November 29 Advent I
For the past three or so years wild tulips have fascinated me. We are all familiar with domesticated tulips, but they are so hard to grow; they are to the gardening world what grocery store turkeys are to food: bred so much for looks that they cannot naturally reproduce or, in the case of those turkeys, even walk. Domesticated tulips bloom the first year in those flashy colors, and then occasionally come back the second year, looking much the worse for wear. If you want domesticated tulips and their bright colors, you are going to be buying and planting them each fall.
But wild tulips are different. They are not as gaudy; they come back year after year, and are even known to multiply. The blooms don’t look very much like the tulips with which we are familiar, but they so far seem to be reliable in my garden.
The other thing in my garden I have been trying to concentrate more on this year is mulch. For the last two years I did nothing about mulching the garden, but this year was different. I have already got about 70% of it mulched, and I have a few bags waiting for a freeze to kill all the annuals so that I can mulch in those areas as well.
These two items—wild tulips and mulch—found their intersection this past week when I noticed that the leaves of my spring-blooming wild tulips were already about six inches high in my garden. For daffodils I expect it. But for tulips it is way too early, and I realized that they were trying to do the same thing that my blueberries did a week ago, and that is: bloom. And we all know that we don’t want it happening now.
I kept telling myself that if only I had put some mulch over the area where the tulips are growing and the sun is shining, then the warmth might not have gotten to them and they would still be in the ground. What those tulips really needed was some insulation to hide them.
Perhaps you have had similarly strange things happening in your gardens this fall. We see these plants growing and we want to stop it, push them back into the earth for their proper time, and insulate them from outside forces that cause them to show up when they ought not.
Sound familiar even if you don’t garden? Well, it is the recipe for how we treat so much of life. Push the things we do not want to see back into the dark, insulate them, or more likely insulate ourselves from what we don’t want to see and experience. If it doesn’t fit our plan on how things ought to look or act, then we’ve got to find a way to hide it, stop it, or delay it.
That desire on our part to insulate ourselves from the parts of life we do not like—and God’s desire to be there just the same—is at the heart of the lesson from today’s gospel. Even with all of its talk about the signs of sun and moon and natural phenomena, I don’t think that the writer of the gospel is trying to scare us. No, the writer is saying that so many of the things that we find disturbing are closely associated with the presence of the kingdom of God. In fact, the disturbance might be a requirement for the viewing of the kingdom.
Read the lesson carefully. When people see that which is fearful and foreboding, then they will see the Son of Man coming with power and great glory. When people see the fig tree coming alive (sort of like those wild tulips in my yard that I cannot stop or insulate well enough), it is a sign that the kingdom of God is near and can’t be stopped. And in yet another example, when we have partied too much and want a dark place to sleep, day shows up as it always does, our interests aside. In the midst of all that we want to avoid, God is present.
This desire of ours to insulate ourselves from the realities of life is one of the reasons that we as the human race got ourselves in so much trouble financially and spiritually during the last few years. It is why all those prosperity gospel churches did so well when the economy was growing, but have so little to say when times are tough. And why so much of the church’s attempt to run from the realities of life in the 21st century will ultimately prove so futile.
As a society we wanted to insulate ourselves from the humdrum of daily life and the self-perceived shame of not being able to keep up with everyone else who seemed so prosperous, so we spent huge amounts of money we did not have in order to insulate ourselves from feelings of inadequacy. We turned a blind eye to the poor and struggling. We have used natural resources to make ourselves feel comfortable and privileged at the expense of the earth itself. And as the church universal, we by and large have not wanted to face the reality of issues such as divorce and the equality of women and offspring who might want to live their lives with someone of the same sex, so we set up boundaries beyond which the church would not look. At the same time the Jesus of the gospels is reminding us that closing our eyes to the difficult and demanding signs around us does not prevent the kingdom of God from coming in. Like a plant that blooms without our encouragement, or daybreak that shows up whether our headache-filled, light-sensitive selves want it or not, the kingdom is going to show up.
That ultimately turns out to be the good news this Advent. God in the form of the Christ is going to be among us whether we are ready or not, whether we want it or not, whether we can see the signs or not. If we want to see the power of God’s unconditional love, simply take a look at that which scares us the most, our own modern day equivalents of signs in the sky and the shaking of the very heavens of our own lives. There will be the Son of Man standing in judgment, not in judgment of others, but in judgment of us, giving us the example of how to die to that which is less than love and live again into that which is ultimate love. That is what the church, when it is at its best and when it sees clearly, calls us to do.
It is amazing where the Christ will be found. This Advent, don’t look toward the end of the world so much as in the quirky, sometimes frightening places in our own lives. How, for example, is the Christ in the political opponent, in the person we want our children to avoid on the street, in our own faces in the mirror when we have so little trust in our own worthiness? To see Christ in such places, indeed to wait in expectation that Christ will eventually be found in all such places, is to live into an Advent that focuses a lot more on Incarnation and a lot less on what I hear so much of these days, that we are getting ready for a Christmas that “is for children.” Banish that thought these next four weeks. Banish safety and the banal.
Instead, look for something unfamiliar, uncomforting, unusual. Look for something that is scary. Then wait for the risen Christ to appear in it midst, coming with power, as Jesus tells us. Wait for the kingdom of God to become real in whatever places we find ourselves. When it does arrive, we will understand that God will not be stopped or trumped by any human invention. And when we know that, we’ll finally understand what the good news really means. Amen.