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If you are like me and most other people who live in the US, you have just finished your celebratory Thanksgiving feasting and are probably still eating daily turkey sandwiches. Maybe you went over the river and through the woods to Grandmother's house to do your feasting. Maybe you watched the TV parades, and fell asleep on the sofa during your umpteenth football game of the long weekend. Turkey will do that to you. Maybe you hatched plans for your Christmas visits with those relatives on Thanksgiving Day. Maybe you sat by a fireplace with somebody you love, grateful to God for the goodness in your life. And maybe you, like millions of others, did one more thing that has become synonymous in America with Thanksgiving weekend.
Maybe you went shopping. Did you know that the Friday after Thanksgiving Day is called "Black Friday" by our nation's retailers? That is the day that most of them fervently hope and expect to turn a profit for the fiscal year, so that their ledger ink can symbolically change from red to black for the first time in 2009. In our current worldwide economic distress, we can certainly sympathize with their hope. But the idea that our national day of giving thanks can turn at the stroke of 12:00 into Midnight Madness sales frenzy is a little disturbing.
Mine eyes have seen the glory of hordes of Early Bird Special seekers, noses pressed against the locked automatic doors of the department store, each of them hoping to be one of the first 100 shoppers in order to win the extra 25% discount or to grab the limited edition toy du jour. A couple of them will fall and get trampled when those doors burst open, but the savings are worth it!
These dedicated shoppers are quite a sight, but they will tell you that the Black Friday shopping excursion is necessary if they are going to secure the important holiday gifts for their children. In fact, many very important people are encouraging us to shop, shop, shop during this holiday season; it will do the economy good, and it is our patriotic duty to pull our national retail balance sheet into the black by the last week in November. The Business section of your newspaper bears witness to the dismal retail rebound so far. Your local merchants' hopes, and sometimes their very livelihoods, are pinned now to the coming holiday sales. Who can argue with that? It's the least we can do. What an irresistible emotional permission to go wild at the mall like there's no tomorrow. Come on, Uncle Sam wants you…to go shopping! Buoy the economy.
If you don't, those same important people are telling all of us, then there is a long, flat recession ahead. Doom is coming, and we don't know exactly when. The mortgage crisis of 2008-09 which concerned primarily personal home mortgages is spreading now into commercial mortgages, and the financial result will be even worse for all of us than it has been yet. All the For Sale signs on your street will become Closed signs on the businesses you liked to patronize. Restaurants will disappear. Even national chains will pull back and close in many markets, maybe yours. The locally owned businesses are already almost dead. In our town, a large local shopping center, for years full of beloved and locally owned retail shops, is almost empty now because the developers who live on another continent raised the rent. The locals went under and closed, and the national chains which had been promised in their place never materialized due to the financial crisis of 2008. If you want to shop, you must drive to the other side of town.
Doesn't this scare you? Won't you go out and use your credit card for the sake of all that is holy--saving the very life of America? If you didn't go on Friday, it's not too late, advent has just begun, go now.
All this doom and gloom, and we're just talking about shopping. Many families have lost their homes. Many good workers have lost their jobs. There isn't going to be a Christmas for them, and there wasn't much Thanksgiving, either. The lines at the Soup Kitchen are getting awfully long.
When we watch the evening news we are now hardened to the idea of soldiers dying from explosions of IEDs in Afghanistan, from car bombs in Iraq, from Taliban attacks in the Swat Valley of Pakistan. No biggie. They shoot down helicopters, we take it in stride. News organizations are going to tell us about it every hour on the hour for the entire day's news cycle, or until another six-year-old climbs into a balloon. It's not really news anymore. It's become gossip, shared for hours on end by TV pundits who make their networks a lot of money. The sad fact is, most Americans really don't know very much about the actual truth of what goes on. News organizations are focused now on business profit rather than conveying unbiased information for the public good, in the tradition of Murrow and Cronkite. They do not tell us what is real: they tell us what is popular. They do not bring truth: they hawk propaganda. You might have stopped listening.
You might not even be hearing this sermon today, because you didn't come to church! You stayed home either because you have contracted the H1N1 virus, or because half your church has done so and you don't want to be next. You are waiting for your doctor to allocate a vaccination for you, since you aren't in the first-round high-risk group. You are anointing yourself with hand sanitizer until she does. Okay, are you scared now?
