November 28, 2021: Homesick

Luke 21:25-36

Rev. Rhonda Blevins

“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. 26 People will faint from fear and foreboding of what is coming upon the world, for the powers of the heavens will be shaken. 27 Then they will see ‘the Son of Man coming in a cloud’ with power and great glory. 28 Now when these things begin to take place, stand up and raise your heads, because your redemption is drawing near.” 

29 Then he told them a parable: “Look at the fig tree and all the trees; 30 as soon as they sprout leaves you can see for yourselves and know that summer is already near. 31 So also, when you see these things taking place, you know that the kingdom of God is near. 32 Truly I tell you, this generation will not pass away until all things have taken place. 33 Heaven and earth will pass away, but my words will not pass away. 

34 “Be on guard so that your hearts are not weighed down with dissipation and drunkenness and the worries of this life, and that day does not catch you unexpectedly, 35 like a trap. For it will come upon all who live on the face of the whole earth. 36 Be alert at all times, praying that you may have the strength to escape all these things that will take place, and to stand before the Son of Man.”

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Happy New Year! You may recall that the First Sunday of Advent is the first Sunday of the liturgical church calendar. So for us Christians, it’s New Year’s Day! I hope you enjoyed your New Year’s Eve celebrations last night.

Or more likely, you’re just now coming out of your tryptophan stupor after Thanksgiving. If you were able to get out of your Lazy Boy the day after Thanksgiving, maybe you went shopping on Black Friday. We needed a couple of things on Black Friday—we did everything in our power to avoid the mall or one of the big box stores. My husband went to 32 different pharmacies to avoid a trip to you-know-where, but eventually it became clear that a trip to you-know-where could not be avoided. Looking deeply into my eyes, he told me, “I’m going to have to go to . . . Wal-Mart,” like he was telling me he had been drafted to go to war. I began packing up things to send with him: I stuffed a couple of granola bars in his pocket and filled his canteen with water. I gave him an extra phone charger and some insulin in case he became diabetic while he was there. “Be careful,” I told him. “I love you.” Then I kissed his cheek, wondering if that would be our last kiss. While my neighbors were all decorating for Christmas, I tied a yellow ribbon on our mailbox, hoping for my husband’s safe return from legit Black Friday shopping.

Have you taken a good look at retail workers on Black Friday? I want to one of the 32 pharmacies with my husband yesterday—the employee at the checkout looked like she was suffering from shell shock. One part exhaustion, one part disgust, and one part sheer terror. I thought about saying to her, “Blink once if you’re ok, blink twice if you need help.” Part of what gets to retail workers this time of year is the music. For us shoppers, the old familiar tunes help get us in the spirit (to spend money). But for the workers, it’s a form of mild torture hearing the same fifteen Christmas songs on repeat.

So for fun, let me take a poll. If you were a prisoner of war and part of your torture would be to listen to the same Christmas song on repeat for over a month, which song would you pick if given a choice: “Santa Claus is Coming to Town” sung by Bruce Springsteen, Gene Autry’s “Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer,” or “I’m Dreaming of a White Christmas” recorded by Bing Crosby?

I’d have to choose “I’m Dreaming of a White Christmas” out of those three. Did you know that this song holds the number one Guinness World Record spot for the best-selling single of all time?[1] Really? I mean, I’d pick it over “Grandma Got Run Over By a Reindeer,” but “best-selling single of all time?” What is it about “White Christmas” that makes it so popular? I have a guess, but let’s remember the first couple of lines:

I'm dreaming of a white Christmas
Just like the ones I used to know.

What is it about “White Christmas” that makes the song so popular? My educated guess: it’s nostalgia, that “sentimental longing or wistful affection for the past, typically for a period or place with happy personal associations.” “Dreaming of a white Christmas, just like the ones I used to know,” takes us back to carefree childhood days when adults dealt with the real problems and our greatest fear was wondering if we had been good enough that year to warrant a visit from Ole’ Saint Nick. For me, now that I have to be an adult, now that I have to clean and decorate, plan and cook, select and pay for the presents (bah-humbug), I can sometimes find myself homesick, pining for a “white Christmas just like the ones I used to know.”

Adulting is hard work!

Layer on to “adulting” the existential angst of the end times and it might just drive you to do something crazy, like go to Wal-Mart on Black Friday without a canteen!

So why this scripture text on the First Sunday of Advent? Why not something sweeter? Something with angels singing or cattle lowing or babies sleeping? The lectionary does this to us the First Sunday of Advent every year. If it’s not John the Baptist screaming, “Repent! For the kingdom of God is here!” it’s Jesus nearing the end of his ministry talking about the earth in distress, heaven shaking, people fainting from fear, and the “Son of Man coming in a cloud.” Happy New Year, everyone!

I don’t know what the intention was when those who crafted the lectionary decided to make us so uncomfortable on the First Sunday of Advent every year. Maybe it’s to jar us from our tryptophan stupor. Maybe it’s to help set the scene for the big reveal on Christmas Eve, in the same way that a good storyteller introduces struggle and conflict into the narrative. No story is complete without conflict.

