On rainy days when I was a child I remember seeing swirls of rainbow colors in water puddles in the street. I didn’t know it was just a little oil slick from the asphalt and the drippings of passing cars. I thought they were where rainbows touched the earth, kissing the ground with their swirling colors and leaving a rainbow residue like a lady’s lipstick on someone’s cheek, evidence of affection and mystery.
On my seventh birthday my grandparents gave me a children’s picture Bible, The Bible in Pictures for Little Eyes by Kenneth N. Taylor. I had not been to church but once in my life at the time, my brothers baptism, and all I remembered from that was the man nailed and bleeding on the cross and how he made my stomach queasy.
So this book of bible stories was a new thing to me, a strange and scary land. Mom would read to me from these stories in the kitchen before I walked to school in the morning and I remember being introduced to the story of Noah, the flood, the destruction of the world, and the rainbow that God put in the sky as a sign of promise that God would not destroy the world again by a flood of water.
I had not seen very many rainbows, but I had seen lots of evidence of rainbows, the swirling kisses of color in the puddles, and I was very glad that the floods would not come again, feeling queasy about all those poor people and animals who couldn’t fit on the ark.
My first introduction to the bible, to theology touching daily life and to that queasy gut feeling that something isn’t right, that something is wrong.
Today we begin the Christian year. It is New Years Day. The Advent season has begun. Happy New Years! We begin the year with scripture lessons that are all about time, specifically the end of time, the end in both senses of the word, both the ending of time, and the goal and fulfillment of time.
Isaiah speaks of the “days to come” when God will judge and swords will be beaten into plowshares and spears into pruning hooks.
Paul in his letter to the Romans writes, “You know what time it is, how it is now the moment for you to wake from sleep. For salvation is nearer to us now”.
And Jesus in Matthew’s Gospel says, “But about that day and hour no one knows” and “the Son of Man is coming at an unexpected hour.”, “as the days of Noah were, so will be the coming of the Son of Man.”
Scripture lessons about staying awake expecting the surprise of God’s judgment at an unknown moment, as in the days of Noah when the flood came and swept them all away. This is how we begin the season Advent, with an emergency advisory warning to be prepared and to pay attention, stay awake, be up and about, don’t waste time on the trivial and the wasteful, put on Christ like a life preserver.
Advent fills us with an expectation that is both fearful and hopeful. We are fearful because we remember all those who were not on Noah’s ark, who were not prepared. We are hopeful for sword and spear to be beaten into plowshares and pruning hooks. We are expectant for the arrival of salvation from all that enslaves and destroys.
The fearful and hopeful expectation of the Advent of God’s kingdom has been used to control and manipulate people with fear, this is the sin of fundamentalists, a destructive fear.
This powerful expectation has also been downplayed, ignored and trivialized into a mere preparation for Christmas, for the birth of the baby Jesus, by ignoring the Risen Lord who will be our judge. So often we don’t let the infant Jesus grow up into the man who overcomes death and the grave and who rules the Universe with a terrible and glorious mercy. Without the overpowering and trembling expectations of Advent the birth of Jesus is meaningless, this is the sin of contemporary liberalism, a hope that is so weak that it is easily forgotten, unmemorable.
So what would a faithful approach to the Advent of Jesus as our Judge look like?
It would be a hale and hardy expectation, fearful of God’s consuming mercy, with a hope that is so great that it can keep us awake during the longest and darkest nights of our lives, sustaining us and moving us to action, filling us with longing as for a long lost love.
Advent wakes us up from the sleep of death, the death of a life that is lost in the oblivion of striving, grasping, consuming and despairing.
Advent fills us with what Thoreau describes as the infinite expectation of the dawn.
In this apocalyptic unveiling of all things we can see things clearly, we gain perspective, and we can see evidence of God’s presence and glory in life, we can see where rainbows touch the earth, kissing the ground with their swirling colors, leaving a rainbow residue like a lady’s lipstick on someone’s cheek, evidence of affection and mystery.
That is what Advent is, evidence of affection and mystery.
More than that it invites us to be evidence, to be the swirling colors, to be the rainbow residue of infinite expectation for the dawn, kissing the earth, evidence of affection and mystery.
Happy New Year! Time to wake up!