Branching Out
Jeremiah 33:14-16; Luke 21:25-36

December 3, 2006


“Taking Care of Business” sings the refrain of the rock anthem by Bachman Turner Overdrive of Winnipeg. “I’m taking care of business and working overtime. I love to work at nothing all day.” Must have been written during Advent because nothing happens starting today. There are no events in Advent, just waiting for something that simply won’t happen now, which is a good way to begin the Christian year. Waiting kind of clears the mind and allows you to imagine what just might be.

Jesus does not mince words in Luke. Stories are told with a breathtaking flourish, the downtrodden and oppressed are championed with an audacity unimaginable in that society and seldom heard in ours. The end of the world is going to be spectacularly bad. Is this how it all begins - with such violence that renders us faint with absolute fear? Can’t we work our way into this Christian world a little more gently and gradually? This Jesus for whom we are waiting to come barely three weeks away prefers to start with a revolution. Is this the Good News? Can’t we do nothing all day for a while?

A few things need to be made clear: Advent hasn’t been around forever. It is an invention of the Church, for back when Advent was happening - the years and months before Jesus’ birth and incarnation - nobody knew it was Advent. No one sang any theologically correct Advent hymns, no candles were lit (largely because candles were not yet invented!), extremely few people anticipated the coming of the Messiah and the way it did happen caught them all by surprise.

Advent was created for those who know the end of the story so that we can start the story all over again from the beginning. Of course, that is for the purpose of starting ourselves all over again.

H. Richard Niebuhr observed that the incarnation of Christ is like the Rosetta Stone. People had admired the colourful pictorial writing of the hieroglyphs on the monuments of ancient Egypt, but nobody had a clue about what it meant, though they were sure it was language. Then in 1799, a large black stone or slab was discovered in Rosetta, Egypt. Etched into the stone was a longish passage in hieroglyphics, along with roughly equal sections of a more modern Egyptian script called Demotic that scholars were able to read and the passage in Greek. The Rosetta Stone provided the key for Jean-François Champollion in 1822 to decipher hieroglyphics, allowing us to figure out what all those Pharaohs were saying. Jesus in turn provides the key to the mystery of God and God’s ways. God can be inscrutable, but now Jesus “fleshes out the essence of God for us.” Jesus translates God into a human language you and I can speak.

The harsh and anxious declarations of Jesus about the End make it clear that something has got to change, that the world as we know it needs serious reworking. Jesus gives us a different way and a new language to start things over, and this is what Advent tends to be about, getting our minds and bodies ready for a revolution, turning the world upside down. It won’t be one of those run of the mill coup d’états that history and greedy generals spring on us from time to time. Remember that non-violence rules Jesus’ methods and kingdom, that his religious faith is not operated by sacrifices of possessions, but by the sacrifice of himself, that suffering unjustly is his path to creating a world of justice, that being a slave and a servant accomplish a lot more than being a wielder of imperial power.

Jeremiah, who was not the gentlest of prophets, probably a personality one could get along without, also spoke in the midst of dire straits. With Jerusalem burned and leveled by the Babylonians and Israel’s leaders carted off in exile to Babylon, things couldn’t be bleaker. There was no empirical evidence that God cared or even existed. Jeremiah proclaimed the happy news that, No, God hasn’t forgotten you, for you are being punished! Nevertheless, it is not all over, for there shall come a day when God will cause to spring forth a “righteous branch” from David - one of the places from which the idea of the “Jesse Tree” originates. This person, this Messiah or Christ, is the one Jeremiah is waiting for, and his calling will be to execute justice and righteousness in the land. Once again, there is no real truth, no real salvation and safety, no real restoration of freedom unless there is justice and righteousness in the land. Peace is not the absence of conflict, justice exists only when it works for all people, prosperity benefits all or only some and that’s not righteousness.

Again, these are not actions, only eloquent and frightening words. Yet, Jeremiah relays to us the idea that it is through branching out that God will become more visible and understandable and hearable. Our God is a God who enters into human history and becomes knowable through history. And the best way to be involved in history is to be involved in human beings, and that is how God chooses to speak. Definitively and most intimately, God spoke through Jesus and that is why we listen so closely and so carefully to his words, and even argue among one another about exactly what did he mean? God, however, is branching out and it is among you and me that most of God’s work is done and it is through you and me that others come to know exactly who God is and what God is like and how God loves.

We have begun to wait for Jesus, but we already know the end of the story, so it is a different beginning and a different waiting. Advent begins once more our becoming the Word made flesh dwelling among the God-forsaken world.

Preached by Robert Kitchen
Knox-Metropolitan United Church
Regina, Saskatchewan