It wasn’t all that long ago when the world was a-buzz with dire predictions of what would happen when the stroke of midnight melted 1999 into the year 2000.  Y2K was the phrase of the moment when people wondered when people wondered if airplanes would suddenly fall out of the sky and the flight controllers’ screens would go blank.  There was speculation that the internal computers that run many of our cars would have some kind of hiccup and when you turn the key nothing would happen.  The computer world, in general, was prepared for the equivalent of a nuclear meltdown.  Borderline hysteria had lots of people out buying bottled water and food, and looking at alternative energy sources in the event that the world really did come unraveled.

It all seems a bit silly now.  (I guess some of us seemed pretty silly then.)  All the worries and the fuss, and midnight came and went as it had for thousands of years, and nothing much happened.  Now, the century is pretty much old hat.  But in the wake of the new century, there are a few things that have changed.  There has been a bit of a resurgence in thoughts about the end of the world with popular books like the Left Behind series.  There are still pockets of conversation out there on the very edges of religious (and I use that word loosely) thinking.

It’s so easy to dismiss it all as religious hogwash.  Then we come across upon a text like this, one that kicks off a new liturgical year and we wonder what it is that we ought to do with it.  Well, we’ll get right down to it.  All of the basic formulations of our Christian faith include some expectation of Christ’s return.  In some churches, the communion liturgy includes the acclamation “Christ has died.  Christ is risen.  Christ will come again.”  The Apostles’ Creed says, “He will come again to judge the living and the dead.”  We hear it in Luke’s gospel this morning.  It sets the tone for the new church year.  “There will be signs in the sun.”

As odd as it may appear, this text is a great anchor for us as we move into the Christmas season, a reminder of what’s essential as the world around us moves into a period of unbridled consumerism.  In the next four weeks, Americans will spend in excess of $50 billion making the weeks between Thanksgiving and Christmas the benchmark for the success of retail business for the entire year.  The average American family will spend over $1500.  The northeast ranks second in the country for overall holiday spending.  54% of American families will not pay off their holiday spending until November of next year—3 months later than in the year 2001.  It will add $30 billion to the total amount of consumer debt held by individuals in the United States.

So Luke’s admonition is timely.  “Be on your guard so that your hearts are not weighed down with dissipation …”  So much of what passes for holiday preparation is dissipation.  The word, though fallen out of popular usage, simply means “to squander”.  Holiday hoo-haah isn’t the only culprit.  Our lives are dissipated by lots of things—squandered by work and worry, job concerns, family worries, relationships with parents, children, spouses, partners, siblings, woundedness and grief over what and who has been lost through time, change, death and disease.  Maybe to you, it’s the first Christmas or the fiftieth Christmas without someone whose life added something to yours.  The list for all of us is endless.  Out of the corner of our eye, we add the burden of knowing that much of the world lives without even basic needs met.  There is war, famine, flood.  The world seems to be falling apart at the seams.

Luke’s gospel acknowledges that all those things are true.  They always have been and they always will be.  In the midst, Jesus says to watch and wait.  “Stand up and raise your heads”  and live in the hope that God’s word and promise are trustworthy. 

Apparently, Jesus was less concerned with reading the signs of the times than he was with reading the times and the signs of the ways people lived.  He pointed to a simple fig tree to tell the story.  Long before the leaves and figs appear, deep in the roots and in the heart, sap begins to rise and roots reach deep into the earth to draw moisture and nourishment.  Before life appears, there’s a whole lot that goes on behind the scenes. 

These weeks of Advent are about that kind of preparation.  It happens deep in the hearts, deep in our roots.  While all around us, the world shifts into some high-gear glitz, this text reminds us that this moment, like all moments, is one of waiting for Christ’s return.  What matters in this moment, like every other, is how we live, how well we wait, and how much we’re paying attention to the signs of God’s presence in the world and in our lives.

So the question from this text isn’t When will Christ return? but rather How shall we live in the meantime?  How shall we wait?  Let’s not forget that this waiting thing has been going on for about 2,000 years now.  So it’s a little bit difficult to stay in the active waiting mode when it spans the lifetimes of all the generations of the world.  It’s a little bit anti-climactic, to say the least.  But waiting is what we’re supposed to do.  It’s never to be confused with doing nothing.  Jesus words to his followers say “While you’re waiting for me to come back, don’t squander your lives.”

Barbara Brown Taylor writes, “Before he died, he told his followers he’d be right back.  Believing him, they didn’t make long-range plans.  Then, a decade passed.  Then, another and another.  The only reason we have the gospels is because, after a while, someone worked up the nerve there weren’t that many eyewitnesses remaining and that it might be a good idea to write down the stories about Jesus.”

In that way, we’re not really any different from the first Christians.  We take our place living in that time between Christ is risen and Christ will come again.  As far as the signs are concerned, the sun, the moon and the stars, folks have been trying to read them for years.  But this text reminds us that the signs aren’t really in those things.  They’re in the way that we watch and wait, not weighed down with dissipation and drunkenness.  The drunkenness is probably easy.  The dissipation is a little more challenging.

Peter Gomes writes, “The second coming of Jesus is rarely phrased in terms of births and babies and attendant dangers.  It is almost invariably phrased in terms of ideas that have been translated into ideals and ideals that are translated into reality.  The second coming is accompanied when truth is triumphant over mere fact by justice, righteousness and mercy triumphant over a mere accommodation to present circumstances; of joy triumphant over mere pleasure; of  peace triumphant over the mere absence of overt hostility.”  Or as Barbara Brown Taylor puts it, “It’s a vision of the end of time, the final coming of the Lord when the world, as we know it, will become compost for the world God has always intended to give us.”

In the 1995 movie Smoke, Auggie Wren manages a cigar store on the corner of 3rd Street and 7th Avenue in Brooklyn.  Every morning, at exactly 8 o’clock, no matter what the weather, he takes a picture of the store from across the street.  He has 4,000 consecutive daily photographs of his store all labeled by dated and mounted in albums.  He calls the project his life’s work.

One day, Auggie shows the photos to Paul.  He’s a blocked writer mourning the death of his wife who was a victim of random street violence.  Paul is pretty much speechless with the whole thing.  Flipping page after page after page, he observed with some amazement, “They’re all the same.”  Auggie watches him carefully and says, “You’ll never get it if you don’t slow down.”  “The pictures are not all the same,” Auggie points out.  “Each one is different from every other one and the differences are in the details—the way people’s clothes change according to season and weather, the way the light hits the street at different times of the year.  Some days the corner is almost empty.  Other days, it’s alive with trucks and bicycles and people.  It’s just one little part of the world but things take place there, too, just like everywhere else.” 

Auggie learned that there’s value in contemplating life as it presents itself in its sameness and predictability and that they’re in the detail usually overlooked for some of the richness for which we so deeply long.  While we’re waiting for God to come and act like we think God should act, God is quietly knocking on the doors of our lives, lives as we live them each and every day, simply asking us not to be weighted down with dissipation, of paying attention to the corner of life where we live it.

So, Barbara Brown Taylor admonishes us, “Pay attention to whatever life is bringing you as a person, as a people.  Pay attention to pain if that’s what there for you to pay attention to because you’ll never be healed until you admit you’re hurt.  Pay attention to the love you will not let yourself have because you’re so afraid you’ll lose it.  Pay attention to the future you’re so furious about because it’s not the one you ordered.”

The truth is that God comes not while we’re posing for the lives we’d like to live but while we’re living out the days that are ours.  While we are waiting for God to rain down on the world what we desire for the world and for ourselves, God gently changes the world that meanders by our door and asks only that we notice and make ourselves a part of the picture.” 

Amen.