24th Sunday after Pentecost

Advent is coming. And that means that we start hearing, as we heard this morning, a lot of readings about the coming of the Day of the Lord, readings about the coming of that day when, as the prophet Malachi puts it, "the arrogant and the evil will become stubble, and the righteous will break loose like calves released from the stall." Advent is coming.

Not long ago, I saw the old familiar sign on a bus stop bench. It was painted years ago, and it's faded now, but it still proclaims, "Jesus is coming soon."

I wonder. I wonder what that means.

What is "soon"? Next week? The week after that? Certainly before the end of the year? If "soon" doesn't mean at least before the year 2002, then what on earth or in heaven does the word "soon" mean? How soon will these things happen, all these things that Malachi and Jesus say will happen: temples crashing and insurrections taking place and the evil being punished and the good rewarded?

"What is time?" St. Augustine asks. "Who can explain it? Who can comprehend time, so as to express it in a word? Yet, in conversation, what do we talk about more knowingly than time? Surely we understand it when we talk about it. What, then, is time? If no one asks me, I know what time is," says Augustine. "But if I want to explain it to someone who does ask me, I do not know." (Confessions, Book xi, chapter 14)

There was a television movie several years ago called, "The Day After." It was about life in Kansas the day after Kansas had been hit with a nuclear bomb. But the movie began with the day before.

What was time on the day before? It was all anticipation, expectation. Some spent the day admiring the great stones of the temple, some wondering where to go to dinner, others standing in checkout lines at Walmart or Toys R Us, another planning an interview for the next day. Like the days of Noah before the Flood, "people eating and drinking, marrying and giving in marriage." All expectation.

Is that what time is? Expectation? Anticipation?

One of you told me the other day that John Lennon says that time is God's way of making sure that everything doesn't happen all at once, which is perhaps another way of saying that we always live in the Day Before, which is perhaps God's way of reminding us that it is folly to live today in such a way as to take the stones of the temple or life or each other for granted.

With a Big Bang, everything did happen all at once, once upon a time. But now, life is lived in time, in the Day Before. It is lived in expectation, in anticipation of a future we do not know. It cannot be lived any other way. So Jesus says we should "keep awake," for neither we nor Jesus himself knows on what day the Lord will come, unlike the sign on the bench at the bus stop, which seems to know more about Jesus than Jesus himself knew.

But Jesus also says that the time has already arrived, unlike the sign on the bench at the bus stop, which seems to think it's yet to come.

Jesus says that no one knows the time, not even he, but that the kingdom of God has already drawn near. Is this what "soon" means? That the kingdom of God is yet to come, but that it's already here among us? That Jesus is already here? That the opportunity to live as God would live is already ours?

As we already heard this morning, there were some "born again" Christians in Thessalonika who had time on their hands, some Christians who did not know what to do with the time they had been given, some Christians who apparently decided that since Jesus was coming back soon, they didn't have to worry about life in this real world any longer. So they just stopped working. They became idlers, says Paul, truants of time and reality who then had time to use their time minding everybody's business but their own. But Paul told them that, in the world of time, if they won't work, they won't eat, whether Jesus is coming or not.

"Always remember that this is the hour of crisis," Paul says elsewhere. (Romans 13) "This time, not some time later, is the hour of judgment, the critical time. It is far on in the night; day is near.... Let us therefore throw off the deeds of darkness and put on the armour of light.... Let Christ Jesus himself be the armour that you wear. Give your unspiritual nature no opportunity to satisfy its desires.... Instead, remember the debt of love you owe one another, [regardless of time]." Either before that day, or after.

"Love," says Mother Teresa, "is a fruit in season at all times and within reach of every hand." Love can be done at any time. That's true as long as time is. Can love be done tomorrow? Can justice be sought and mercy be done tomorrow. Sure, if there is still time then. But more certainly, it can be done right now, because now there certainly is still time.

Time is what gives us hope. The future is the hope of the present, the hope that it could be soon, tomorrow, today, maybe even right now, when the judgment of God about us and our lives intersects with our own judgment about ourselves and our lives, the hope that there is still time, which is any time, when we can decide to live in this world and time the life God has given us to live.

Advent, which is coming soon, is about the "yet-to-comeness" of life and about the necessity for decision. It is about the intersection of your own judgment about life with God's judgment about life. Advent is about your necessity to decide how you're going to live your life in time in the only time and world God has given you to live it in.

Who knows when or where that intersection, that crisis, that time, is? Or was? Or will be? All we really know is that right now we live in the Day Before. The Day After is still to be determined. Living in the present means that living in the future is yet to be, and that there is still time for it to be, still time to beat our swords and spears into plowshares and pruning hooks.

Or, put another way, Advent is about being pregnant. And Christmas is about being born. Advent is about the Word of God pregnant in the world, even in a world of crashing temples and World Trade Centers and of wars in Afghanistan.

We know about being pregnant. We know, when pregnant, that we have a choice, which is what life lived in time is all about. We have a choice. There is time, if we wish, to abort the Word and the Hope. And there is also still time to bring the Word and the Hope to birth. Still time to see them born and given a name, still time to beat swords and spears into plowshares and pruning hooks...

...still time to give birth again to God's Word in this given world and time; still time to heal the sick, cleanse lepers, raise the dead; still time to share our food, our clothing, and our money with those who have none; still time to visit those whom no one wants to visit; still time to share time with our children and to tell them we love them...

...still time, in John the Baptist's words, to repent; still time to turn to the babe in the manger and to Christ on the Cross; still time to turn from our desperate notions that we can save ourselves with our money, our intelligence, our bombs and other human devices...

...still time to turn from life lived for self to life lived for others; still time to sell what we have and give to the poor; still time to do for others as we would want them to do for us; still time, in other words, to be the Word of God in this given world and time that Jesus sends us to be.

For although the Word and the Hope was born and made flesh years ago, the Word and the Hope is ever seeking to be born again and again and again. And Christmas is about giving birth and about naming what is born.

Christmas is about the birth of the Word and Hope of God, and there are 37 living days left before Christmas. And the anticipated, expected life of the Word promises to make a difference in this given world again, if we will allow him to be born in this given world again.

"Jesus is coming soon." I wonder. I wonder in just what sense that is true? The sign is faded now. And I wonder if the rainbow, the sign God gave Noah, isn't already the only sign we're ever going to get, and the only sign we need, the sign that God isn't finished with the disaster which human history is and is making a new covenant of grace and mercy.

The rainbow is faded now, but its promise is still here, the promise of a judgment of grace. The promise of the judgment of Jesus. Isn't that it? The promise and the judgment that the kingdom has already drawn near.

The promise of the Cross, Jesus' judgment of how to live his own life as it intersected with God's judgment about life, is Jesus' judgment for us. And it is the only sign we will ever get, because it's the only sign we will ever need. And like the rainbow God gave Noah, the Cross stands eternally over the given world, past, present, and future.

It is coming soon. It's already here. It was already here in the days of Noah. The only question is us, which is the question of time, the question of intersection for us, the question of the intersection of our lives with life as God gives it to us to live in time. Will we make the sign and the promise our own in time?

There is time, and yet no one knows the time. That's what Advent, and now, are all about.

In the Name of God, Father, Son, and Holy Spirit. Amen.