There will be signs in the sun, the moon, and the stars, and on the earth distress among nations confused by the roaring of the sea and the waves.

Luke 21:25-36

But he also has a talent for getting out of them. When his backers asked for the details of his plan for escaping looming financial disaster, Mr. Henslowe's answer was always consistent, if not entirely helpful to others.

How is it that you're going to come up with the money you need to avoid bankruptcy, his creditors would ask while literally holding his feet to the fire.

I don't know , he always replied. It's a mystery . For Mr. Henslowe the statement was not so much an evasion as it was a statement of faith.

Every year, on this particular Sunday, I have something of the same response. For as you know, this is the first Sunday of the Christian year. There are many calendars in the world -- academic and school calendars, fiscal year calendars, the national calendar, the regular, monthly calendar -- and they all have their own values, their own meaning.

They all call for their own kind of allegiance. They demand certain things from us. We pay our taxes on April 15th. We shoot off fireworks on July 4th. We pop champagne, and if we're extremely lucky and blessed, we kiss our honey at 12:00 a.m. on January 1st.

And those are mostly good things, except for the paying taxes part, obviously.

But those of us in the church have our own calendar, with its own values and its own meaning. Today is the first Sunday of Advent. It's a day when we mark the beginning of our own journey to Bethlehem, to greet the Christ child anew, to welcome again the coming of God's own light into the world.

It's a day when we change our stoles and our banners, when we say by the very color of the season that we are no longer in the green of ordinary time; we're in the purple of Advent. It's a way of saying that something special is afoot, something worth marking off, something worth observing.

And so our excitement builds. We can taste Christmas on the wind, feel its hope brushing on our cheeks, like God's own breath. We even smell Christmas here in this sanctuary, in the pine scent of these beautiful greens.

But on this, the first Sunday of the Christian year, the lexionary does something unexpected. Rather than the familiar stories we associate with Christmas, we are given, instead, apocalypse.

Every year I find these readings startling and a bit unexpected. We want stories of shepherds and angels and magi. Indeed, some of us need stories of shepherds and angels and magi.

Cause sometimes we feel like we're standing around in the cold darkness, like those shepherds were so long ago. Standing around in some insignificant field, far off from everything that matters. If only those angels would appear and sing to us, so that we might know that we matter. If only they would assure us, again, by their song that God's hope for the world, God's hope for me , is peace on earth, good will to everyone.

Or maybe we feel like those magi, like we've actually been searching for God, for signs that God is real and more than a fairy tale. But we feel like we're not much closer, that we've still got a long journey ahead of us if we are, in fact, going to find this God.

If only that star would appear in our night sky, guiding us to the place where we belong, guiding us to God, guiding us to that manger where our 21st century doubt, and our honest questions, are banished by the cry of tiny babe. And we find ourselves kneeling in homage.

So we want those texts and maybe we need them. And yet those are not the stories we are given.

Instead of angels and shepherds, we are given -- of all things -- apocalypse. Before we get to the manger, we must first deal with what seems to be the end of the world.

Why is this so, I always wonder? I read these texts, and think about what I'm going to say on Sunday morning. And I feel like Mr. Henslowe, like someone's holding my feet to the fire and asking, How in the world are you gonna get out of this fix? What are you gonna say to make sense of this stuff?

My answer is the same as Philip Henslowe's: It's a mystery.

Certainly the task of making sense out of this mystery - out of why we're given apocalypse rather than angels -- is made harder by the way these texts are used and manipulated in our culture today.

You may know the names Tim LaHaye and Jerry Jenkins. They are the authors of the enormously successful "Left Behind" series. They've made a fortune out of these texts. What they've really done is made a fortune by scaring people nearly to death. Out of making people think global catastrophe is imminent. And that if you don't get right with God, if you don't accept Jesus as you're Savior in the way they understand that, you're gonna be left behind, left to suffer right in the middle of it.

And you want to write off such scare tactics as silly, or manipulative, or irresponsible.

