Spoiler: Alert

Luke 21:25-36

Are you one of those people who read the end of the story first?  Who flip to the back of the mystery and find out whodunnit before you even know the crime?

I’m not that kind of reader, myself, so it has always seemed odd to me that we start at the end of the story today.

As many of you remember from sermons past, the First Sunday of Advent – today – is the first day of the new church year. All the cycles and seasons of the church, all the patterns and stories of our faith start here, every year.

And every year, on the first Sunday of Advent, we read the end of the story.

We hear Jesus tell his disciples about how it all ends – the full and final coming of God into the world, the righteousness and redemption and judgement of God finally and forever coming into a world filled with chaos. The certainties of heaven and earth – stars, sun, tides, maybe gravity – will change disruptively.  Whole nations will dissolve in distress, and people will simply fall down under the weight of fear as the Messiah is revealed, coming out of the clouds in overwhelming glory.

When you see these things; when the end has come, Jesus says, stand up confident and proud. Raise your heads because your redemption is near.

This is the end of the story that starts with the baby in the stable. Not a gentle, hidden, domestic scene, but every bit the opposite: a world-wide apocalyptic whirlwind of international and environmental turmoil, terror and power and great glory.

This is what we find when we open the book at the end today, before we turn to the beginning.

A few years ago, psychologists at the University of California San Diego found that spoilers – reading the end of the story first – actually improved people’s enjoyment of stories.
Vindication, there, for all of you who check out the end of the book before you start it.

Support, if it were needed, for Jesus “spoiling” the plot for the disciples, telling them ahead of time not only about his resurrection, but about just how exactly they will – we will – experience the ultimate coming of God.

Affirmation for us, as a community of faith, reading the end in order to start at the beginning.

We start at the end now so that in a few weeks, when we read the beginning of the story, we don’t forget that that fragile, beautiful, humble baby is also about to come into the world in clouds and power and glory, throwing the sun, stars, moon, and nations into chaos. We start at the end, so that we look for and recognize the devastating, utterly transformative, final and ultimate power and presence of God in the infant and the healer and the teacher and the teller of stories about mustard and pennies and sheep.

And we start at the end so that we know where we are supposed to arrive in our journey: heads high in eager expectation; alert and watchful and confident, eyes peeled for the signals of God’s nearness, even – maybe especially – in the face of chaos and fear; collapse and confusion.

By starting at the end, we know our own role – as readers and hearers and central characters – in Jesus’ story. We know what to look for in the pages of the story from long ago, and the hours and days of the story here and now: Look for the signs of God’s nearness, as cyclical as fig leaves; as extraordinary as the shaking of the heavens.

Sometimes it seems that what God wants most from us, from God’s people, is expectation. God wants us to be people of eager, attentive, anticipation: not waiting for the story to unfold, but looking eagerly ahead, attentively seeking out and spotting the clues, the signs, of what we know is coming: the reign of God; the kingdom come; God’s full, righteous, awesome presence all over the world we know.

When we know the end of the story, we keep watching for it to happen as we read. We involve ourselves in finding out not just where it ends, but how we get there.
And when we know how it ends, we know it’s safe to keep going, we have reason not to give up when the plot seems to slow and drag, or dives into the scariest, thorniest, almost hopeless places.

Jesus emphasizes that to the disciples around him in that long ago Jerusalem, and to the disciples here today:

It’s going to get scary. It is. (You and I know this, don’t we?) It’s going to get messy and it’s going to not make sense.

And that’s when you keep alert. Don’t get distracted by either indulgence or anxiety. Don’t put the book down because you’re busy. And don’t give up in fear.

Watch for the signs – like the spring leaves on the fig tree, easy to overlook because they happen every year, or they lag behind the first leaves – that mean the season is just about to change, and bear fruit.

Live like a reader watching for the earliest, smallest ways in which the author reveals whodunnit.

Watch exactly that way: alert to the small things, absorbed and attentive, confident in redemption. Watch and really see, because you know the end. You know what you are looking for, that God’s kingdom is really, absolutely going to come – in power and glory and cosmic upheaval and stunning faithful justice.

