Sermon by:
The Rev. Pamela Dolan
“Prophets, Presence, and the Promise of Truth“
Dec 1, 2024

“Be on guard so that your hearts are not weighed down with dissipation and drunkenness and the worries of this life, and that day catch you unexpectedly, like a trap.”

Those of us who are prone to anxiety anyway probably don’t much like to hear words like this coming from Jesus. Aren’t we all on edge enough these days without our actual Lord and Savior telling us that we’d better get busy and do something before the other shoe drops, because the other shoe is going to drop, and boy then will you be sorry.

And yet. And yet one of my favorite definitions of grace is that it is the divine reassurance that, no matter what, the other shoe we’re all dreading so much isn’t going to drop. In God’s gracious kingdom, in the Beloved Community, if you will, nobody is going to pull the rug out from under you or catch you out for not living up to their expectations. Grace is about letting go and letting God, about getting out of our own way so that we can have a flourishing, intimate relationship with the God who made us and who loves us beyond measure.

So, with that as my bedrock understanding of God, I simply must regard today’s Gospel text with a critical eye and a curious heart and ask, so if Jesus isn’t saying, “Look out and get busy before you get in big trouble!” then what is he saying, exactly?

Let’s start by considering the season we’re in, the season of Advent, the very beginning of the church year. In the Godly Play stories we tell during Advent, the first Sunday always focuses on the prophets. Above all, prophets are truth tellers. They see the world as it really is, and they also see the gaping distance between how it really is and how God intends it to be. That’s why the prophets may sometimes seem a little grumpy or out of sorts. They are the ones who have the unhappy task of telling the inconvenient truths that a lot of people, especially people in power, just don’t want to hear. 

Year after year, Advent begins with voice of a prophet, meaning that one of the themes of Advent is always the promise of truth. Truth is what we can expect from the prophets, and truth is what we can expect from Jesus. In today’s Gospel, one of the things Jesus is doing is very truthfully telling us that the changes that are coming into the world are not going to be easy. Before the coming of the Beloved Community, that time when all things will be on earth as they are in heaven, before the part where “truth and righteousness” have their way with the world, before our redemption draws near, there will be things that many of us will find unsettling, if not downright terrifying. We might wish for Jesus to be a little less of a truth-teller about all this, but then he wouldn’t be Jesus.

There’s a parable in the middle of this Gospel passage, a parable so brief that you’ll miss it if you blink. Jesus asks us to “behold the fig tree,” and then the fig tree in this parable becomes a stand-in for all trees, indeed for all Creation. The followers of Jesus lived in a world where everyone knew how to look at the natural world and read its signs, whether you were a fisherman who had to know how to read the sea before setting out on a voyage or a farmer who had to know to read the skies and the soil before planting or harvesting. Creation is a truth teller, just like Jesus and just like the prophets. And so, in the language of parable, when Jesus tells us to look at the fig tree, it is a shorthand way of saying “look at the world” and see the world as it really is, beautiful and terrible, and read the signs it is giving you.

You’ve probably all heard me talk before about how far from nature most of us live, with our climate-controlled homes and supermarket food and cars and planes that speed us along at a pace unknown in all human history. This isn’t our fault, as individuals, it’s simply the world we were born into. But because of this distance, we’ve also become mostly rather inept at reading nature’s signs, at least without the help of the weather channel or an app on our phone.

The parable of the fig tree takes on a special meaning in our day and age, because we’re not only distanced and insulated from nature and the weather, but we are also distanced and insulated from so much of life. We can (and in so many ways we do) live in an artificial reality, a carefully controlled and curated bubble that only lets in the news and views and opinions that we want to hear.

While our particular temptation may not be to “dissipation and drunkenness,” most of us can probably think of other ways that we choose to check out and not be fully present to the world around us, or even to our own lives.

If we don’t want to think about climate change, or what’s happening in Gaza, we can change the channel. If a point of view of conversation makes us uncomfortable, we can unfriend people, ghost family members, and opt out of community gatherings. Even worrying about things can become just another anaesthetizing distraction if the worry paralyzes us instead of leading to action.

And all of that, I think, all the worry and preoccupation, as well as all the distraction and dissipation and opting out, is what Jesus is warning us against. Jesus is warning us again living half a life, or a life of half-truths, because that is the opposite of the abundant life that God wants for us.

The truth about being present, being fully alive, is that you don’t get to pick and choose. We can’t check out during the tough times and then be fully present for the fun stuff. (Some of you who are parents will know what I mean.) Presence doesn’t work that way. Life doesn’t work that way. In fact, we may need to be more present when things are difficult. Talking about all these difficult things that are going to happen, the things that will cause people to “faint from fear and foreboding, Jesus says: “Now when these things begin to take place stand up and raise your heads, because your redemption is drawing near.”

“Stand up and raise your heads.” Don’t shrink back, don’t hide in work or worry or the pursuit of pleasure. Stand up and be counted. The world needs you now—your family, your friends, your community, your church. Your presence matters.

So, let’s return to the admonitions that Jesus gives us to “be on guard” and “be alert,” the admonitions that to the anxious among us can sound like a call to hypervigilance. What if instead of hearing these as a warning that we’d better get our act together before it’s too late, we took them as an invitation to be present, to live fully and whole-heartedly, with our eyes and hearts and minds open and curious and awake, regardless of what seems to be crashing down around us.

Jesus is asking us to pay attention to our lives–our whole lives–and come to grips with certain truths, even if they’re difficult. Looked at in this way, today’s passage becomes very much about God’s love for us, love that is too all-encompassing and absolute to allow for any dishonesty or sugar-coating. As one of my old mentors used to say, God loves us unconditionally, just as we are, and God also loves us too much to leave just us as we are. Advent is a time to embrace that truth, to open our eyes and behold God’s redeeming work in the world, and then to stand up and raise our heads, because we know that our redemption is drawing near.

In that spirit, I’ll close with some words from Kate Bowler, who authored the curriculum we’ll be using this Advent, called The Weary World Rejoices. This is from her poem-prayer, “A Blessing for Beginning Again in Advent.” She writes:

“Could this be the Advent when we notice
the inbreaking of your coming promises?
Promises full of blessing: of truth so clear, so bright
that every shadowy lie must flee away.
Of compassion so deep, so strong
that everyone is encircled in its embrace.
May this Advent be the new beginning,
as we learn to live by the light
of your coming promises.”
Amen.