Jeremiah 33:14-16; Luke 21:25-28

“There will be signs in the sun, moon, and stars, distress among nations, roaring of the sea and the waves. People will faint from fear of what is coming upon the world, for the powers will be shaken. Then they will see ‘the Son of Man coming in a cloud’ with power and great glory. Now when these things begin to take place, stand up and raise your heads, because your redemption is drawing near.”

On the First Sunday of Advent, Jesus always gets weird, not just because he talks apocalyptic signs in sun, moon, and stars, but because Jesus speaks of redemption — cataclysmic, world-shaking interventionist, God-wrought redemption.

You like it when Jesus talks redemption? The last great Catholic theologian, Flannery O’Connor, had her anti-preacher famously say, “Any man with a good car don’t need redemption.” How expensive was the car that brought you here?

June 1984, my very first Sunday in Duke Chapel. Durham was doing its seasonal nosedive into draught, turning West Campus into the Sahara. So in the Prayer of Intercession, I pray for rain.

“Lord, we beseech thee, send us rain. We promise to be good if you’ll send us rain. Please, make it rain.”

So this professor accosts me after service. “Praying for rain? Duke Chapel is a sophisticated, thoughtful, university church!” Harrumph.

My second Sunday in a sophisticated, thoughtful, university church, the gospel was Jesus feeding the multitudes with a few loaves and fish. Afterward, an earnest Sophomore jumped me, “How can you preach on hunger without once urging us to organize to fix the problem of hunger? That was irresponsible!” A Sophomore calling me irresponsible.

“The gospel was about Jesus, not better food distribution. If you know how to ‘fix world hunger’ why are you wasting time here in church?”

Thus I was unsurprised when, in a survey of what you expect from my sermons you said, “I want a sermon that reminds me of my Christian responsibility and then motivates me to use my talents to respond to the needs of the world.”

OK. You asked for it. Write this down. Get that tiny golf pencil from the pew rack and write this down! Church, this week you must do something about your sexism, racism, classism, ageism, and ethnocentrism. Stop using Styrofoam, go vegan, gluten-free, eat locally, think globally. If you want peace work for justice, fight against gentrification, don’t drink so much, don’t give so little, practice civility, mindfulness, inclusiveness, take precautions on dates! Keep Sabbath, breathe deeply, live simply, practice diversity, perform random acts of kindness. You drink too much!

Don’t you give me that look when I’m in the midst of moralizing! Do a good deed daily, first be sure you’re right, then go ahead, love your neighbor as yourself, it’s up to you to do right or right won’t be done, you are the hope of tomorrow, you can do anything you set your mind to. You drink too much!

Notice anything missing?

God.

Come back next Sunday; I’ll give you another list. You are responsible, sensitive, caring, compassionate, liberal, open-minded, culturally diverse, gluten-free, mindful people who have your Master’s degrees — otherwise you wouldn’t be coming to this church. Christianity is a kind of primitive, Jewish technique for motivating responsible people (like us) to do what we need to do to save ourselves by ourselves.

You think you are a good person who is making progress. Pelagians come to church for moral fine-tuning, not redemption. A bit of a spiritual boost, not the Son of Man rending the heavens and coming down to rip the cozy arrangements we have made with the status quo. We’re looking for gentle confirmation of our better angels, not God-wrought, world-disrupting redemption.

Sorry. It’s the First Sunday of Advent and (did you notice?) none of today’s texts are about you. There’s nothing in any of today’s scriptures for you to think, feel, or do.

I know that makes you uncomfortable.

Advent delights in rubbing our noses in scripture that makes nervous people like us who have advanced degrees and drive Volvos and shop at Whole Foods and eat kale. Relax. Advent doesn’t apply to you. Advent is for other people, people who can’t save themselves, people who don’t even have the boots to pull themselves up by their bootstraps, those who find the political, economic deck stacked against them, people who’ve got no hope… but God.

I trusted you! You told me you were progressive, enlightened people making moral progress, getting your act together, monitoring your gluten intake and your drinking. And then just a couple of Advents ago, you snuck into a dark booth, closed the curtain and, when nobody was looking, you elected a serially adulterous, casino-owning, prevaricating…..!

I don’t think I’ll ever trust you again with the fate of the whole world.

Oh, we have good intentions. We get organized, take action, vote, send troops to the border to protect us from pregnant women….and end up putting more of our fellow citizens in jail than any country in the world.

All we wanted to do was to provide security for our families,… and thereby created the most violent country in the world. We wanted privacy, and got loneliness. Fashioning freedom, we unintentionally enshrined inequity.

Just the sort of people who, one Friday afternoon – democracy in action, the power to the people, church and state cooperating, biblical fidelity, making Judea great again – just happened to torture God’s Son to death on a cross.

A sermon is not about you. A sermon is about God. When we read and then preach scripture, we pray for the guts to ask dangerous, but potentially redemptive questions: Who is God? What’s God up to, now? How can we, hitch on to what God is doing?

You said you sincerely wanted to do better, said that you craved my sanctimonious advice on how you could set yourself, and the world, aright. Then you went and messed everything up by being… human, finite, mortal, sinful, just the sort of reprobates Jesus loves to redeem.

Wherein is our redemption if it’s not in ourselves? All of this morning’s scripture has a theme: God is coming. Or as we say it in churchspeak: Advent.

Though time again we have shown our inability to go toward God, good news: God is moving toward us.

We’ve got a God who loves to redeem the worst of times into God’s good time. Jeremiah says that God has given up waiting for us to reform our politics. God’s going to send us a new King of David President who will “execute judgment and righteousness in the land” since we can’t. Jesus foretells, “signs in the sun, the moon, and the stars, and on the earth distress among nations confused by the roaring of the sea and the waves….[by which we will see] ‘the Son of Man coming… with power and great glory…. your redemption is drawing near.”

I personally believe that we are living in one of the saddest seasons for American democracy. Some of it is not Donald Trump’s fault. But how do I know what time it is? With a 3 redemptive God, you never know if it’s Good Friday or Easter. As Jesus says in today’s gospel, when the sky turns dark and the stars fall (bad news), look up! Your redemption is drawing nigh.

Good news or bad? I guess it depends on how scared you are of the possibility of a living, active, interventionist, judging, creating, destroying, loving ….God.

Or maybe good news/bad news depends on how badly you need a God who does for you what you can’t do for yourself.

The highlight of worship, in my thousand Sundays in Duke Chapel, was not my sermon, of course. It was communion, the Eucharist, when I got to watch you come forward and held out your empty hands, just like little children, to receive the mystery of the Body and the Blood of Christ.

I know you have achieved much, are good at knowing and fixing things. But in that potentially redemptive moment, when you held out your empty hands, needy, unselfconsciously as a little child, like a beggar, like you just couldn’t go on without being given a gift that you couldn’t earn, well, that was as good as it gets in this church. You at your most truthful, God at God’s most redemptive.

It’s Advent. Keep your eye on the sky. Get ready to be redeemed, like it or not.