COME, LORD JESUS
The Rev’d Phillip Channing Ellsworth, Jr.
The 3rd of December 2017, the First Sunday of Advent
Based on the Collect of the Day, and Luke 21. 25 – 28

Jesus said, “Now when these things begin to take place, look up and raise your heads, because your redemption is drawing near.” [Luke 21. 28] May I speak in the name of God, Father, Son, and Holy Spirit. Amen.

We know a boy whose family, in the late sixties, had a big champagne Rambler station wagon with the rear-facing back seat. He was in the third grade, and a new student at a grade school in New Mexico. He had not paid sufficient respect to some of the bullies in power so they were going to give him some rough justice in the open air, and it was coming to him the next day. He didn’t know what to do. He always walked home from school, but that evening he decided to ask his father for a ride.

The next day at school even boys he didn’t know were looking at him and pounding their fists into their hands. When the last class ended, the boy walked across the playground, stuck his chest out, and pretended his heart wasn’t pounding beneath it. “There he is!” he heard a bully shout, and the chase was on. He ran to the gate but it was an ambush: there was another group there waiting for him. They cornered him against the fence and moved in to, as the Romans would put it in Jesus’ day, ‘keep the peace’. 

And then, just then, he looked up and behold, he saw his redemption drawing near. Half a block away was the big champagne Rambler coming down the street. Lo! he comes with clouds descending. You can imagine the rest of the story.

What is Advent? Jesus’ words today give us a point of departure. They are the latter part of a larger discourse. Their immediate context was the Jerusalem of his day, a Jerusalem occupied by the Romans. Many of the resident Jews were refusing to kowtow to Caesar; they resented Gentile invaders and their pagan religions. Things were reaching the boiling point, and were ready to spill over into a bloody and disastrous rebellion. 

Jesus thought that the fervor for revolution was madness. Today in our nation, there’s talk about a tax plan which some worry could send those living at the edges over a fiscal cliff. But Israel in Jesus’ day was rushing toward the brink of an existential cliff. Standing up to the power of Rome would be suicide. The Romans would make an old-fashioned playground beating of it. It would be rough justice in the open air.

Jesus could see it coming, and he wept over Jerusalem, saying, “Would that even today you knew the things that make for peace! But now they are hid from your eyes. For the days shall come upon you when your enemies will … surround you and hem you in on every side, and dash you to the ground, you and your children within you.” [Luke 19. 41- 43] Things were going to go from bad to worse, but Jesus said that then, just then — when it seemed like the sun and moon and stars were collapsing — we should look up and raise our heads to behold our redemption drawing near. 

Advent is about the mysterious comings of Jesus. He arrived in great humility in the days when Caesar Augustus announced that all the world should be taxed, and Mary brought forth her firstborn son, wrapped him in swaddling clothes, and laid him in a manger. Advent is waiting to celebrate the first coming of Jesus. And it is looking for Jesus to show up today, into the humdrum of your life, by the power of the Spirit. And it’s still more; it’s wanting the blessed One to come again when we’re all of us really out of school, when crowned by our tears and laughter he comes in his glorious majesty to judge both the living and the dead. Advent then as now is looking up the street, hoping to see the big champagne Rambler.  

Years ago a 10-year old boy had an army of third graders chasing after him, and that experience plays itself out on a larger scale in our adult lives. You have your own armies to face. For you it may be a dogging cynicism, perhaps an anxiety or disappointment you can’t outrun; it may be the advancing years of mortality gaining on you or a dread illness pinning you against a fence, threatening; it may be the expectations of other people chasing after you, and the pressure you feel to stay ahead. At some point your only hope is to look for God to come help you. 

Let’s enter the mysteries of Advent with two prayers. The first is the Collect appointed for praying on the first Sunday of Advent and indeed on every day of Advent right up to Christmas Eve. “Almighty God, give us grace that we may cast away the works of darkness, and put upon us the armor of light, now in the time of this mortal life in which thy Son Jesus Christ came to visit us in great humility; that in the last day, when he shall come again in his glorious Majesty, to judge both the quick and the dead, we may rise to the life immortal; through him who lives and reigns with you and the Holy Spirit, one God, now and for ever. Amen.” This prayer was composed in 1549 for the first Book of Common Prayer by that master of English prose, Thomas Cranmer, Archbishop of Canterbury.

The author of the second prayer? Nobody knows. It began floating around the Anglosphere in my lifetime, and for 25 years I’ve been praying it throughout Advent and Christmastide. It expresses the longing of your heart this time of the year. “O Blessed Lord Jesus, our choicest gift, our dearest guest; Let not our souls be busy inns that have no room for you and yours, but quiet homes of prayer and praise, where you may find the best company, where needful cares of life are wisely ordered and put away, and where wide, sweet spaces are kept for you. So when you come again, O Blessed One, may you find all things ready, and your servants waiting for no new master, but for one long loved and known. Even so, come, Lord Jesus. Amen.”