Creekside Church Sermon of November 30, 1997 "A Message Written in the Clouds" Luke 21:25-36	Rev. David Bibbee
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I hear people telling stories of what they did in the morning before going to school. Some shoveled coal, chopped wood, milked cows, or slopped the hogs. I drew weather maps. My eighth grade science teacher appointed me class weatherman. Equipped with colored pencils and mimeographed maps of the United States, I got up early and watched Frank Blair's national weather report on the Today show. I would copy the warm and cold fronts, indicate the areas of high and low pressure, and bands of precipitation.

I've been fascinated by the weather ever since. I think it would be fun to be a TV meteorologist, standing in front of the map and with the push of a button send satellite images of weather systems travelling across the nation. Poised between the local news and sports, I would tell of troughs, inversions, and disturbances in the jet stream, and relate up to the minute information from the Doppler radar. I would tell people what to expect and search the sky for signs of what is to come.

This image of searching the sky is a fitting one for the first Sunday in Advent, but it is not a completely pleasant forecast as the texts for the beginning of Advent always make plain. We would just as soon not hear a lesson about distress in the heavens and earth and people fainting for fear of what is happening. Enough distress and perplexity. The malls are waiting for us. There is gift-wrap to buy and there are lights to string. But Advent says before we begin making the list and checking it twice, before we ice the cookies and sing carols too soon, we ought to take stock of our situation.

Advent won't let us get all sentimental about the cute little ball of God in the sweet hay. The birth of Jesus was a disruptive event. Herod couldn't be king any more. The clock started ticking down on everything other than the kingdom which Jesus began. With Jesus' birth was a new beginning. In fact, the New Testament writers believed that his coming marked the end of the world as they knew it. As Jesus neared his death, he said that what seemed so permanent, wasn't. When the Son of Man comes sitting on the clouds with power and glory, it will spell the end of temples and organized religion and armies and corporations and the Dow Jones Industriales and Social Security.

What sort of language do you use to describe such a thing? Language of the end times; signs in the heavens, the moon turning blood red, the stars falling, everything nailed down coming loose, disintegration, chaos. Watch the clouds. They tell what is coming on the world.

We have tended to put these verses in the dark corner of the closet in favor of less unsettling scriptures. We have been content to let the fringe groups rant and rave that Jesus is coming back at any time, and that when Jesus said, "This generation shall not pass till all has taken place," he meant OUR GENERATION. They claim to have identified the anti-Christ...first it was Hitler, then Henry Kissinger, then Gorbachev. On one cable access program I recently heard one end-time teacher say it is Bill Clinton. Authors like Hal Lindsey who wrote THE LATE, GREAT PLANT EARTH, have done very well from royalties on their books because millions of people are spending good money to get a glimpse of the end. I am not a fan of these books because I consider their use of scripture flawed. But this doesn't mean we can dismiss the scripture.

Other voices are entering the end-time scenario...scientists, sociologists, and social commentators are lending their voices to the forecast that sees clouds of chaos and collapse looming on the horizon. They paint dire predictions of what will happen unless we stop polluting the planet. Last Wednesday the government acknowledged that millions of gallons of nuclear waste have been leeching into the ground water in Washington State and that unless something is done, it will ooze into the Columbia River in twenty years. Unchecked population growth, global warming, species which have lived for millions of years, disappearing; rain forests vanishing, frightening new killer viruses.

The world is fast becoming a huge battleground. There is the enmity between Israelis and Palestinians; the mass graves in Bosnia. Some fifty thousand bodies, many minus heads and limbs have washed into Lake Victoria from the savagery in Rwanda. And the trouble isn't just elsewhere. Not long ago in one of our cities, a fourteen year-old boy made the mistake of crossing a gang boundary. He was chased into a church. You would think that there he would be safe. A worship service was going on. The boy was pursued down the center aisle and shot dead in front of the congregation.