Now, Jesus knows this is a long story, and that you and I may get tired of watching that closely, wondering if we ever will get to the end we know we have read. It’s hard to stay alert and attentive and all that for years and decades and generations.

But we’ve read the spoiler for that, too. Seen and heard from Jesus at the end that God provides the strength and the stamina to keep us alert, to escape from the chaos or the distractions and finish the story with God. And that spoiler means we know how to pray: with confidence and trust and that attentive, keen, anticipation.

We start, today, at the end. Because the spoilers are what lead us through the story with all the joy and expectant trust Jesus wants us to have. The spoilers are what keep us alert, looking all around and into the smallest clues, so that we don’t miss a moment. Don’t miss a gift, a twist, or a sign of the coming of the Kingdom and the salvation of God, near to us on every page and day of the story.

Stay alert. Because you know how it ends.

School of Trust

1 Samuel 1:4-20; Hebrews 10:11-25; Mark 13:1-8

If you’ve been watching the news from California this week, you have a mental picture of the kind of devastation and fear that Jesus is talking about today. A landscape that used to be full of life and natural beauty now looks like the barren surface of the moon. Rubble and ruin in shades of black and gray and ash paint a vivid picture of the pain of grief and loss.

The California fires are just the latest way in which the world proves itself to be untrustworthy.  We’ve seen similar destruction of even the most stable buildings and infrastructure after hurricanes and floods, just this summer. The same widespread sense of danger and fear and loss that comes from remembering we can’t always trust our homes and churches and roads and friends to be there when we come back.
In fact, we were all reminded how untrustworthy the world can be just a couple of days ago, when the snow defied the forecasters and turned the roads and our schedules into a snarled, destructive mess.

We can’t make plans, carry out business, meet friends for dinner, care for our kids, drive to the grocery without trusting the world to be stable and predictable. But the world keeps on proving itself to be full of uncertainty; untrustworthy and chaotic.

The world has long proven untrustworthy for Hannah. In the normal, predictable course of things, married to a man who loves her, she should have had a child long ago. Many children. And she hasn’t. Her rival bullies her mercilessly over this. And her husband clearly doesn’t understand – trying to cheer her up by focusing on himself, not her.  Even God has failed her so far, it seems, since God hasn’t yet given her a child.

But even so – in the face of all this disappointment – Hannah turns to God.  She goes into the sanctuary to pour out all her fear and anxiety and hope mixed with pain. And in the middle of pouring out her heart she makes a vow to God. She commits herself to be faithful and trustworthy, when all that she should trust has failed her. 
Then she walks away from that prayer and vow full of assurance and confident expectation.  Ready to take up life and trust again.

In due time, that trust is fulfilled. Hannah has a son, and fulfills her own vow to God. But it’s noteworthy that her assurance – her confidence and hope and happiness – come before the child’s birth. Her trust is restored while she cries out to God, by making a vow to be trustworthy and faithful herself.

Hannah’s story reminds us of a truth that resonates over and over through scripture, and through the history of God’s people. We heard it again this morning, from the sermon to the Hebrews recorded in the New Testament: “Let us hold fast to the commitment of our faith, knowing that the one who has promised is faithful.”

Jesus is faithful to us, God is faithful to us, when the world insists on being untrustworthy.

That’s good news. It’s just hard, often, to really trust in God while the world we live in tries to keep us from trusting (anything).

Fire and flood and snow betray our trust in the world’s stability.

People who long to be parents still suffer infertility, the betrayal of what we hope is natural, and the sometimes deliberate, sometimes unintentional, derision or misunderstanding of the fertile, just like Hannah did.

Wars and rumors of wars cover the earth, just as Jesus warns his disciples. The daily news is full of stories about Facebook and Russian trolls and old voting machinery that undermine our ability to trust our democracy and the tools of relationship. People we need die; the healthiest of us gets cancer.

God is still faithful. Always faithful. It’s just hard to feel the truth of that sometimes. Hard to know how to put our trust in God.

