Gloria Dei Lutheran Church

Luke 21:25-36 + First Sunday of Advent + December 1, 2024+ Gloria Dei Lutheran Church + Pastor Bradley E. Schmeling

Beloved Ones: Stay Awake!

Recently, on one of those days when I needed to step off the intense, fast-moving train that is our collective life right now, I stretched out on the couch, turned on the TV for a time of old-fashioned channel-surfing, finally landing on a segment of 60 Minutes about the Webb Telescope. It was about the future of the universe.

Apparently, the whole universe is expanding faster and faster outward. This isn’t fitting the models. If gravity has the effect of pulling things toward each other, another force is pushing in the opposite direction, moving things apart. One scientist suggested that, either we just don’t understand it yet or our understanding of gravity is wrong, which means Einstein’s theory of relativity, a watershed discovery that has proven correct so, far may not be correct.

Scientists call this other force “dark energy” because you cannot see it. It doesn’t emit, reflect, or absorb light. You only know it’s there because of its effects.

slide of dark energy[1]

There’s a lot of it. Dark matter accounts for roughly 25 percent of universe; dark energy about 70 percent. Which means we can only see 5 percent of the universe. Think about that. We can only witness five percent of the universe; 95 percent is mysterious, undefined, unseen, beyond our capacity to take it all in.

To understand where the universe is going, scientists go back to the past of which the new Webb telescope is giving unprecedented glimpses. Because of the way light travels, anything we see happened long ago, and the farther we can see, the farther back in time we’re looking, closer and closer to the beginning. Scientists suggest that if we know how it started, we know how it ends. [2]

Of course, I can’t help but hear Jesus’ voice, “Heaven and earth shall pass away, but my words will not pass away.”

Screen to black

Great. I just wanted a twenty-minute channel surfing respite. But instead, Jesus is talking about the end of the world in my head. Scientists are talking about on TV. Pundits are predicting it for January 20^th. It wasn’t long before I was pondering my death, Judgment Day, and this sermon. Typically, this is the kind of moment when the full power of my inner dysfunction settles in like one of those friends who can’t stop talking.

However, that pattern didn’t happen because not one scientist seemed to feel a bit of fear about their uncertainty, or even nervousness about only knowing a tiny bit of information. They gushed. They spoke with joy, wonder, and even delight about the next discoveries that could be made. As they began to discuss the Webb telescope, they described how they decided to show the pictures of those things that the eye can’t see. They assigned 29 different colors to the wave lengths of infrared light. When the hidden is revealed, it looks like this.

Universe Slide with Color[3]

The images inspire wonder, joy, and a peace that passes all understanding. Perhaps this is another effect of that dark energy, this unseen force acting on us to expand rather than contract: to approach uncertainty with creativity, courage, and a prism of rainbow colors.

It’s so difficult to hear these bible stories about the end of the world without focusing on the falling stars, the distress at the sound of rising seas, fear and foreboding settling in as a way to tell our story and describe our reality. Yet when Jesus brings up this conversation, likely when the disciples just wanted a nap, too, he is not guided by inner and communal dysfunction but by his deep awareness of the mysterious and unexplained presence of God within his own body. He’s trying to give his friends a new way to tell the story, providing color, to inspire hope, courage, and tenacity. Coming faster and faster is an energy that is more beautiful and life-giving than the world of violence, greed, elitism, and the moral certainty that has power but not longevity. If the wheels are falling off, this is the sign that a new way of traveling is about to be born.

To many, the church’s mission to pull wonder, righteousness, justice, and peace into this historical, political, cultural, and social mess is simply naivete. It’s pie in the sky, not hope among the devastation. But here we are on the First Sunday in Advent talking about a branch from the stump, or joy and gratitude written into a letter by Paul from prison. When we begin this season by talking about the end, it is not to scare people into compliance but to choose another story as our north star.

When I hear “Heaven and earth are passing away,” I’ve come to understand that the divide between heaven and earth has passed away. In Luke’s gospel, darkness covers the earth, the curtain of the temple, adorned with celestial bodies, tears in two, holiness expands outward like another kind of dark energy. Only then does Jesus says, “Into your hands I commend my spirit.” John has him say, “It is finished.” Jesus isn’t sinking into despair about his end. He gives himself over to the one who made the heavens and the earth, the one gave the word love to describe the energy of the cosmos.

Maybe this is what the end times talk leads us into. It’s a nudge to colorize, to open the box of crayons. The Second Coming is only a warning in that it snaps us to attention to start noticing instead of disappearing, reminding us that the phrase in the creed, “he will come in glory to judge the living and the dead,” is not some religious strategy for getting on God’s good side when the sheep and goats are separated.

It’s a reminder not to miss the glory. Jesus wanted the disciples to see even his death, not as an end, but as the sign of what’s coming next. God’s reign arrives only three days later. Jesus is inviting them to notice, to breathe in a life that’s more stable (the one, in fact, we glimpse in a stable); a peace that rests in wonder, a joy that gives birth to carols and feasts and lights strung around the windows in winter; reconciliation and mercy as political strategies, creativity that undermines injustice, curiosity that ends of division, and laughter even when know how real death is. Don’t miss the signs or that new star in the sky, the one that’s farther back in time, yet with the eyes of the Spirit is rising again on history’s horizon, colored in a beauty that’s almost indescribable.

On that afternoon with the TV I didn’t get up. I feel asleep. We all need rest, probably more than we think we should. Eventually, I did raise myself up off the bed, went on, and now: here we are at the dawn of a new year, some bread and wine, the eyes to see rainbows where, at first, there was nothing. Day One of Creation.

And on this weekend when everyone is seeing “Wicked,” we say that we are a people who are…defying gravity.

[1] Information Slide on percentages, https://news.uchicago.edu/explainer/dark-energy-explained.

[2] I watched this segment on a Live TV and have been unable to find the episode to note here. Link to 60 Minutes site: https://www.cbsnews.com/60-minutes/full-episodes/#search-form.

[3] https://www.flickr.com/photos/nasawebbtelescope/albums/72177720313923911/with/54164228360