Summary: A few weeks ago I bought my casket. I was looking ahead in the Lectionary at this week’s Gospel, and I thought: “It’s time to do that and spare someone else the trouble of picking one out and paying for it.” It seemed at the time to be one more way of being “ready.” Hamlet lived (in Shakespear’s play) with an unfortunate inner conflict over his inability to accept his situation in life. As a result he was consumed with hesitation, grief and self pity. But gradually, which in some ways is the point of the play, he comes to accept the realiaty of his life and the belief that God has a hand in every detail of life. He claims that whatever is destined to happen will happen soon enough, and that for those on earth, “The readiness is all.” Sounds rather scriptural doesn’t it?Now there is a sad and undeniable fact in all of creation that nothing lasts. Things break and wear out. Styles come and they go. The cosmos is changing all the time, and astronomers watch and tell us of the collapse of stars and gallazies. Political theories come and go. Economies come and go. Friends do the same. Marriages collapse. Towns and cities disappear. People die, young and old. It seems to me that this Gospel is good science. Stars have always fallen, burned up, collapsed, and meteriotes crash together and fall out orbit. The Gospel is good history too, because the truth is, nations have always been in tumult and war. Peace on this earth is always short, and most of the time, it is simply a puase that allows the combatants to rearm and reposition themselves for another go at it.As Luke was writing this Gospel, Jerusalem had just been destroyed. For the people he was writing for, the whole world they knew was finished. More than moralize and console, he writes to encourage and to remind them and anyone else whose life and immediate world collapses that there is only one “end” and that “end” will be ushered in by the Son of Man. For those first to receive Luke’s Gospel it was a reminder that Titus and his Roman army who destroyed Jerusalem was nothing. The fall and burning of Jerusalem was of no lasting significance because for them it was the beginning of something new, not the end. We often for get that every end is nothing more than a beginning.Why is it, I wonder, that so many people, perhaps some of you, live in fear and anxiety always expecting the worst, a disaster, a time of trial and tribulation. How is it that the message of Jesus Christ gets so displaced by the silliness of predictions that terrible things will happen and all will be destroyed. Another one of those is coming around again causing all sorts of anxiety and fear. All this talk about the end of the Myan Calendar is just the end of the Myan Calendar, and the beginnning of another. There is a prediction that everything will end on December 21, 2012. What will happen at the end of December 21, 2012 is the beginning of December 22, 2012. Things will end. This world will end. The earth will go, the Sun will burn out. Of course it will. Nothing lasts. We will die. I will need that coffin, but I don’t know when. Everything changes and everything goes away. Yet something new always takes its place. Endings are always beginnings, and that is exactly what Jesus Christ came to proclaim: that the old order passes away and a new one is awaited. Of course if you have your every hope, and your life invested in the old order, that’s going to be a problem.Crises can mean a breathrough just as much as it can mean a breakdown. Every age lives in that kind of crises when something new is breaking through, and it is this way of looking at a crises that replaces fear and anxiety with Hope.Hope is how we live. Optomism is the only attitude of a Christian. We are hopeful and optomistic by our spiritual nature given to us in baptism. It is who we are, a people always expecting the best, the new, the glory. Hope is the spirit of this season. Hope is the unmistakable virtue of the Christian’s life. The point of this Gospel today is not to freighten us, but to give us hope and tell us where to look. We will not find our fulfillment in the cosmos. We will not find it in the political order through some perfect leader. There isn’t one nor is there a perfect political or economic system. All of that passes. Nothing lasts. We will not find our fulfillment in having the perfect body and in clinging to youthfulness. We just get fat, wrinkle, and falls apart, trust me on that. Do not look to this passing world. The future, what God has in store for us is not found in anything here, but only in Jesus Christ. Only in Jesus Christ do we find and have our link to the power of God.We must watch for him by living with our eyes wide open for the slightest hint of his presence in a smile, an expression of thanks, a plea for help, a touch, or word of comfort.We must wait for him but not in idleness and anxiety, but by a readiness tested by trials overcome with hope.We must find our peace in him by forgiveness given and asked, by patience and understanding, tolerance strengtheend by a willingness to watch and wait.While too much of this world is occupied these days with a celebation of the first coming of Christ, we must see through all of that, remembering that the gifts we give and the gifts we receive from others will wear out, break, and disappear. It is the second coming of Christ that matters now, not the first, and this Season and it’s readings, this time, and our lives are looking for that coming with Joy, not with sadness, with Hope, not with fear.This message and this truth is what can not only direct how we live, but why we live.