That’s one of the blessings of Trinity Preschool, though, that we celebrate today. Preschool isn’t just a school for ABCs and colors and days of the week. Preschool is a school of trust.

Preschool helps teach us that relationships are sustained when we can’t see the evidence of them. My teacher will be at school again on Wednesday, even if I don’t go Tuesday. Mom and Dad come back to get me, even though I’m crying when they leave on those September mornings.

Preschool holds space for things to be the same around us, even as we grow and change too fast for our own minds to keep up with. 

That school of trust has been a gift to me. There are days, occasionally, when the untrustworthiness of the world is too much for me, and I stand for a minute outside the chapel where our preschool children are singing, and they help me to trust God again. Times when I walk around with the fire inspector, or attend an abuse prevention training with our teachers for the Preschool and the Sunday School, and the commitment we’ve made to be people and a community that these children can trust strengthens my own trust in God, and my hope for our world.

Sometimes – often, in fact – it is our own commitment to be faithful that God uses to strengthen our faith and trust in God and one another. 
That’s what happened for Hannah, when she made her vow to God and went home full of confidence and assurance long before she had evidence that her longings would be fulfilled.

That’s what Jesus is teaching his disciples, when he warns them that even the massive, stable, most trustworthy stones of the Temple are about to fail them: “Do not let anyone lead you astray.”

It is your own commitment to be faithful that will keep you safe in your trust in God, when earthquakes and wars and famines insist that you cannot and should not trust.

And we don’t have to trust in ourselves to make that commitment, or to keep our faith. Because God’s faithfulness will enable our own.
Just as God supported Hannah’s faith;
just as God’s Spirit brought the disciples through all the turmoil and uncertainty and distress with a faith that reached out from first-century Jerusalem to encourage multitudes and generations and, eventually, you and me.

Your own commitment, your faithfulness, my own, is what God gives us to sustain our trust in God when we don’t know how to trust. Our own commitments, like Hannah’s, are schools for trust.
My commitment to tithing has helped me recognize God’s abundance, and trust that there will always be enough in my household budget. Your commitment to be there for a friend in their illness or need may be the way God helps you to know and feel God’s presence in their life, or in your own. Our Vestry’s commitment to showing up for the life and mission of this congregation is revealing Gods faithfulness at work in our own hearts and minds and lives.

So let the world go on being untrustworthy. God is faithful, and in the midst of any chaos, God invites us to be faithful, too. To commit ourselves wholly and deeply, so that God can fill us with trust, and hope, and the love that reveals God’s faithfulness to our children, our neighbors, and ourselves, today, and tomorrow, and forever.

Restoration

Ruth 3:1-5; 4:13-17

At 11 am on the 11^th of November, silence fell abruptly on the Western Front as German guns finally stopped firing. One hundred years and a few hours ago, church bells began to ring across shattered fields of trenches and in villages and cities, as the final Armistice of the First World War took effect and the long, hard work of peace began.

It wasn’t easy work, and history is littered with failed attempts at peace. But all those attempts – the ones that fail as well as the ones that succeed – are testimony to the dream of restoration and peace that has been part of humanity for as long as we’ve known loss and war and pain and division.

That longing seems to have been particularly strong a hundred years ago. From the early years of the war, drawing on a 1914 article by H.G. Wells, people had begun to speak of the war devastating Europe as “the war to end war”, with a profound belief or a faint hope that the destruction unleashed in the trenches and fields would ultimately destroy Europe’s – or humanity’s – capacity to make war on one another. 

The founding of the League of Nations was an attempt to make the dream of restoration practical, permanent, and self-sustaining – a dream that sharing the practical business of daily life: postal services, safe working conditions, health initiatives – as well as disarmament and dispute resolution – could create a world where war could not even begin.

The hymn we sang just now – Hubert Parry’s setting of William Blake’s poem “Jerusalem” – describes a longing for restoration and peace set to music in the midst of that first devastating World War. The hope of “building Jerusalem” is a dream of building a place of heaven on earth, inspired by the visions of the Book of Revelation.

