Luke 21:25-36
“Signs of Hope”
November 28, 2021
“It’s the end of the world as we know it” is the title of a song that was popular about 12 years ago by REM where all forms of annihilation are documented from earthquakes to fires to corrupt governments.
Throughout history there have always been those who believed the end of the world was about to happen. Those living through the Black Plague were convinced that humanity would not survive. Soldiers and civilians who found themselves deep in the first World War that killed 15 million people and wounded 20 million others and where dysentery, typhus and cholera ran rampant thought the end days had arrived. Remember the doom that was foretold and believed by millions of folks that Y2K in the final hours of 1999 would mean the end of civilization?
Some envisioned the end of the world with the attacks in New York and D.C. on September 11, 2001.
It has been pointed out that perhaps the end is always coming toward us in some way, shape or form so that each generation gets some practice with apocalypse before we die. Jesus is saying that here: “Truly I tell you, this generation will not pass away until all things have taken place. Heaven and earth will pass away, but my words will not pass away.” (Lk 21:32-33)
We know that Luke’s Gospel most likely was written sometime in the final decades of the first century.
By that time Jesus had been crucified.
Peter, James, and Paul had all been put to death.
The temple there in Jerusalem had been destroyed.
Nero had severely persecuted the new church.
Mount Vesuvius may also have erupted by that time with 100,000 times more destructive energy than the combined atomic bombs dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki.
Doomsday was a very clear possibility then and here Luke was trying to put down in words the saving power of Jesus for people, who like him, may not have directly experienced these tragedies but likely knew about them.
This same Jesus knew so well about tragedy and still he kept going because the pull of the possibility of the Kingdom of God was stronger than any earthly threat.
Jesus embodied hope.
What does hope look like for us in the midst of a global pandemic that we’ve just learned has yet more mutations in the Omicron variant?
What does it look like with the demise of ecosystems globally?
Where’s the hope in ever greater divides between God’s people?
One writer (Diana Butler Bass) points out that maybe apocalypse is not the right word for what has historically happened and the place we find ourselves now.
Maybe a better word for what is happening throughout our world would be rupture.
With the word rupture we envision a breaking of what was.
But unlike apocalypse in which we see only a complete ending, with rupture we can imagine that what is broken may be able to be made new.
That’s where hope comes in.
Henri Nouwen had a powerful definition for such hope:
“Hope means to keep living amid desperation and to keep humming in the darkness. Hoping is knowing that there is love; it is trust in tomorrow; it is falling asleep and waking again when the sun rises. In the midst of a gale at sea, it is to discover land. In the eyes of another, it is to see that he understands you. As long as there is still hope, there will also be prayer. And God will be holding you in his hands.”
(Henri Nouwen, With Open Hand, 85)
Jesus here in this first Gospel reading of the new Christian year is speaking of the already/not-yet nature of life and that’s the place where hope lives.
We are living in an in-between time knowing that Jesus has already come, and Jesus will come again.
He wants us to know that this life, as hard as it has been around the world over these past 20 months, is a blessing and an opportunity balanced with tremendous challenges and pain and loss.
We may need to retrain ourselves to look for the hope that is at the heart of the Christian message.
As we begin this season of Advent, can we be signs of hope for those on the verge of despair?
Who is the most desperate person in your life right now? What glimmer of hope can we offer them?
Maybe our determination not to look at the world as coming to an end but rather that the breaks in it are our chances to be involved in the mending of them.
All that is broken is not lost.
On the NPR radio program, On Being, host Krista Tippett ends the conversations she has with her guests by asking, “What makes you despair, and where are you finding hope?”
What she has learned is that despair and hope are often two parts of same thing rather than being opposites.
It can be acknowledged that many might think that the human race is heading in the wrong direction but there is also a whole new existence that wants to be born, often finding new and amazing life out of loss.
Yes, there is plenty of dysfunction all around us but so, too, there is research and art and writings and discoveries that give us hope.
Just think of all the new inventions and technologies and medical innovations that have happened in just our lifetimes – including the so-far short life spans of our children.
When we begin to feel that all is lost and that we’ve made a huge mess of creation and life, let us remember that in these ever-shortening days as we approach the official start of winter, that tonight the sun will go down leaving a pervasive darkness.
And then, tomorrow, the sun will come up and we will get to start anew in the light.
Such is the beauty of this Kingdom of God that is bold and bright.
We have a story to tell. It is one of hope.
Hear then the words of the poet Lisel Mueller who came to the U.S. at the age of 15 when she and her family fled the Nazis in Germany in 1939. This is her poem titled simply “Hope:”
It hovers in dark corners
before the lights are turned on,
it shakes sleep from its eyes
and drops from mushroom gills,
it explodes in the starry heads
of dandelions turned sages,
it sticks to the wings of green angels
that sail from the tops of maples.
It sprouts in each occluded eye
of the many-eyed potato,
it lives in each earthworm segment
surviving cruelty,
it is the motion that runs
from the eyes to the tail of a dog,
it is the mouth that inflates the lungs
of the child that has just been born.
It is the singular gift
we cannot destroy in ourselves,
the argument that refutes death,
the genius that invents the future,
all we know of God.
It is the serum which makes us swear
not to betray one another,
it is in this poem, trying to speak.
Amen.