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"Salem.....Where a Warm Welcome Awaits You"
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BREAK-IN
(The following sermon was preached by Pastor Barbara Melosh on December 2nd, 2007.)
But about that day and hour no one knows, neither the angels of heaven, nor the Son, but only the Father. For as the days of Noah were, so will be the coming of the Son of Man. For as in those days before the flood they were eating and drinking, marrying and giving in marriage, until the day Noah entered the ark, and they knew nothing until the flood came and swept them all away, so too will be the coming of the Son of Man. 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. But understand this: if the owner of the house had known in what part of the night the thief was coming, he would have stayed awake and would not have let his house be broken into. Therefore you also must be ready, for the Son of Man is coming at an unexpected hour. -- Matthew 24:36-44
This time of year, as earth tilts toward the sun, the light fades earlier every day. You can almost feel the darkness, like an undertow pulling you down, in this season where some suffer from depression and most of us feel a kind of primal edge of uneasiness/dread in the cold and dark. Around us, our culture tries to drive away the darkness with bright Christmas lights and neon, fills the air with tinny Christmas carols and announcements of sales. Christmas parties, shopping, baking, decorating—light, color, food and festivity to dispel the gloom of these long December nights. Meanwhile, the church year leads us directly into that darkness. This time of year, maybe more than any other, our worship challenges the world around us—even as that world, our own everyday world, is already celebrating the feast we call our own. In Advent, we feel the distance between that everyday world and the strange world of the Bible—and more than that, even, the distance between the world we know, and the world to come. Advent means “coming,” and in this season we wait in the dark for the One who is to come. We’re not waiting for a baby in a manger—that baby was born, grew up, and died on a cross, two thousand years ago. We’re waiting for Christ to come again. We wait in darkness and light one candle, and then another, and another, and another, these four weeks of Advent. In Advent darkness, we come face to face with who we are, and who God is. Advent brings us deep into the darkness of our world, a world of war and violence. It brings us deep into our own darkness, our own violence and anger, our grief, our bitterness and loneliness and need. We are a waiting people, and, at times, we are fearful and anxious people. But the gospel of Jesus Christ for us today is a gospel that calls us to another kind of waiting—to a waiting full of anticipation, a waiting filled with the urgency of God’s purpose and the power of God’s love. A waiting in the darkness like a bulb buried in the dark earth and packed with life, germinating in the dark that it needs for growth, and being prepared to send its shoots into the light. So it is a waiting that calls us to energy and preparation and anticipation for the new life ahead. “Wake up.” That is the message of holy scripture for us today. In the gospel, Jesus wakes us up with images of transformation—of God’s unexpected appearance, not in some impossibly remote end-time, but in the midst of everyday life—while we, like the people of Noah’s time, are eating and drinking and marrying. While we’re on the job or preparing food. Pay attention, he says. I’m coming like a thief in the night, when you’re asleep and your guard is down. The kingdom of God will come with the suddenness of catastrophe, like those moments that split your life into “before” and “after”, when whatever you called your ordinary life is smashed to pieces. Footsteps behind you in the night, the phone ringing at 2:00 in the morning, a crushing pain in your chest and then darkness. A winter’s night sleep, awaking to shattering glass and the slam of your heart. And Jesus is telling us this is how he’ll come back. Like a thief in the night—an unexpected intruder, without an appointment. What’s up with that? Well, maybe one thing is that if he tried to make an appointment, we’d be full of excuses. “…hmm, let me see,” as we flip through our date-books. “Next week I’m totally booked. Three weeks from now…I’m free now, but I can’t really commit; there’s a lot going on and something else will probably come up.” And then, too, if we did know when Jesus was coming, maybe it wouldn’t be good for us. Something like that was going on with some of the churches that Paul planted. In the first few years after Jesus died, many people thought he was coming back soon. He had said so himself, after all, that some in that generation would not see death before he came back. The result was that some people who believed that got lazy. Didn’t take care of business here on earth, since they thought they were going to leave it behind soon for God’s kingdom. On the other side of it, two thousand years later, maybe some of us are dealing with the opposite problem. We’ve been waiting so long that we don’t really believe that Jesus is coming back, or at least we aren’t living like we believe it. For some people in our world, that means living just for the moment and just for our own purposes—our pleasures, our accomplishments, our family and the tight circle of people closest to us. For others, maybe some of us here, it means living in the darkness of limited expectations and diminished hopes, discouraged or disapproving about what’s happened to our neighborhood or country or world, and convinced that the best things in our lives have already happened. In the dark so long, that we can’t even imagine the light any more. But God is with us already in that darkness—in the darkness of our own faltering hopes, our own sin. In the darkness, we’re being prepared. In this darkness, God uses our own vulnerability to draw us to God’s own heart. In our own darkness and emptiness, the Spirit rushes in, filling us with God’s own longing for peace and justice and reconciliation. And in that darkness, Jesus comes to us like a thief in the night, when our guard is down, and we can’t lock him out. He’s breaking in to take away all our despair, all our grief, all our fear, all our sin. He’s the light, breaking in to scatter our darkness. Dietrich Bonhoeffer, whose courageous witness against Hitler cost him his life, wrote a letter from prison before Christmas 1943, in which he said, "Life in a prison cell reminds me a great deal of Advent. One waits and hopes and putters around but in the end what we do is of little consequence. The door is shut, and it can only be opened from the outside." Jesus breaks in, to set us free. So come to the table as a free people, walking in the light. Come to the table, to stand in the light of God. |
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