LUKE 21:25-38

Laterally Luke…Advent 1…Revised 2018

Welcome to the ‘Year of Luke’! Celebrate Advent by worshipping & preaching a Jesus who lives in the present! Not in past glories; God’s, nor anyone else’s. Not even in any apocalyptic future Jesus discerns coming on the heels of His life here on earth. In the Gospels God is always opening us up to new possibilities in this world; not putting them off till the next! Live & preach in God’s ‘Now’ time; always ours, &, at the same time, always God’s. 

Today’s world is more & more scary for more & more people. That doesn’t mean ‘the end’ is coming, though it does raise the question Jesus is raising here; that any ‘end’ may well be of our own making. Jesus, though, has come, is always ‘come’ by His Spirit, & will one day come again. Maybe as unexpectedly & unrecognisably as in His first coming among us? Let’s live, &, if it’s time, die with our spiritual eyes open.

My wife & I have a large fig tree, product of a bird dropping a seed long ago. For 15 years it produced not one piece of fruit! Then, one Summer a crop of figs appears. Aha! But those figs are dry as chips; inedible! Even the birds won’t touch them! 5 years ago, a smaller second crop appears in Autumn. Among them a few edible figs; the pattern, we expect, for the foreseeable future. How far, though, is ‘foreseeable’? 

Neither the Scriptures, nor the Faith revealed in them, guarantee God will rescue us in the foreseeable future from small dilemmas, or the real trials & tribulations many are grappling with. The Scriptures though, if we read with open & discerning hearts & minds, do re-assure us of God’s presence with us & in us throughout whatever we’re suffering. Preaching a Son of Humanity coming on the clouds will be, like us expecting a huge crop of edible figs next Summer, escapism. Pray, hard, ‘Save us from the time of trial, &, deliver us from evil’, but be prepared for that saving & deliverance coming in surprising ways! As we don’t write off our fig tree!

Brian

Afterthought: Jesus, now by His Spirit in us, always reads ‘the signs of the times’, the state of our humanity, in us & what we get up to. Was there ever a possibility so un-expected as Christ’s kind of Messiah-ship? How many, though, ‘read’ that in His life, His death, & Resurrection? How are we ‘reading’ that now, in our own day?