There’s something about the coming of the Season of Advent that always takes me back to the first year I spent in Germany in 1979-1980. Maybe it’s because it was then that I first really felt the darkness of the season. Marburg, where I was studying was much further north than the part of the Midwest where I grew up and the constantly gray skies and short days combined to create a gloom that seemed to encompass everything. 

But it was also then that I first encountered the powerful themes of Advent in the Lutheran tradition; not just the Advent wreath but the great German hymns, like the Bach Chorale “Wachet Auf” which we will be singing later. Lutheran theological reflection on Advent also shaped me deeply: the theological reflection on Christ’s comings—at Christmas, at the end of times, and in Word and Sacrament. A few years later, I would listen to the great Swedish New Testament scholar and later bishop of Stockholm, Sweden as he preached to a tiny congregation of students at Harvard Divinity School on the symbol of lighting candles in the midst of deepening darkness. As darkness descends in the Northern Hemisphere, to light candles is not only a necessity but an act of hope in a time that can seem disorienting when the darkness seems overwhelming.

In the twenty-first century, we have the luxury of electricity that helps us keep the darkness at bay. It’s hard for us to imagine, unless we’ve experienced lengthy power outages, or are accustomed to camping in the wilderness far from human habitation, the ubiquity, intensity, and sheer power of darkness, especially as it was experienced in previous centuries. For those of us who are sighted, it is hard to imagine how blind people experience the world—the darkness in which they are enveloped all of the time.

As rich and powerful as the imagery of darkness and light is—and we will see it not only now in this season of Advent but right through Christmas and Epiphany, it is not without its problematic side—it can easily slip into the binaries of white and black, good and evil, that have had such a pernicious and persistent effect on our culture. Can we imagine other ways of relating to darkness—its mystery, its infinity, its unknowingness, the way it has of disorienting and reorienting us?

While the language of darkness and light is almost ubiquitous in our liturgy, other themes dominate our scripture readings and theological reflections in Advent. Chief among these may be time. 

We see that theme emphasized in the beautiful collect for the First Sunday in Advent:

give us grace to cast away the works of darkness, and put on the armor of light, now in the time of this mortal life in which your Son Jesus Christ came to visit us in great humility; that in the last day, when he shall come again in his glorious majesty

This beautiful and powerful collect for the First Sunday of Advent stresses that this season is not only a time of preparation for Christmas; an opportunity to get a head start on Holiday festivities. Advent directs our attention to Christ’s second coming and teaches us that we live as Christians between that time of Christ’s incarnation, his death and resurrection, and the consummation of our final hope in Christ’s return. As Christians, we have experienced the first fruits of Christ’s transforming work, but we languish in this world, in this time, enmeshed in the powers of evil that surround us and seem to hold sway.

In a very profound sense, all of Christian life lives in that tension between Christ’s coming and the Second Coming. It’s often said that Christians are “Easter People”—the reality is that we are also Advent people, living in the interstices between Christ’s first coming and his second. Of course, we usually do what we can to reduce that tension between time past, time present, and time to come, and we most often do that by ignoring or downplaying that focus on the future, on Christ’s second coming. 

Those of you who grew up Evangelical in the 70s, and perhaps even in the decades since, may still bear with you the trauma of endless warnings on the imminence of Christ’s second coming and the rapture, much of it precipitated by Hal Lindsey and his bestselling book—The Late Great Planet Earth. Lindsey died this past week, but his legacy lives on.

Now, however, It may be that our visions of the future are dominated by dystopian nightmares : the movies of the Mad Max franchise, or the Handmaid’s Tale; and the dystopian future may seem ever closer and more realistic. In the gospel reading, we have hints of such dystopias: signs in the sun, moon, and stars, the roaring of waves and the sea.

We may be tempted like so many in the past and in the present, to see in those signs evidence of the nearness of the Second Coming. Certainly, however we interpret those signs, we may be full of fear as we look into the future of the next few months, or the next four years, or beyond.

This morning’s gospel comes from Luke’s version of Jesus’ apocalyptic warnings to his followers. Present in all three synoptic gospels, though with significant differences among them, this speech is located in the last week of Jesus’ life, when he is preaching and teaching in the temple, and confronted by his opponents. In fact, it comes from Luke’s version of the story we heard from Mark just two weeks ago. To set the context a little more clearly, the chapter began with Jesus’ prediction of the destruction of the temple, followed by the disciples asking him when all this would take place. Then Jesus gives lists of things to look for, warnings of what will happen to those who are his followers—arrest and persecution.

Now, here, Jesus gives his followers advice. Be on guard! Be alert! Stand up and raise your heads! But there’s another piece of advice that seems to contradict what else he says. Jesus refers to the fig tree. He points out something every gardener knows, that when a plant begins to show signs of growth in the spring, the summer is on its way. On one level, that’s obvious and might be interpreted as another sign of what is to come. But as every gardener knows, a tree that leafs out and blossoms in the spring, may not bear fruit until the late summer or fall. In other words, the new growth may be a sign of things to come. But there is also a lot of time to pass and probably some hard work to do. 

Most importantly however, the signs Jesus mentions are not signs of doom and destruction. They are signs that our redemption draws near. They are signs of the coming of the Reign of God.

There’s a sense in which all that we do in this season of Advent, all that we do in the run-up to Christmas, is about the nearness of God’s reign. The promise we hear in the words of the prophet Jeremiah, that God will keep God’s promise and restore justice and righteousness,–that promise beckons still. 

But the reality is rather different. God’s reign draws near but the world knows it not. God’s reign draws near but the shoots of new life are only that, faint signs in the midst of a turbulent and difficult world. God’s reign draws near but it is easy to miss those signs and to fall into despair and disappointment.

We shouldn’t interpret Jesus’ instructions to be alert, stay awake, as warnings. We shouldn’t lapse into fear and foreboding. Instead, we should look for the signs that God’s reign draws near, signs of promise and hope, signs of new life in the midst of our troubled world. Advent is a time when we should look for such signs, cultivate and nurture the signs we discover, and be signs of the coming of God’s reign to the world around us. 

Among those signs, but more than a sign is the third way that Christ comes to us in Advent and throughout the year. In the proclamation of the Word, and in the sacrament of his body and blood, we experience Christ’s coming among us, to us, in us, even as they are signs of Christ’s second coming and signs of God’s coming reign. Truly our redemption draws near. May this season of Advent be a time when we experience and see Christ’s coming to us and to the world.