Sermon: Heads Held High

Luke 21:25-36

Heads Held High

James Sledge                                                               November 29, 2015 – Advent 1

What are the things that weigh heavily on you, that cause you to lose sleep at night? I’ve read several articles talking about a growing fear of terrorist attacks among Americans. And we’ve all seen this fear being aimed at Muslims.

Perhaps your worries are more immediate, financial concerns. The economy is better than it was a few years ago, but not for everyone. And in a region with the economy so tied to the federal government, and with a largely dysfunctional Congress, who knows when another sequester or other budget mess might arrive.

Or maybe you’re concerned about getting into the college of your choice, graduating from school, or getting a decent job when you do. What will you do if you don’t get in? Or what if that job you’re hoping for doesn’t pan out? Or what if it doesn’t pay enough to live on?

Perhaps your worries and anxieties are of an entirely different sort. Health, relationships, retirement, the environment, and many more possibilities can leave people feeling anxious, burdened, and weighed down.

But now comes the Christmas season, a time of year that is supposed to fill us with joy and good cheer. Bathed in Christmas lights and feasting on a steady diet of Christmas music and broadcasts of It’s a Wonderful Life, A Charlie Brown Christmas, and Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer, we can enjoy a respite from all our worries.

I’m sure this works for some folks, but for a lot of people, the holidays and Christmas season just leaves them feeling more stressed out.

When I lived in Columbus, Ohio, I volunteered and served on the board of a non-profit that worked to help people dealing with mental illness lead productive lives. It was staffed and run by people who themselves were living with various mental illnesses. One happened to be a member of the church I served which is how I got connected with them.

Most every year as the Christmas season approached, the good folks at Partners in Active Living would ask me to do a presentation on faith, mental health, and the holidays. For a lot of clients at Partners, Christmas made them feel worse rather than better. Most were living on limited incomes, and the focus on gifts and buying only reminded them of that. For those dealing with depression, the idea that they were supposed to be joyful and cheerful seemed like added pressure. In addition, long years of struggle with mental illness had often frayed family relationships and caused estrangements from parents, siblings, or children. Christmas could be lonely.

For a lot of the clients at Partners, the difficulties of day to day life were enough to leave them feeling weary and heavily burdened. Christmas sometimes felt like “piling on.”

I was careful never to proselytize when I did my “Christmas and Mental Illness” presentations, but I never pretended to be anything other than a pastor. A lot of clients had religious baggage connected to their mental illness and family estrangements. And so they often wanted to talk about faith with me.

A revelation for me in these discussions was how relieved some were to hear that our culture’s obsession with Christmas was neither biblical nor part of Christian tradition for most of history, and how much some of them preferred Advent to Christmas. In most congregations, people are itching to get to Christmas. I was warned in seminary that if you don’t start singing Christmas carols by the third Sunday in Advent you’re going to get yourself in trouble. But many at Partners would have been happy to stay in Advent.

I think they might have especially liked our gospel reading for the first Sunday in Advent. Actually, the lectionary features something similar every year on Advent 1. There is nothing about angel annunciations, an impending birth, or a manger. Rather there is talk about a very different coming, the coming of the Son of Man in glory, what some label the Second Coming, a day when God will finally set all things right.

When I talked with the people at Partners about Advent and how it wasn’t necessarily about being joyful and cheerful all the time, many of them heard that as good news, even gospel good news. Some of them expressed real relief the first time they heard that Advent isn’t just a run-up to Christmas, but that it proclaims the hope for a day that has not yet arrived. It was a striking thing to see, people responding so joyfully to Advent.

Our Advent gospel reading takes place only days before Jesus’ arrest and execution. He has just told his followers that the magnificent, Jerusalem temple will be destroyed. His disciples want a timetable, but Jesus instead he warns them to ignore those who say they know the time.

When Jesus speaks the verses we hear, he seems to have shifted from talking about the temple’s destruction to speaking of the arrival of God’s new day. He speaks of that day with stock, apocalyptic language taken from the Old Testament. The images are strange and scary, but Jesus says that when we see them, “Stand up and raise your heads, because your redemption is drawing near.”

I’m not sure that cosmic signs in the heavens and distress and confusion among the nations sounds like a good thing to many of us. Sounds like things that frighten us, that keep us up at night and makes the stock market go down. But Jesus seems unworried about such things. The things to guard against, he says, are “dissipation, drunkenness, and the worries of this life.” These will weigh us down, he says.

I think I see the word “dissipation” once every three years when this passage shows up to start Advent. I have to look it up every time. It means debauchery and fits nicely with drunkenness. Add in the worries of this life and you describe some folks’ holiday plans: a lot of stress and a lot of parties and drinking. I thought the parties and drinking were supposed to help let go of the stress and worries, but Jesus lumps them all together.

I think Jesus looks at life differently than modern folks do. For us, life is what we make of it. Hope is about people doing the right thing and fixing things that are wrong. Hope is about achievement and progress and convincing others to see a good way forward. Worry and anxiety creep in when we’re not sure we can do enough, when we fear there are too many scary people in the world or politics who are going to make a huge mess of things.

Jesus knows that life can be hard. He does expect us to do our part, to love neighbor and work for peace and justice. But for Jesus, hope does not lie with human effort and activity. Jesus can hope, and Jesus calls his followers to lift up their heads even when the world seems to be coming apart, because God holds the future, and no one, no force, no amount of evil or foolishness can thwart the future God will bring.

Jesus can speak of hope and salvation even as he prepares to go to his own death because he knows with certainty that the future belongs to God. So too, Martin Luther King, Jr. could carry on in the face of opposition and threats without succumbing to worry or fear because by faith he knew, “The arc of the moral universe is long, but it bends toward justice.”

What gives you hope? What lifts off the weight of all that worries and frightens and burdens you, allowing you to hold your head high even in the face of terror, economic uncertainty, or the pressures of an overly competitive, overly consumerist, overly fear driven society? For me it is a faith sure that the days are surely coming when nations shall beat their swords into plowshares and not learn war any more; a faith sure that in life and death,  I – and every one of you – belong to God; a faith sure that the future rests securely in the hands of the loving God we meet and know in the person of Jesus.

Thanks be to God!