So welcome to the conflict in the Christmas story. And this is no small conflict—this is conflict on a cosmic scale, conflict not bound by time or space. Holy Apocalypse, Batman!

Let’s talk about what apocalyptic language means, like this “Little Apocalypse” from the Gospel of Luke. Let’s start with what “apocalypse” means: it simply means a “revealing”—literally to uncover or reveal. In Middle English, “apocalypse” meant something different than it does today. Instead of its contemporary “end of the world” meaning, “apocalypse” used to simply mean “insight” or “vision.”

Given that understanding, we could accurately say that COVID-19 has been “apocalyptic”—the end of the world as we knew it perhaps, a great “revealing” for sure. Think about all the things we discovered about ourselves over the past couple of years, about what we learned about each other. Workers have reevaluated their engagement in the workforce, causing employers to adjust to new demands. We’ve been forced to think about health and wellbeing, and how much risk we’re willing to assume for the reward of engaging with others. If you’re worshipping from home right now, perhaps it is because the risk of being here in person is more than you’re willing to assume, at least today. One of the silver linings of the pandemic is that we’ve been forced to consider what really matters. This is the great “revealing”—insight and vision that we didn’t have before a global pandemic distressed earth and shook heaven. The bad news is, we’ve lived through the “apocalypse.” The good news is, we survived!

So Jesus, nearing the end of his ministry, uses apocalyptic language not to instill fear (as many contemporary preachers like to do) but to imbue hope. To summarize Luke’s “little apocalypse,” Jesus essentially tells his listeners, “Look, bad things are going to happen—things that cause distress on earth and shake heaven. People will be terrified. Into that chaos and fear the Son of Man will come. So look up! Your redemption is at hand!”

Some biblical interpreters like to envision some kind of made-for-TV end-of-the-world scenario (think: the “Left Behind” books and movies). While that kind of sensationalized stuff sells books and movies, I find it all distasteful (to put it mildly). Fear-based religion is manipulative at best, heretical at worst. Taking texts like the “little apocalypse” from the Gospel of Luke, or larger apocalyptic texts from books like Daniel in the Old Testament or Revelation in the New Testament—squeezing this ancient form of literature into our modern scientific method in order to predict the future or scare the hell out of people in the present—it misses the point entirely.

What’s the point in all of the apocalyptic language in the Bible? What’s the point Jesus is making in this “little apocalypse” in the Gospel of Luke? The point is this: bad things are going to happen. Terrible things even. That’s just the reality of life here are earth. But into that suffering, into that distress, when the world (your world) is in distress and it seems like even the heavens are shaking—into the worst suffering you can imagine—Christ comes. Over and over and over again. Every single apocalypse—every cataclysmic event—if you “look up”—you’ll see Christ coming in the clouds, descending from some remote, inaccessible throne that we’ve relegated Christ to. We do not have a distant God, uninvolved in our suffering, no! Christ shows up in the muck and in the mire of “this present darkness.” Thanks be to God! I can summarize the point of all apocalyptic material in the Bible: the word is . . . hope.

The great mystery of the faith is that Christ has died, Christ has risen, Christ will come again! Say that with me? “Christ has died, Christ has risen, Christ will come again!” And again, and again, and again.

Whatever this world throws at us, whatever you’re going through even at this very moment, Christ will come into that reality. You are never alone.

Sure we’re homesick. We pine for the days of yore when the realities of “adulting” were not yet known to us. Nostalgia makes us long for an idea—some reality that never really existed. We are homesick because we are only fully at home in Christ. We may never feel completely at home until we reach that glorified state in which we are in full unity with Christ and in Christ. But that does not mean Christ’s power and strength is not available to us now. No, in fact it’s that power—the power that hope gives us—that has gotten us this far.

Like Dorothy in the Wizard of Oz, we know “there’s no place like home.” We’ll keep walking the road until we get there.

Listen to a poem by Rev. Sarah Speed called “Homesick”—it’s today’s reading from the Advent Devotional Guide we are providing this year:

How do you describe homesickness to a child?

You don’t.

They know.

Children know the feeling of being away from home.

It’s fear, dipped in loneliness,

that “What if I’ve been forgotten?” sonnet,

or the “What if I can’t go back?” refrain.

Even a healthy, scrubbed-clean,

showered-with-love child

knows the longing of home. 

But if I had to.

If I had to describe

that aching feeling, I would say:

“Homesickness is when longing and grief

wrap themselves around you like a blanket.

It’s the door to comfort thrown open.

It’s an eye on the horizon for what could be

and the only way out is to keep walking,

to keep dreaming,

to keep looking

for signs that will point you back home.”

And if you tell that to a child,

you just may realize

that a part of your spirit

has shoes on

and has always been walking,

always been dreaming,

always been looking

for the home that could be. 

The door to comfort has been blown open.

Tell God I’m homesick.

I’m on my way.

[1] https://www.guinnessworldrecords.com/world-records/best-selling-single