The folks listening to Jesus' sermon, which scholars have named the Temple Sermon because it concerns the destruction of the temple in Jerusalem, were as worked-up about the worries of the day as we are now. In our account from Luke's gospel, people are asking Jesus for signs they can monitor so they'll know when the kingdom of God is close at hand. These folks would have loved to have had Fox and CNN to bring them hour-by-hour info about stock market activity, the US front in Iraq and Afghanistan, and the latest adventures of hot stars. During their period in history, there was a great deal to worry about. All they can do is ask the prophet.
The prophet answers, according to Luke: there are a lot of things that are not signs of the kingdom--they are just things that are going to happen, and they aren't very good things, but they don't portend the coming of the Kingdom. Most ancient peoples took unusual cosmic events as indicators and harbingers of some big human event. Jesus tells his listeners that these things will happen, but that they aren't a big deal, either. The only sign that really tells you God's Kingdom is coming is the Son of Man descending from heaven on a cloud. When you see that, get ready.
This is a very interesting part of Luke, because the author of Luke-Acts set down his gospel account several decades after the death of Jesus, and probably a few years after the AD 70 destruction of the Temple in Jerusalem. So the readers of Luke's gospel were not concerned about the Jerusalem Temple's destruction--it had already occurred. Scholars of the time described it as a horrible event, and that more people died than they could recall from any other single situation, sort of like Americans' September 11, 2001. These people had already experienced the worst of things. Of all the "signs" that Luke gives to Jesus to say, just about all of them were things that had happened already, or were so vague as to be useless as indicators. They are really non-indicators.
When in human history is there not financial panic somewhere? In which year do we not witness strange cosmic events such as comets and meteors, solar and lunar eclipses? When has there been a week in which the stock market has not fallen some? Name a day in your lifetime that the news has not covered a war, or shocking violence, or killing, or bombing? Imagine Katie Couric coming on the air and saying to her viewers, "I have nothing to report--not a thing happened today--all of you, for the next half-hour, turn off the TV and eat your dinner, then go outside and take a walk." No, Katie and her colleagues will find something, some terrible or at least worrisome thing to tell us about, every single night.
But Jesus is saying to us that despite all these worries and harbingers of doom, we are going to live to see some redemption. Breathe deeply for a minute and take that in. His words sound like a marvelous thing, even if they aren't precise and we can't pin them down. Today is the beginning of advent, the day we light a candle for Hope. If Jesus is saying anything in his Temple sermon, he is saying, "have hope, bear up." Do you remain in a constant state of feeling weighted down with the cares of the world? Jesus wants to distract you from looking at all those TV reporters, and have you look him in the eye instead, and hear him say to you, "Ignore the man behind the TV screen. You are going to live to feel redeemed. Pay attention to looking for that."
Do you feel overwhelmed by the beginning of this season, because it has ceased to be preparation for something holy and real, and has become instead a burdensome string of heavy days, lists of tasks in the service of something hollow and false? Jesus wants to distract you from our shopping, our money-spending, our tight-throated dread of the gatherings and duties and costs that Christmas has become. He wants us to see his face instead, and hear him say to us, "I want to save you from this, to redeem the month of December for you, to lead you through the days of advent so that you will know the truth of what is taking place, that I am coming to you full of grace and truth. Take my hand, get yourself ready for that."
Do you feel that daily life has gotten completely off track, that the minutiae have taken over, so that you sometimes wonder what meaning and purpose there is in living like this each day? Are you waiting for something to come into your life? Are you holding off for some reason? Do the people around you seem to be living at cross-purposes, so that you don't move forward or accomplish something valuable? Jesus wants us to look up from what we're doing, to lift our heads and turn our eyes upon him, and hear him say to us, "Focus on me, and you will live long enough to know for yourself a grace and love that saves your life and makes it whole."
Let today for you be, not like Black Friday, but like Purple Sunday, the advent of hope in your own real, wild, wonderful, priceless life. See the signs Jesus is pointing you to, and ignore the labels of the Emperors of media, merchandise, and life on the surface. And light a candle today, promising that you will follow the longing of your own heart, directed not toward what is hollow, but toward the One who comes, bringing salvation with him. He has already promised to arrive on time.
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