Grace and Peace to you from God, our father and the Lord Jesus Christ. Amen.
Already it’s the second Sunday of Advent and only 17 days to Christmas. At our Loving Life Seniors planning meeting on Thursday, everyone was commenting on how quickly time seemed to be passing. Thanksgiving was late in November, so Christmas seems to have come upon us with out warning.
Isn’t the passing of time such a subjective thing? When you are young the summers seemed to go on forever at such a dawdling lazy pace that you were almost anxious for school to start. People at their 50th High School reunion can’t believe where the time went. A woman’s last four weeks of pregnancy endures forever.
Our lesson from 2nd Peter has this to say “Do not ignore this one fact beloved, that with the Lord one day is like 1,000 years, and one thousand years like one day”. Time in God’s hands is mysterious as well. God is eternal, by definition, beyond time. We cannot even conceive of God’s temporal reality, just as we can’t grasp the idea of an endless universe that extends into space with out a boundary.
Advent is the time of contemplating the “end time”. We talk about Jesus’ return, the second coming. Again, all our language about this event uses metaphors. Symbolic, metaphorical language is all we have. We being folks who are necessarily literalist – as in “give me the facts, man, just the facts”, have trouble understanding what the bible is attempting to describe.
God plans to perfect creation. What does this mean? Right now, creation is fallen, or corrupted. The bible explains this corruption or fallenness as a consequence of human sin. All creation is condemned to death because of Adam and Eve’s sin.
Yet our death makes God unhappy because we are created for companionship with God forever. Like my Grandmother, who stored every newspaper of consequence, every Christmas card, or anything of value in her attic, God just lathes throwing thing away. We are God’s treasures, God’s handiworks, God’s masterpieces. Just as no one would discard the Portrait of the “Mona Lisa”, Michelangelo’s “David”, Van Gogh’s “Starry Night”, God cringes at the idea of losing even one of us. No matter how broken corrupted or pathetic we become.
So God, being God, planned a rescue. Jesus saves us by serving us from sin and death. God in Christ becomes (and this is weird and impossible to comprehend) sin and death to free us. When Jesus returns, sin and death will vanish because we will be a part of the restored, resurrected, eternal creation.
There has to be though, some way to get rid of all the gunk, ie; the sin, egocentrism, fear, anger, jealousy and evil that clings to us. Scripture uses the metaphor of a purging, of a refining, of an extracting to make this clear. In our lesson from 2nd Peter it read like this.”
Who We Are