The statistics tell the story. In an age of technological marvels we are picking up speed on the slide into chaos. So at the start of Advent, we hear Luke using language that fits the present condition. He isn't telling us something we don't already know. Our plight can be captured in the lines spoken often by Oliver Hardy to Stanley Laurel..."Here is another fine mess you've gotten us into." In a world without God, a mess is all we have. Frederick Buechner said, "In a world without God, we know at least that the thing that will happen will be a human thing, no better or worse than the most that humanity itself can be. But in a world with God we can never know what will happen, because the thing that will happen is God's thing."

"There will be distress among the nations confused by the roaring of the seas. People will faint from fear and foreboding of what is happening in the world." Jesus said this during his last days on earth, but while he was bracing his followers for distress, he also assured them. "The Son of Man will come in a cloud with great power and glory. When all these things take place, stand up and raise your heads because your redemption is drawing near."

If God is not part of the equation, if all we have before us are the projections of disturbing trends, we will choke to death on fear. But at Advent we are told, "Stand up, raise your heads, your redemption is drawing near." But how near? Next month? January 1, 2000? It doesn't say when. It only says our redemption is coming. We are still waiting for it. Luke makes it clear that Jesus is the source of our redemption. Yet what Jesus began is not complete...not yet.

He came as the Light of the world, and still people are attracted to the works of darkness. He came as the Prince of Peace, and still there are wars and rumors of more to come and violence is so much a part of life that we are not phased by what use to sicken us. He came as the Bread of Life, and millions are starving. He came as the Lord of Life, and we continue to be addicted to things that suck life from us. No, the world is not redeemed...not by a long shot. That's why we need Advent. We are still watching and waiting.

What seemed solid is shifting beneath us, but there is still a fixed point of hope, and it is not in only our ability to turn the tide. Our fixed point is the promise that Christ holds the future and that what he began, he will complete. James Kay said it better than I can-"Advent tells us we can never take our own projections more seriously than God's promises."

We don't know what's out there in the future, we only know who. Creation may groan in travail, but we've been told to raise our heads. The future has a recognizable face.

One of the persistent pleas in the Psalms is, "Lord, do not hide your face from me." To hide the face is to withhold approval-to turn away and to abandon. But to behold the face of the Lord is to be blessed. That's why one of our most cherished benedictions is, "The Lord bless you and keep you. The Lord make his face to shine upon you."

Walter Wangerin described a dream he had in which he was waiting for a friend, but he didn't know who. As the time of his arrival grew near, so did his excitement. He said that laughter was falling from him like the rain. He wanted to stand on the porch and holler to everyone, "My friend is coming!" He hadn't seen his friend for years. He wasn't even sure what his friend looked like, yet he knew beyond a doubt that the friend was dear to him, as he was to the friend. He knew the friend satisfied a fathomless need in him, and it was him he chose to visit.

Music attended the waiting and the closer the friend came, the more wonderful the music became...high violins with piercing dissonance searching for, weeping for the final resolve of his appearing. When the music ascended to a nearly impossible chord of wailing little notes, and when excitement had squeezed the breath from his lungs, he started to cry. Then the friend came. Walter put his hands to his cheeks and was crying and laughing all at once. The friend looked directly at him with mortal affection, and he grew strong with the gaze, and he knew at once who the friend was. It was the perfect flame of the knowledge of his name. He had come exactly as he said he would. The friend was Jesus.

This dream beautifully suggests the promise we proclaim at Advent. The battles rage on. Human greed destroys the environment. Much of humanity lives in agony. People faint with fear and foreboding of what is coming on the world. The trends are not encouraging. So at Advent we scan the horizon for signs of His coming in the clouds. Though we have not seen the face before, we will recognize him. He won't look like Arnold Schwartzenager, nor will he have undergone a personality change and slay millions as some of the end-time prophets say he will.

The face we'll see is the one we first saw at Bethlehem. We therefore live not by fear, but faith. Like St. Paul said, "God has shone in our hearts to give the light of the knowledge of the glory of God in the face of Jesus Christ." (II Corinthians 4:6)

This sermon was inspired from a meditation entitled "Redemption Draws Near" by James F. Kay in the November 12, 1997 issue of Christian Century.

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