds roll and the trumpets ring out and they are taken away from the suffering of this place in the blink of an eye. The way Daniel and John of Patmos believed that God would swoop in and fix everything in one massive event.

And who knows? Maybe it will happen that way. But I’m not worried about it. Not anymore. If God comes back that way, I now feel confident that love, not reward or punishment, will determine how things unfold. Because that’s how I understand God now: as Love. Which makes hope a lot less desperate and fearful.

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What I’m more interested in is the second Advent Bernard of Clairvaux described, which is the everyday arrival of Jesus into our lives. About that day and hour no one knows. He may arrive in the form of a sad-looking cashier at the grocery store; or in the form of an impatient man grumbling loudly in line at the post office; or in the form of a person wearing a certain red hat—or a frog costume.

Are you awake? Are you ready to meet Jesus in whatever form he appears? Are you prepared to treat him with the care and love that he himself taught you? How do you greet him? How do you make space for him? Perhaps there is a rapture to be had in every encounter you have with yet another form of Jesus that arrives in your life—a way to take up that other person into your purview, to show them kindness and joy or at the very least patience and acknowledgement rather than leaving them behind.

And are you yourself ready to be met? To be greeted? To be cared for? Because you, too, are a form that Jesus takes in this world. We are, each of us, the least of these in some way. We’re all looking for rapture, for hope in the darkness.

Which is why we spend this Advent season waiting with intention, which is to say preparing for the coming of Jesus. We let ourselves get if not comfortable then at least acquainted with the darkness, with others’ suffering—and our own, with others’ neediness—and our own, with others’ vulnerability—and our own.

And instead of dreaming of wars and the end of the world—of all the ways God might swoop in dramatically to fix things—to light our single candle of hope in every encounter we have, giving us just enough light to take another step, and to wait as each week a little more light comes.

Amen.