And today, one hundred years (and a few hours) after the guns fell silent, we heard part of the story of Naomi and Ruth, another story about the longing for restoration and wholeness, and of God working through us.

Naomi, at the beginning of the story, is an economic refugee, forced by a famine in her hometown of Bethlehem to flee with her husband and sons to the land of the Moabites – a people whose ancient division from Naomi’s people runs so deep that scripture forbids any Moabites to take part in the assembly of God’s people.

Naomi and her family survive the famine and make a home in the strange land of Moab. But when her husband and sons die, Naomi sets out to return to her land and people. She’s accompanied by one of her Moabite daughters-in-law, Ruth, who has declared her fierce and unyielding loyalty to Naomi, committing to share her life, her God, her people, and her fate.

So these two widows, one of them foreign, from a land of ancient enemies, come to Bethlehem, to a community that has no particular place for them. They survive by gleaning in the fields, hard and practical work, picking up the grain left after the harvest. And they find kindness and concern for their well-being in the fields of Boaz, distant kin of Naomi.

So when Naomi wants to seek some longer-term security for them both, she sends the younger (and apparently attractive) Ruth to offer herself to Boaz.  And when Ruth comes to Boaz at night, she invites him to take up his right and responsibility as Naomi’s kin to restore her to the community.

Boaz accepts this invitation, negotiating among the neighbors and community the practical details of the right – and the responsibility – of restoring an inheritance to Naomi’s family.

In the excerpt we heard today, we hear the results: When Boaz and Ruth are married, and have a son, Naomi is made whole. This grandchild is proclaimed “a restorer of life, and a nourisher or old age,” a heir who ensures her place in the community, now and for generations to come.

It’s a restoration that requires strange alliances and an expansion of our sense of unity – an immigrant, a Moabite, long forbidden from joining God’s people in worship, now welcomed at the center of community and helping to create a holy future.

And then, with a little end note, the dream of restoration is expanded, inviting you and me in:

This child Obed, born to Ruth, is the grandfather of David, king of Israel.

Naomi’s dream of restoration, Ruth’s hard work in gleaning and in building relationship, not only restore them and assure the permanence of their peace. It also produces David, who becomes a promise and a dream of the restoration of all God’s people to their home, and to God’s peace, for generations and millennia.  Naomi’s dream of restoration brings to you and to me the David whose distant grandchild will be Jesus of Bethlehem and Nazareth, God made flesh to bring about the restoration and wholeness of the entire world.

Naomi’s story, Ruth and Boaz’s story, are about how God acts across many generations to create wholeness and renewal when we pursue restoration faithfully in our own lives and place. When we pursue our own restoration generously, like Naomi and Ruth and Boaz who each consistently put one another before themselves in this story.

Naomi’s story, and the stories of David, build up the dream that God has come to us in Jesus to make real.

Because the dream of restoration and lasting peace, of an entire world made whole and holy, isn’t just a human dream from the midst of war or loss or famine. 
It’s not just a human longing, triggered by the remembrance of war or the weekly horror of gun murders or the inflated divisions of an election season.

That dream of wholeness, of restoration, of peace that heals, isn’t our human dream at all.
It’s God’s.

It’s the dream and the purpose of God, through ages and generations.

It’s the dream and the purpose that God works to make real in Naomi and Ruth and Boaz, Obed and David. In the leaders and the unsung ordinary people who try over and over to build peace out of the devastation of war, whom we remember today. The dream that God makes flesh in Jesus as a baby in Bethlehem, a teacher in Galilee, and a resurrected Lord in Jerusalem. The dream that God is working, right now, to make real in Moorestown, in our county and our country, in you and in me.

God takes your longings and dreams, and mine, and the faithful and generous work they inspire, and uses that to create wholeness and renewal that will outlast us.

Today, one hundred years and a few hours after the guns fell silent,

two millennia after Jesus lived in Israel,

an uncountable number of generations after David inspired God’s people,

after Naomi and Ruth dreamed of and worked for restoration in Bethlehem,

today, God dreams of restoration and peace in you and me.

and invites us to share that dream, now and forever.