But then you actually read these texts and you wonder, are these guys really that far off? Maybe they're actually on to something.

For there will be signs in the sun, the moon, and the stars , Jesus says, and on the earth distress among nations confused by the roaring of the sea and the waves. People will faint from fear and foreboding of what is coming upon the world, for the powers of the heavens will be shaken.

And you think, isn't that kind of how things are now? I actually know people who are reluctant to have children because the world seems to have changed so much in recent years, because the specter of terrorism seems like it's here to stay and because the threat of global warming does seem literally apocalyptic.

And so sometimes, like Jesus says, our hearts do faint from fear. And we think, maybe LaHaye is right. Maybe the end is near.

Certainly something is coming to an end in these texts. But I'll wager it's not what we think. And I'll guarantee it's not what LaHaye would have you believe.

What might it be, then? Well, first, apocalyptic literature is fairly common in the Bible. We read it here in the Gospels, and it spooks us because it's coming from Jesus. But we also get essentially the same thing in other places, too, in the Book of Daniel in the OT, for example. And the very last book of the Bible, the book of Revelations, is nothing but apocalypse.

And it is true that in every case something is coming to an end. But the question is what? The end of the world? The end of time? The end of life as we know it?

Well, yes and no. Not the end of the world, no. But maybe the end of life as we know it, or at least life as it plays out for many people in the world.

The NT scholar, Barbara Rossing, claims that what's coming to an end in these texts is the "oikoumene" - the imperial world of the time. It's a specific word in Greek, different from the word for the "ordinary" world, different, too, from the word for "earth."

What's coming to an end is a specific world, the world of enslavement and domination. A world predicated on power over others, whether that's between nations or between spouses. In Daniel what was coming to an end was the imperial world of King Nebakanezer. And in the NT, what's coming to an end is the Imperial world of Caesar.

And what's coming to replace that world, that "oikoumene", is koinonia , the fellowship of God. The Kingdom of God, a world predicated on love, where power is shared with others, not lorded over them. Jesus says as much, right here, doesn't he? When you see these things taking place - when you see the world in the midst of these trials and tribulations, these birth pangs - you know that the kingdom of God is near, that something new is about to be born.

But then he tells his listeners that this generation, this group of people that's listening to him speak right then, that this generation will not pass away until all things have taken place.

And we wonder, did he get it wrong? None of that seems to have happened.

But isn't that the very point? It did happen to that generation. And it happens to every generation. This generation, the very group of people who are listening to these texts every time they are read and proclaimed, this generation has its own tumult and turmoil. In every generation there is distress among nations confused by the roaring of the sea and the waves.

But it's not just every generation, and it's not just the nations that are confused by the roaring of the sea. Every life has its own distress. Each one of us will eventually suffer our own little bit of apocalypse. Our faith and our believing, our very lives, will eventually be interrupted by these distresses. By bad pathology reports or bad credit reports, by literal car wrecks or personal train wrecks, by hurricanes or tsunamis, global and personal.

That's why we get these text now, on the first Sunday of Advent. Just as the year approaches its darkest point, we fight back with light. Starting with the hope candle today, and every Sunday for the next three weeks we will light another candle, pushing back steadily on the darkness.

It's a way to say that our faith is not afraid of the dark; that our faith grows deeper in the dark. A way to say our faith is not just about these comforting stories of angels and shepherds. Instead our faith is grounded in real life, where bad things happen, sometimes even during Advent itself.

And still we light candles of hope and peace and joy and love. And at the last, on Christmas Eve, we will light the Christ candle to make it known that we believe, we really believe, in the coming of God's light into the world. Into our world, into this generation, into our lives.

How is that going to happen? I don't know. It's a mystery. But that's not an evasion. It's a statement of faith. A way of saying that despite what we read in the news, despite the gathering darkness and the tumult of the roaring waves, I believe things are gonna work out, that there's a plan. That light will come, and that Christ will be born again in this generation.

And that we are right to light this candle of hope.

Amen